It's kind of amazing that almost 100% of the Uber and Lyft rides I've taken in the last 6 months have had drivers/cars that work for both simultaneously. There only service distinction is which app you use to book the ride, the inventory and employees are all the same.
Lyft/Uber driver here: It depends on what driver rewards they are running. Most of the time they are about the same. They are both sneaky in their own way:
Uber:
1) You drive to a surge area for an extra reward and as soon as you get there it disappears. Your presence eliminates the need for a surge reward. Chasing the surge is for rookies.
2) Most of the time I get let's say X for taking someone to the airport. On a surge I am supposed to get X + Y, however they'll pay me 75% of X + Y. Isn't that great that I made Y extra! actually no, they reduced X. It's straight up robbery.
Lyft
1) I drove out some rural roads to a scheduled pickup. The rider didn't show up. Before I had a chance to cancel the ride and get some payment, the algorithm cancelled the ride paying me nothing. This does not happen on Uber. I always get paid for cancelled rides there.
2) I got a pickup in an area I was not currently in. I went there. The pickup point was inside a cemetery at night. I'm not going to drive into a cemetery at night and get robbed. I get a message "You are in a very high demand area (the neighborhood next door) Why don't you stay there and wait for a ride?" The zombie pickup went away with no comment from Lyft. Lyft sneakily lured me into an area (an unsafe lure too)
3) There were too many drivers waiting at the airport. Lyft created a high demand reward area in a town next to the airport. It didn't make sense to me, but I went there and waited. I noticed a bunch of other Lyft drivers parked there waiting. No one getting any rides. So Lyft created a false high demand reward area to siphon excess drivers from the airport waiting lot (keeping the peace with folks that live around there)
I'd say the Uber algorithm is less dishonest than the Lyft algorithm. The odd thing to me is that they don't want to hear from techie drivers that could serve as beta testers, but neither Lyft or Uber want to hear from drivers. At all. They are losing business because good drivers (smart drivers) won't take some actual legitimate rides or cancel them because of these games.
It's interesting that you bring this up. Every time I take an uber or lyft (which is very often), I ask the driver which one they prefer. Around early 2019, I've noticed a lot of drivers say they get more business on uber, but prefer lyft. So, it seems like there is actually a noticeable distinction for the 2 services, at least from the driver's perspective.
From a (very occasional) rider perspective: I only have an Uber account. From my understanding - which may be completely incorrect, but it's what my decision to only have Uber was based on - Uber is available in more cities (which are likely nearly a superset of Lyft's cities), has more drivers, and is cheaper.
In other words, based on my understanding of the brands, the only reason for me to install Lyft would be if I wanted to boycott Uber. And I already have Uber, but not Lyft, and I would likely have to keep Uber because I go to cities where Uber exists and Lyft doesn't.
So some network effect is there, but I don't see how it justifies the insane valuation of the company. AFAIK they're still operating at a loss.
Their strategy seems to be having the network when self-driving cars come around, but any competitor offering (safe) self-driving rides would get my sign-up just due to novelty. Even if not, $100B buys you a lot of new-user incentives.
Uber has to solve completely different issues than a self-driving cab: A self-driving cab company can just flood a market with cars to ensure a smooth experience for new users, offer a bunch of free rides in a limited time to get people to sign up, then move the excess cars to the next city (can't simply do that with human drivers).
No need to recruit and manage drivers, deal with driver fraud, settle disputes when a driver claims a passenger puked in the car and the passenger claims they didn't (if they take a picture after the passenger leaves). All the tracking and fraud detection systems of Uber are worthless.
Writing an app that can show a map and let people press a "I want a car" button may not be trivial, but it isn't going to cost a billion dollars.
You can also link your Lyft account to both Delta and Hilton to earn a few points per dollar with them every time you take a ride. It's a good way to keep Hilton points from expiring if you don't stay at one very often.
>"There only service distinction is which app you use to book the ride, the inventory and employees are all the same."
The one area where I have been able to draw a distinction and for me this is the most important is customer service. When I have had issues with Uber I found the customer service to be completely worthless. It seem to consist of nothing more than canned email responses from a support center in India. Case in point I had a psychopath Uber driver who kicked me out of car at night and left me on the side of the road when I asked if they could turn on the air conditioning because there was a heatwave. Despite my persistence I was never able to get anything more than a canned email response of "Uber upholds our drivers to the highest standards ..." Every email I sent asking if they could please escalate this as it was serious issue resulted in a new canned email response signed by a different employee name.
Lyft by contrast on the two occasions that I had a somewhat serious issue responded to me by having a customer service representative call me and ask me further details.
For me this matters much more than the fare differential at any given time. In my experience Uber/Lyft feels increasingly more like a race to the bottom and this distinction has become more important to me.
IMO this points to inevitable consolidation. Uber and Lyft will merge at some point. As long as traditional taxis still exist and/or there is a Republican administration, it should clear antitrust.
