Why Isn’t Your Uber An Electric Car?

The operating and maintenance costs for electric cars are now clearly showing to be quite a bit lower than for gasoline cars, even very efficient gasoline cars like the hybrid Toyota Prius. Even so, it’s quite rare to summon a TNC and get an electric car. Why is that?

Full time drivers for services like Uber and Lyft will put in anywhere from 150 to 200 miles per day. It’s lower in city cores and higher in areas where most trips are on the highway. A NYC Taxi puts in around 200 miles/day but may be driven for more than one shift, and also drives more hunting for riders on the street.

That number is within the typical range of newer electric vehicles like the Tesla model 3 and the Chevy Bolt. That means such a car can do the full day’s service and charge once overnight. In an area with lots of highway driving, one might need the longer range Tesla or to spend 30 minutes or so at a high speed charger. (Tesla currently forbids TNC drivers from using their superchargers.) Either way, it’s certainly possible to use an EV for TNC (with some exceptions I will describe below) and the TNC companies could make it even easier with some basic software changes.

At 150 miles/weekday in a 50mpg Prius, you’re going to drive around 43,000 miles/year when you add some personal driving. That’s 860 gallons of gasoline, which costs about $3600 here in California. You will also spend around $3,000 for maintenance on a gasoline car.

Depending on where you get your electricity, you’ll spend $1700/year at crazy PG&E rates, but only $1,000 on utilities closer to the national average. And pointers suggest the maintenance costs may be only around $1300 per year for the expensive model S, less for the Tesla model 3. Numbers for the Chevy Bolt are not yet well known. This does not include repairs.

On fuel and scheduled maintenance though, the savings per year amount to $3,500 per year – more if you live in a town with more average electricity prices and non-California gas prices, the fuel savings drop from $1,900 to $1,200 – but still quite good.

Of course, the electric car is more expensive. If you’re smart, you buy a used car for TNC work, leaving somebody else to eat the first 2-3 years of depreciation. But even if you buy new Chevy Bolt for $24,000 to $27,000 after federal rebates. You might also do well with a vehicle like the Kia Niro or other Korean EVs which still have the full $7,500 federal rebate. Several states have additional rebates of up to $5,000 – California offers around $2,500 and PG&E offers $800. If you buy used, you will get the benefit of the previous owner having received this rebate.

You will need to spend anywhere from $500 to $2,000 in most houses to install a level 2 charger, though rebates can also be available for that.

The Toyota Prius has a similar final price to the Bolt, so the win with the Bolt is fairly strong an obvious. Even a basic Tesla model 3, a much nicer car than the Prius, is about $35,000 after rebates in California, but that’s easily paid for in just a few years when the savings are $3,500 per year.

There’s also the perk, here in California, of carpool lane access and cheaper bridge tolls even when solo. For those who pay a bridge toll every day, that’s an additional saving of $600 per year or more.

So why doesn’t it happen?

TNC drivers are gig workers, not in the upper echelons of earning. Historically, such people have a terrible track record when it comes to spending extra up front to save more money over time. They either simply lack the funds to spend the extra money, or they fear that large purchase. This could be solved if EV vendors offered special loans to those who plan to make a living driving the car.

In order to make this work, the car needs to park each night in a place with a charging port and reasonably priced electricity. Many TNC drivers do not own their own homes with a garage or parking spot. If you live in an apartment building or park on the street, you may not be able to get such charging, again leaving you out of this option. Unfortunately most commercial public charging stations price their electricity at more than double the residential price, and they don’t offer discounts at night they way they should. This eliminates the savings.

Some TNC drivers live a long distance from their working area. I routinely meet drivers here in the San Francisco Bay Area who live in the less expensive central valley. Some come for 2-3 days shifts and rent an AirBNB, but either way the commute drive of 100 miles will suck up the range of the electric car, making this impractical. High speed charging can solve this, but it is also usually priced at 2-3x the price of residential charging, eliminating the savings.

People who don’t own EVs have range anxiety. They are worried that an EV would not be suitable for this work, even once they look at the pattern of how many miles they drive in a day. There is always the risk that you might pick up somebody at the airport who wants to go 60 miles when you don’t have the range late in the day, and you would have to decline. The TNC companies could easily adapt by understanding that the driver has an EV with a given range, and not assign them a ride that exceeds their range. The driver’s phone knows how far each car has driven since recharge, and some EVs, like the Tesla, can even report the charge level to external apps.

Tesla, as noted, forbids use of their superchargers, but there’s no reason for them to do that to people who are not getting free supercharging, particularly at superchargers which are not at 100% use. Tesla owners can now (with a $500 adapter) use the same fast chargers as Nissan Leafs use in a pinch. This can be a way to bump the daily range by an extra 100 miles on a lunch break.

Finally, most TNC drivers have not done this math. In fact, while efficient cars like the Prius are indeed very popular with TNC drivers who look at the cost math, it is still very common to get picked up in cars with far worse mileage. In most cases, you get the car the driver happens to own, not a car selected specifically for TNC work. People who pick up full-time TNC work still don’t know how long they will do it full time, and as such can be wary of choosing their personal car only for business reasons.

Some TNC drivers rent a car from the TNC company or an associated provider. Here, EVs should be a good choice, and in fact these rental companies could even solve the charging problem for some of those folks, who would park the rental in a charging lot and travel to it in some way.

From a social standpoint, it would be good to encourage TNC cars and taxis to be electric and reduce pollution, especially on city streets. We’ve become used to the clouds of fumes on city streets as we walk around, and I think in a few decades, when all cars in downtowns are electric, we will wonder why we ever put up with it.