Drivers weigh-in on Waymo, dashers time at work and Tesla integrates with Uber. LegalRideshare breaks it down.

Uber drivers give their thoughts on Waymo. The Register adds:

Tim — a pseudonym as he asked not to be identified — expects Waymo, the leading maker of self-driving taxis, to broadly under-cut Uber's human-operated ride-hailing service in the US city at some point in 2025, and feels that will be the beginning of the end.

“To put it bluntly, we are cooked,” said one person posting to a forum for San Francisco Uber drivers, in response to my solicitation for thoughts about Waymo. “We're done for. In the age of artificial intelligence and automation, we're the first to be impacted in a major way.”

Tim argues that Waymo, which began offering rides to the general public in San Francisco in June, will use the same business playbook that Uber used to beat its competitors — spend venture capital to price rivals out of the market.

“The second Waymo trips are less than Uber, which is going to happen in 2025, everyone including myself, will just start taking Waymo,” he said.

Dashers spend less time on the gig than you think. Business Insider reported:

About 7 million people made deliveries for DoorDash last year. But, surprisingly, most of them averaged just a few hours a week on the gig.

Seventy-two percent of DoorDash's gig workers devoted less than four hours a week to making deliveries, according to the company. That figure includes just the time that gig workers spend on a delivery. Including downtime between orders, about 62% of workers spent less than four hours a week working for the app.

DoorDash's workforce of independent contractors also skews young and female. Fifty-five percent of DoorDash's workers, whom the company calls “Dashers,” were between 26 and 44 years old in 2023, according to DoorDash. And 60% said they identified as women.

Many of DoorDash's contractors are using the service to make ends meet — either to cover their mortgage, pay off debt, or have income between jobs — in addition to working a full-time position, a 2023 report from the company found. As of 2022, 44% of DoorDash contractors also had a full-time job.

Tesla integrates with Uber. Electrek adds:

Uber has announced that Tesla drivers using its rideshare app can now send trip navigation automatically to their vehicles.

On top of the navigation, Uber drivers can make the rideshare app aware of their current battery range in order to only send trip request within that range.

Tesla and Uber have also been working together to share data in order to better deploy charging stations in New York City, where there are a lot of Uber drivers using Tesla vehicles.

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