[SS-Traveller]

Originally Posted by libranof1987

Uber and Ola are ... just blowing VC money.

Originally Posted by SDP

...(their rides are effectively discounted by VC money).

Originally Posted by speedmiester

The cab companies are only after number of trips to show to their investors to ask for more money.

No one seems to be blaming the venture capitalists for the current Uber/Ola situation?

The VCs poured in their money, each aggregator being asked to outdo and sideline the other. Everyone had their party - and no one (aggregator, driver or customer) remembered that there is no such thing as a free lunch! If anyone is to be blamed, I'd say, blame the VCs for demanding a return on their investments!

[drmohitg]

So what is the ground situation now? Are they still on strike or has it fizzled out? I haven't seen any response or action from either of the 2 companies. Are these Cab drivers able to afford a week long holiday spent striking? Also this might be a bumper month for the handful of drivers who are probably working during this time, blessing in disguise?

[srishiva]

According to media reports, its not having any impact. Uber services was unaffected and Ola had small issue in the morning which has eased up. All these online services need to converge towards reality sooner.

[Nonstop-driver]

Originally Posted by drmohitg

Also this might be a bumper month for the handful of drivers who are probably working during this time, blessing in disguise?

I booked an Ola share yesterday and the driver was very, very rude. He took up 3 calls (was a shared cab) and charted a stupid route doubling my travel time. When I protested, he said its your loss if you want to cancel now. Somehow made him prioritize my drop but he drove like a maniac.

I thought he's trying to maximize his profit but he later told me that PCR vans are intercepting cabs on the road and penalizing them

[aroonanand]

Originally Posted by SS-Traveller

No one seems to be blaming the venture capitalists for the current Uber/Ola situation?

The VCs poured in their money, each aggregator being asked to outdo and sideline the other. Everyone had their party - and no one (aggregator, driver or customer) remembered that there is no such thing as a free lunch! If anyone is to be blamed, I'd say, blame the VCs for demanding a return on their investments!

Well, thats the nature of the VC beast, it is like running on a treadmill. The faster you go, the higher the speed is. The promoters of any company raising VC financing know what they are getting into (if they dont, either they are too naive or had bad advisors

Coming to the drivers, they didnt complain when they had the free lunches for so many months / years now; they were happy to switch loyalties overnight when Ola converted TFS drivers in 2014 by giving added incentives or when Uber gave more when they expanded. They were grinning ear-to-ear when the Meru / Mega's of the world were struggling to get any business apart from airport trips in Bangalore. So when their party is coming to an end, why crib now? I know drivers who have made north of a lakh a month in Bangalore on these incentives. Is that sustainable for a cabbie in India - no. They know it. So rather than crying foul now, it is time they reconcile to the new normal and move on. Eventually, fares will go up (Rs 7-8/km is not long term sustainable) and consumers have to pay more. Economics will eventually determine the balance.

It is like the IT industry today which is struggling for 10% growth and employees are getting meagre hikes - one cant keep comparing to the pre 2008 days and ask for 30% hike, can they?

[dailydriver]

Originally Posted by Nonstop-driver

I booked an Ola share yesterday and the driver was very, very rude. He took up 3 calls
When I protested, he said its your loss if you want to cancel now. Somehow made him prioritize my drop but he drove like a maniac.

Had a similar experience last month during Sankranti. We had booked an Uber from Rajajinagar 6th Block. Our destination was Cloud 9 hospital in Jayanagar. The driver started calling some number as soon as we started the trip. He kept on trying with such seriousness that I thought he might be in some urgency/emergency and refrained from commenting.

After a while, the call did connect; lo and behold-he was calling Uber Customer Care . And to my utter disbelief, the call continued for at least 7-8 minutes, with the driver doing the majority of the talking. He was complaining against a customer he had picked up the previous night and with whom he had a slight misunderstanding.

The CC executive, fully aware that the driver was in a moving car (based on the id the driver gave him when the call got connected), did not ask him to call later. He answered all the queries patiently.

I should have said something to the driver. I didn't. . My bad.

[libranof1987]

My dad landed at 2am last night at Delhi; Uber and Ola are still on strike. He ended up taking Mega Cabs.

[deehunk]

Ola was charging a surcharge of 1.6x for Micro and Mini cabs today morning. I have also seen share trips still in practice. These operators just don't abide by any rules and regulations or respect the law of the country.

[dark.knight]

This is very much like 90% of strikes worldwide, union members knew what they were getting into before getting into it, and then they enter the job, made hay while the sun shone, make themselves feel important and then strike, assuming that they are so important that they are irreplaceable and blame everything possible including inflation, rising costs and threat of competition / dilution. So cliched. Of course there are quite a few times that the employers unfairly exploit their employees/workers and take full advantage of them, for those times such protests are valid, but in this case there never was a limit on the number of drivers who could join and all the terms and conditions laid out earlier are the same today as well, only that their worst nightmare got realized.

