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by Jonathan Knope on October 19, 2018 14 Comments

Best Phone Mount According to Uber Drivers

Harry here. I’m always surprised when I take a ride in an Uber as a passenger and see my driver staring at his lap for directions. Come on guys, get a phone mount! Today, 5-star Uber driver Jonathan Knope reviews some of the most popular car phone holders and the best phone mounts on the market.

Quick links:

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Best Non-magnetic phone mounts
Best Magnetic phone mounts

Car Phone Holder

Car phone holders, aka phone mounts are a staple for drivers everywhere. Having your directions available hands-free is not only important for your safety, but safety of the people around you.

Especially if you’re a rideshare driver, passengers like to feel safe, and if they see you staring at your lap all the time, they may not give out those all-important five stars.

This is safer than staring at your lap while driving!

Recently we had the opportunity to compare a selection of the best phone mounts. Check out the video below or read on to see the full review.

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by Christian Perea on March 12, 2018 Leave a Comment

Is Renting A Car For $5 an Hour to Drive for Uber Worth It?

Don’t have a car, or temporarily without a car, but want to drive rideshare? How does $5 an hour to rent a car sound like to you? Senior RSG contributor Christian Perea tested Getaround, a rental car service for Uber drivers, and explains how it works, what you can expect when signing up to drive, and how you can maximize your earnings.

For only $5 an hour you can pay for the privilege to rent a car and pound the streets of San Francisco as a bonafide Uber driver seeking profits and adventure.

Is it even worth it? Seems a little strange paying Uber for the privilege of shuttling around a bunch of techies. I decided to try it to find out for myself to see how great (or terrible) it is.

UPDATE: Getaround no longer includes gas in the price of the rental. This is a deal breaker for me since a 10 hour rental is about $50 and the gas would be another $20 ($70 to drive for the day). That’s about half my earnings for any given day of Bay Area driving. So I recommend that you get around to renting a different way 😀

Getaround and Uber recently partnered up in San Francisco to offer cars that almost anyone can use to drive for Uber. They’re dispersed all throughout SF, Oakland, and Berkeley, and you can just go on ahead and walk up, unlock the car from your phone via the Getaround app, and proceed to drive them for Uber for as little or as long as you want.

As of now, this partnership between Getaround and Uber is only available in San Francisco, but you can find a list of rental and leasing options nationwide on our Vehicle Marketplace. And I suspect if this goes well, they will roll it out to other cities.

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by Christian Perea on November 1, 2017 17 Comments

Rydar: The Swiss Army Knife of Driver Tools

Have you ever wondered how you could only drive during surge times, when concerts and events get out and demand spikes? Ever wish you could just drive during a high surge? You can with a new app called Rydar, which identifies places and events for you to drive and helps you drive only during a profitable surge period. Today, senior RSG contributor Christian Perea covers these functions and more.

Rydar is a new rideshare driver assistant app that combines a lot of the features from existing driver apps on the market.

Rydar has custom surge alerts, custom heat maps, tells you where to go for your next ride, an events calendar (think concerts and sports), a mileage tracker, expense tracker, and syncs with your Uber account. All at the same time and in one place.

There are a lot of driver apps on the market right now that do many different things for drivers, and they’re all competing for your hard-earned money. Rydar seeks to combine most of those apps into one big, multi-tool driver app – the Swiss Army Knife of driver tools, if you will.

Let’s see how it does, or you can get started signing up with Rydar here.

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by Melissa Berry on October 20, 2017 1 Comment

Naming Your GPS, Naked Passengers and More: New Book Review

Our very own RSG senior contributor John Ince has written a new book, Travels with Vanessa: An Uber and Lyft Driver Tries to Make Sense of it All. The book is one in a series of four upcoming books, which chronicle passenger stories, John’s personal recollections and societal observations. You can purchase the book here, and for our review and an exclusive interview with John Ince by RSG contributor Melissa Berry, continue reading below.

When you first start reading Travels with Vanessa by John Ince, the title leads you to believe this will be a story about a rideshare driver and, presumably, a passenger named Vanessa. This is both true and not quite true, as Vanessa actually ends up being the name of John’s GPS. Her voice is at first jarring to John, but becomes a tether for him while he drives all around San Francisco as an Uber and Lyft driver.

While Travels is a long book, it’s really a collection of stories. It’s easy to pause after a story and return without losing your place. The first in a four-part series, Book One begins with John’s start as a rideshare driver. His description of starting as a rideshare driver, without any guidance from the companies on what that looks like, is very familiar to anyone who remembers their first few weeks of rideshare driving.

If you’re familiar with John’s writing, particularly his Treasure Chest article, you’ll know that John has been collecting stories from passengers for a long time. Travels is the first book where John shares these stories, plus other societal and personal observations. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be a rideshare driver, you should check out this book and read about some of the strange encounters John has had. As he mentions in the book, “sometimes real life is stranger than fiction.”

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by Christian Perea on August 15, 2017 5 Comments

How Machine Learning Can Help Drivers Find Their Next Ride

Note: This article is sponsored by FarePilot. They’re a free app that provides drivers with locations and intel on where to go to get their next ride. I’ve found that it’s a useful app for when I don’t know where to go next after dropping off a passenger. Check it out here. As always, all opinions are our own.

Whenever I hear about AI and machine learning in the context of rideshare driving it usually involves how we are all going to get replaced by robots. This unfortunately paints AI and machine learning in a pretty negative light to drivers because it more or less becomes synonymous with “unemployment.” Even if drivers can benefit from it today.

AI and machine learning isn’t all doom and gloom for drivers though. It’s reflective of new technology; and like any new technology it’s benefit at the end of the day depends on how humans use it as a tool. [Read more…]