Uber Tales – My Beginning at the End of the Wild West Days

When I first started driving for Uber in Spring 2017, it was the beginning of the end of what were called the ‘Wild West Days’ of Uber. Uber was founded in 2009 to try and ‘disrupt’ traditional taxi and black-car services in major cities. By 2017, less than ten years later, it was a worldwide juggernaut that has changed the way people and goods move around the world.

But not long after I signed on, Uber’s CEO and co-founder Travis Kalanick got the boot when he was caught on video bad-mouthing an Uber driver. So in August 2017, Dara Khosrowshahi, the former CEO of Expedia Group because CEO. And from there, Uber continued to grow, and also had to clean up a lot of damage caused by their predecessors around the world. Then of course in 2020, the pandemic hit and luckily the Uber Eats side of the business kicked in to compensate for the ride-share side. Since then, Uber has stabilized and focused on core businesses and managed growth.

When I signed on in 2017, Uber had only been in San Antonio for maybe two years and not long after I signed on, Uber got kicked out of Austin so a lot of those drivers came to San Antonio which depressed business and made me seriously wonder what in the world I’d gotten into. Luckily the city of Austin and Uber kissed and made up and life began to stabilize. But what was it like on the road in those early days?

Well, the app was crap. It glitched all the time in ways you couldn’t begin to imagine. GPS would go wonky, lose signal, tell you someone was a mile away from where they really were (especially around the airport). Then they made an update about a year in and the female voice sounded like a commandant in a Nazi prison (I actually nicknamed her ‘The Commandant’ for the few days she was live- trust me, they fixed this real fast).

Second, there was NO live support in those early years. If you had a problem, you solved it. There was NO way to reach out to anyone, real or AI back then and it was frustrating. But luckily I’m a problem-solver from my days in call-center hell so this wasn’t too big of a problem for me.

Third, in those early days you had NO idea how long a trip was going to be or what you were going to earn from it. Something came in and it was just ‘yes’ or ‘no’ so sometimes you took a wild gamble on rides. Then they started putting trip distances in but at first only up to a certain distance so a long ride only came in as ‘45+ minutes’ with NO actual milage or time given. Hence, the reason I set my personal record with this with a three-hour trip (would have been three and a half hours if I hadn’t been able to take the toll road around Austin) but I haven’t taken anything that long since then because it’s just not worth time and money.

But in the early days before I came online I heard stories of drivers knocking down a hundred-thousand plus a year in earnings and also driving for twelve-plus hours a day. Eventually, they put in a limit of twelve-hours of drive-time per day (though if you break that up by being offline for six hours your drive-time limit will reset to the full twelve hours). Now this drive-time only includes time in ‘active’ status and not if you’re parked and waiting like at the airport, for example.

So the Wild West Days were the days of glitchy apps, highly-unpredictable earnings, unlimited drive time, and no real-live support. I don’t miss these things at all because although I don’t have a need to reach out to Support often, it’s nice to know it’s there along with the Emergency button (in the early days if you were in big-trouble you had to hope you could hit 9-1-1 and get the call out). The app still glitches every so often but nowhere near as often as it did in the early days. And it’s good to have the drive-time limits because if not you’ve got trouble with tired and exhausted drivers. And as for the earnings, I like seeing trip earnings and trip duration and I’m seeing improvements there, too, because in the end, I think money has always been the biggest issue. For me, it’s just being able to do this job until something else hits and I can get off the road.

But I’m forever grateful to Uber for keeping me on the road when I couldn’t do anything else and I’ve weathered the ups and downs as well as I could. Like a lot of things in 2024, it’s looking upward. I don’t need Wild West stuff to do my job nor do I want that. I like stability and steady leadership, and also, that drivers are truly being listened to.

I think a part of me is going to miss this gig someday but right now, I’m grateful for it. I’m grateful leadership came in and stabilized things and kept it going instead of letting it languish or go under.