I heard from a source that in Bangalore there are at least, a thousand cabs that have been seized by the loan-issuers a.k.a banks (SBI most notoriously) and UBER themselves via the UBER financing (not sure if this is true, I heard UBER does finance cars at high interest rates). This number is conservative and I heard that one seized car lot itself had 1000+ cars, mostly, Etios.

The main problem is that most drivers do not understand head or tails of math/finance and they just get into it because they've "heard" from their recently graduated buddy about the ways to hot-wire the system and earn upto 6 digits a month. Those times were short lived and I'm sure UBER knew all too well how their drivers were rigging the system to get benefits by extending rides, however they had to put up with it build a huge driver base and now they want their profits, automatically the driver earnings will go down due to dilution and of course, their conveniently overlooked fact that it needn't be necessary that riders volume would increase parallel to drivers volume increase.

Lack of logic, education and financial sense.. prevalent in India and U.S would obviously stand to gain from it. Things might get better once the "purely for cash" drivers drop out and leave and when the better rated, professional drivers stay put.

[sdp1975]

The High Court, on Friday, told the striking drivers' unions that they have to "get it out of their head" that they can "extract" something from these companies by agitations as they do with the government.

"You cannot demand anything from plaintiffs except by peaceful commercial negotiations," the court said

Source

The court is absolutely right IMHO.

[dailydriver]

Originally Posted by Recompose

Does this have anything to do with the strike? I'm not sure what a newspaper is doing publishing someone's salary anyway.

On the face of it, Ola and Uber drivers fighting for their 'promised' salaries in Bengaluru and a fresh graduate being hired by one of the companies in question, at a high cost, for their office in San Francisco may appear unrelated. But on second thoughts, one tends to wonder from where will the companies fund the 1.25 crores?

I agree that the recruitee may not even remotely be associated with Uber's Indian operations once he starts working. But the news item provides- especially in light of the previous discussions held in the thread- a perspective to the apparent gap between the emoluments of the people at the two ends of the business ladder.

And, newspapers love to publish the salary details of fresh recruitees, more so during the placement seasons and in relation to reputed institutes.

[Chetan_Rao]

Counterview from a cab driver.

Now this guy lives close to my home, and often drives me to office. He's attached to one of our corporate cab suppliers for his day job, and drives for Uber/Ola on weekends and lean periods when corporate trip volumes are low.

A lot of his colleagues jumped ship during the initial incentive-rich period but he kept his head and stuck with his steady income, making extra on the side as needed by driving for aggregators.

A lot of his disillusioned colleagues are now moving back, settling for stable incomes over unsteady incentives.

He recently traded in his four year old well-kept Vista for an Aspire (taxi variant), and is really happy with his decisions overall, compared to some of his friends who've now got cars they can't afford (some were crazy enough to buy top-end Sunny and Lodgy variants), while earning the same as him.

P.S. Just remembered something he said during our conversation, astonishing common sense from someone who'll probably be dismissed as an uneducated brute by most. 'Saar, nobody gives even a free glass of water. I'll only drink what I can pay for'.

[drmohitg]

So the strike seems to have fizzled out with neither the 2 companies bending down, nor the courts favouring the drivers. In hindsight it might have been a better idea for the drivers to strike against only 1 company at a time, in the process making the customers in-directly a part of this strike by forcing them to use only one platform and creating loss of customer base for the other.

On the other hand looks like Uber is back to its philanthropic ways. Got the following mail today:

Uber just got more affordable

Starting tomorrow, 22nd February, pay only ₹99 or less on all uberGO rides in Delhi NCR.
Simply fire up your Uber app, request an uberGO ride and off you go!
You will automatically pay ₹99 or less for all rides up to 9kms within Gurugram, Delhi, Noida-Ghaziabad and Faridabad.

[shankar.balan]

Originally Posted by Chetan_Rao

P.S. Just remembered something he said during our conversation, astonishing common sense from someone who'll probably be dismissed as an uneducated brute by most. 'Saar, nobody gives even a free glass of water. I'll only drink what I can pay for'.

Sheer common sense. Poor man. Hope he succeeds in his life.

[deehunk]

I had to take a cab yesterday night to my wife's office, got a chance to speak with one of the old drivers who used to pick me daily in 2015 after my surgery.
He was repenting for the mistakes he made by doing fake trips and how he had to sell his own vehicle after Ola terminated him. Now he drives somebody's vehicle and no longer does fake trips. Many of his friends have gone back to the companies where they were working earlier.