The Uber Fights - Taxi Driver 2.0

It took several months before one of the five German daily papers we peruse did a test of the Uber taxistas.

The rideshare company from California had been making headlines in Germany as provider of cheap rides and easy taxi jobs for everyone.

So, today we extend a big kudos to FAZ for a well researched article! We did go and check on some American sites after all.
It is not a simple register and drive operation, in case you need to know. Lots of documents, including registration, insurance, driving record and clean history are par for the course. An inspection of the vehicle by a local Uber-German [so what, we could not resist] finishes off the process.

As of this post, Uber has beein violation of German law for over a week. A court in Frankfurt, Germany, came out against Uber, making it illegal for the company to continue offering its services in Germany.

We found it very interesting to see article after article about the company, the business model, the legal situation, without the nuts and bolts.

Remuneration was one question we had: the article delivers on that. One Euro per kilometer, 25 Cents a minute.

If you are not sitting down right now, please find a safe and comfortable seat before we tell you how much a regular taxi cab costs in Germany.

You're good?

Sure?

Really?

12 km (about 8 miles) set the blogster back 32 Euros (40 bucks or so) on the only occasion on which we resorted to a cab. A recent newspaper report about a taxi company serving a local music festival stated a price of 100 Euros for 25 kilometers.

It is no wonder, then, that Uber and lesser known competitors represent a threat to the taxi cab business model.

While one Euro per kilometer will not make you rich in no time, it is pretty decent compared to many of the other "piece work" jobs available on the web. You have to do quite a bit of work as a mechanical turk to get close to the driving income. Driving is inherently more hazardous than verifying the physical address of a business web site, for instance, but at least you get out of the house and don't spend more time talking to your pet than any psychologist finds healthy.

The legal battles faced by rideshare companies are not limited to Germany and other European countries. This article about Uber and Lyft in Texas has a discussion, and it also addresses the very American "donation" model of compensation.

Yet, to some degree, the Uber fights can be considered another episode of much ado about nothing. With autonomous cars potentially coming to a road near you in the foreseeable future, taxi drivers may find their real worries are only starting. 

Our future does not include a taxi driver as far as we can tell.

Or maybe the 1976 movie for old times sake.


[Update 18 Sep. 2014] The court cancelled its expedited ruling, saying the matter was not urgent, so wait and see. In the meantime, at least one taxista has mounted a sting operation and bagged an Uber driver for operating a transportation service without proper license.