AAA Says Uber, Lyft Cost Twice as Much as Car Ownership
Giving up your car and only using ride-hailing services can sound tempting, until you crunch some numbers.
Remember when you wanted nothing more than to own your own car? There was freedom in hitting the open road anytime you wanted. Then you started getting bills. Insurance, maintenance, monthly payments... Not to mention the amount you spent at the pump each month. It really adds up.
But it's still cheaper than Uber and Lyft expenses.
It can be tempting to give up your car and all of the headaches that comes with it to ride in someone else's car for a small fee. However, AAA says you'll actually spend nearly twice as much if you went "cold ride share." Thank goodness someone did some number crunching before I scribbled out a "For Sale" sign on poster paper.
After digging through some data, AAA determined that owning a car cost the average driver between $7,000 and $10,000 a year. This includes payments, insurance, reasonable repairs and more. They then calculated the average amounts of money that people pay using services like Uber and Lyft.
With this AAA was able to find which cities were spending the most and the least amount on ride-hailing. Dallas ended up being the city with the least amount of money spent each year on average. Their average came in at about $17,000 a year. It seems to me that instead of getting rid of your car, why not pay for that same car with other people's money by driving them around?
Of course, driving for one of these companies probably comes with some expenses of its own.