Monday, 1 December 2014

Our Night as an Uber Driver—Using a $500,000 Rolls-Royce

Want a Silicon Valley tech job? Hop on the ride-sharing bandwagon that’s giving fits to gentlemen with “India Out of Khalistan” bumper stickers and try life as an Uber driver. While the service’s users are accustomed to riding in Civics and Priuses, our disdain for the ordinary is somewhat legendary. Which is how I found myself swanning around San Francisco as a completely amateur and entirely untrained (and, indeed, unlicensed) taxi driver behind the wheel of a $490,215 hunk of weapons-grade plutocracy. Uber, the ride-sharing operation that connects smartphone-wielding drivers to app users who need a cab, springs from a deep well of Bay Area innovation. There’s a culture of ­fiddlers here. Of tinkerers. Of, as our British cousins are fond of saying, men in sheds. Think garages and labs and cheap rehearsal spaces and warehouses, and in the rural outskirts, the odd barn.
It makes nothing but sense that Uber was born here. Muni, San Francisco’s public transit agency, is a long-standing joke. Taxi service has never been as widespread or con­ven­ient as it is in New York. Meanwhile, the city’s Department of Parking and Traffic breeds meter maids with the ferocity of Gorgons and the ruthless efficiency of SEAL Team Six. In Manhattan, owning a car is a liability and public-transit alternatives make carlessness plausible. In the Bay Area, one often needs the service of a car to get around reliably with any haste—haste, of course, being one of the tech industry’s guiding principles. The other, at least in this latest Internet-of-Things iteration that’s given us companies like Uber, is to make a profit without actually making anything.
So the all-conquering monolith with the pointedly Nietzschean name doesn’t concern itself with inventory, save for a stock of iPhones it leases to drivers for 10 bucks a week. With this “revolutionary and magical product” (yes, that’s what Steve “Godhead” Jobs actually called the iPhone moments before introducing it in 2007) suction-cupped to the windshield of my borrowed mecha-Percheron, I set forth to see what tech-gentrified San Francisco had wrought upon the city’s long-standing relationship with the automobile.

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