Lyft becomes the taxi brokerage that monopolizes the kinda of car you can use.

We threw around some wild-ass guesses as to the numbers in the office, and came up with the idea that it's probably a bit better to be a Lyft+ driver than a Lyft driver, assuming (and this is a big if) that Lyft can deliver you a similar volume of rides.

The big thing is that this Ford Explorer is probably not a lot more expensive than a Prius is. Priuses tend to cost about $30,000 all in. Ford Explorers start at $30,000. Assume $10,000 in after-market add-ons, but then assume that Lyft negotiates your base price down to $25,000 because they're buying a bunch of them, you're only an additional $5,000 in the hole compared to a Prius. Gas is twice what a Prius owner pays.

And they're charging twice what Lyft ordinarily costs.

So, basically, if they can deliver the same number of rides, your gross is twice as high, your costs are something on the order of twice as high or actually a bit less than that, means that your take-home pay is probably about 150% what a normal Lyft driver makes.

Again, the big if here is whether you are in fact getting the same volume of rides that the downmarket offering is. And the question there is how much supply Lyft wants to put on the road. Are they willing to have more failed rides in order to support their drivers' incomes? Is the demand for a Lyft premium option there at all? Alternately, is the demand really high and you're going to be surging (yeah, yeah: "prime time tipping") more often and making a higher gross? Nobody knows right now.

Disclaimer: I work for Flywheel, a Lyft competitor.

Agreed. It seems like the "right" thing to do if you're running a personal taxi service is to buy a reliable used car in the high tens of thousands of miles, and then drive it until it dies. Buying a new car -- you'd have to make thousands of dollars more per year to justify the depreciation.

I was wondering the same thing, but I'm sure they ran the numbers and gauged driver interest before launch. Quite curious to see how it turns out.

It's not just Lean Theory/MVP blah blah. Microsoft has done this for years. Splashy PR announcement of a hot-shit new thing they cooked up in R&D. Then a year later, closed down.

Is it? I think it's a great way to test hypothesis for early-stage companies.

For lyft, on the other hand... not so sure.

This could be an MVP. Build a landing page. Drive traffic to it. See if anyone cares. If they do, then design the product. It's quite simple really.

With Uber, marking themselves as "arrived" does nothing but notify the passenger. I asked one driver about it and he says he does that a few blocks away because he doesn't want the text to be delayed.

The actual paid portion of the ride doesn't start until you enter the vehicle and the driver taps the Start Trip button.

You can also verify the entire trip later on your receipt. It shows the entire trip on a map, plus the start and end times, so you can verify that it matches your expectations.

It's most probably because they have KPIs to fulfil set by Uber and they are gaming the system that way. If I were Uber I would definitely monitor quality of service by measuring the arrival times for each driver.

Is there no way to report this sort of behavior? Possibly by refusing to ride with the driver?

I was a longtime Uber user who started using Flywheel a few months ago and haven't switched back. You get the convenience of an app as you would with Lyft/Uber along with the professionalism and expertise of a cab driver. I don't want to have to sit idle in the front seat of a Lyft for two minutes while the driver punches in the address on Google Maps, I want to say "Bush and Sansome" and have the driver take me there the quickest way possible. Also I don't have to feign interest in the driver's backstory and keep up a weak conversation during the entire ride--I just want to sit back, check my FB/Twitter feed, and zone out for a few minutes until I have to be "on" again when I arrive at my destination. If the cab driver sucks, you can just give them a low rating and you'll never get that driver again. I should note that I do not work for Flywheel, just a huge fan who switched from Uber due to some scummy tactics I read about (employees overwhelming competitive apps, etc).

What I wonder about Lyft is the extent to which friendliness scales. That it has scaled so far is obviously due to the fact that they can simply project that sense of friendliness and then rely on individual drivers to actually do the work of giving that impression to customers, but what if they want to expand their business into domains where friendliness is unimportant or even a downside (an example might be something like the bike messaging that Uber is getting into in NYC, where prompt service basically requires the service provider to be brusque)? In such a market, the company wouldn't be able to trade on their reputation as the friendly alternative and in fact might be even harmed by the expectation that they would be that. Is friendliness a straightjacket in the making?

Aren't there laws against the whole "machine broken" thing?

The difference between Lyft and Uber was once described to me as "Use Lyft if you want to talk to the driver, use Uber if you don't". So yeah, if you value conversation with the driver, you'll probably find Lyft to be the friendlier service. Me? I'd rather not maintain a conversation with the driver.

I've used Uber, Lyft & Summon (in SF). I was a big fan of Uber (UberX), but Summon is much cheaper than UberX or Lyft (I think 15% is the official number).

And yes, I do feel sometimes there are less drivers, but I just open those apps in order : Summon, then UberX, then Lyft.

I also talked a lot to the drivers (of all companies), and it seems like Uber drivers are really treated like shit, which is mainly why I switched to competitors.

The one near me sponsors a pride parade every year, so I guess some things don't scale that well :p