When Uber Says Your Car Is Obsolete

Remember Uber Black? (It’s the Uber you try not to accidentally pick instead of UberX.) Uber Black was Uber’s first foray into the rideshare market, and it’s been around for a while.

Long enough, in fact, for Uber to start telling drivers that they need to invest in newer luxury vehicles because their current Uber Black cars are no longer good enough for the Uber brand.

BuzzFeed gives us the story of Sam, a Los Angeles Uber driver who began driving for Uber Black in 2012 (shortly after the service launched) and was informed two years later that his 2004 Lincoln Town Car was “too old” for Uber Black.

“They didn’t tell us that when we signed on,” says Sam, who now pays $700 a month to lease a 2012 BMW 740Li. “They never said, ‘By the way, in the next year or two you’re going to have to replace your cars because if they’re too old, we’re not going to accept them.’”

Uber argues that a luxury car service needs to provide luxury cars, and that a ten-year-old Lincoln Town Car is no longer luxurious. It doesn’t matter if drivers maintain or even renovate their cars; once the cars reach a certain age, they must either be replaced—or downgraded to UberX cars.

UberX rides are less expensive than Uber Black rides. They’re also less profitable for Uber drivers, but that hasn’t stopped Uber from prompting Uber Black drivers to accept UberX customers:

Drivers in New York City who signed up to drive Uber Black after late February 2015 agreed to also pick up UberX fares; the app automatically sends these Black drivers to pick up cheap rides, an Uber spokesperson confirmed to BuzzFeed News.

Even Uber Black drivers who signed on before February 2014 are urged to accept UberX fares. BuzzFeed quotes Uber driver Zahir Chowdhury:

In New York, UberX rides cost $1.75 per mile, compared to $3.75 for Uber Black, meaning his gross earnings for a Black ride are more than twice as much per mile. Chowdhury says when you’re burning fuel at the rate his SUV does (less than 15 miles per gallon in the city, according to the U.S. Department of Energy), the UberX fare simply isn’t worth it. “A regular car is V4. This is an eight-cylinder car,” he says. Regardless of this math, he says Uber continually encourages Black drivers to pick up X passengers.

I’m less interested in Uber asking Uber Black drivers to pick up UberX passengers because of course Uber is going to ask drivers to accept the less popular fares, that’s how the gig economy works—it’s really how all jobs work, nearly all of us are asked to take on undesirable tasks that weren’t originally part of our job descriptions, or work late without pay or deal with scope creep or accept fewer benefits or do a myriad of things outside of our original work “agreement.”

But I’m struck by the idea that Uber wants its drivers to regularly upgrade their cars. I suppose when you think about it, it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which Uber didn’t ask drivers to stop driving “old cars,” but I don’t think many people considered that when they signed up to be Uber drivers. The gig economy is still so new that we haven’t followed its implications to their inevitable conclusions—and yet there it is, the idea that you can spend a couple of years working for a luxury car service and then be asked to personally upgrade your luxury car.

Y0u could spin that idea outwards and imagine a future in which people are told that their clothing is too outdated for their gig economy work, or that they themselves are too old, but we already have that, it’s another factor that’s always been part of the workplace, hidden under the label “bad fit” or “4.1 star rating.” Although the gig economy has given many people new opportunities to earn money, it’s also created new standards of perfection and demanded we shoulder both the cost and the responsibility of keeping up.

I wonder what else we’ll learn about our disrupted workforce in the next few years.

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