Well hey...if you can bait civilian drivers with no real contract into taking these costs for you, more power to you, right? After all, you're creating shareholder value. If the drivers ever pick up on it, just raise the payout. They'll have made money in the meantime.
To be fair here, unless you're driving a luxury car like a Tesla, your depreciation, gas and maintenance costs are still probably $5/hour or less. So, call it $16/hour, and it's still well above minimum wage and most living wages. You're adding extra danger due to potential crash concerns etc, but I don't really know how to best quantify that.
According to Consumer Reports (see linked article), the median car costs about $9k per year for the first 5 years (including the sticker price). That comes out to $0.75 per mile--not an insignificant amount. Driving 30 miles per hour, that's $22.50 in costs.
Those costs are accurate, but a major part of the expense is depreciation. The longer you own the car (and the less you drive it), the lower those expenses are. Parking (including the land or rent you pay to your garage) is another big hidden expense.
Automobile reliability has, generally, advanced worlds from where it was in the 1970s. It used to be that getting 100,000 miles was a significant accomplishment, now it's pretty much expected, and having a car run 200,000 miles isn't uncommon. I'd had a vehicle I ended up selling to a friend which went 280k before it was finally cash-for-clunkered. In that time, it went through a couple of radiators, a couple of exhaust manifold repairs, and a transmission (protip: keep 'em lubed and watch for oil leaks). And a few sets of brake pads, possibly a clutch. But all told, pretty remarkable.
In the 2000s you saw some significant improvements in safety (ubiquitous airbags, ABS, and traction control), but not a whole lot else.
That said: doing a lot of city driving in traffic is fairly high-risk and high-wear on a car.
I'm not sure how you can use a flat statistic like $9,100/year to own based on 12,000 miles per year driven, and then apply it to a Lyft driver. They could be driving 45,000 miles per year, in which case the $9,100 per year would go up, but it's not clear by how much. I would guess that there are large efficiencies there. There are another number of flaws with this logic:
1) Assumes that you only use your car for Uber/Lyft driving and that it is entirely valueless otherwise. If you were going to own a car anyway, you were going to eat a bunch of that cost to begin with. The extra costs are in the incremental mileage that you drive.
2) Assumes you are buying a brand new car, and uses averages for first 5 years. If you just start with a 1-year old car, that drops your average around 25% (from ~$9K to ~$7K).
3) Averages across a number of makes and models, including a number of luxury cars (pretty sure most people looking to earn $35/hour aren't in the market for Porches, Land Rovers and Mercedes Benz', all of which top out the scale being used in the consumer reports article). For example, a Toyota Camry would cost about $5,700/year to own for years 2-5 (http://autos.yahoo.com/toyota/camry/2013/l/cost.html), and around $7K/year for all first 5 years.
4) As stated earlier, assumes that a Lyft driver is just going 12,000 miles/year and that the rate $0.75/hour stays constant regardless of how many hours you drive in a year.
Not quite sure how to evaluate, and it's very possible that I may have estimated on the lower end. But, the methodology used in that blog post linked is pretty visibly flawed in a number of ways. Now I've already given this more thought than I initially planned to, but you're right that I shouldn't have off-handedly thrown out $5/hour without investigation. That said, it bothers me that the blogger you referenced put out an entire article (that was referenced on HN) that used such poor reasoning and assumptions using misleading data. All of which to come up with a bolded "$3.45/hour!!!" conclusion. /rant
That's not a very good comparison. Many of these costs you'll incur, regardless of whether or not you drive for Uber (insurance, tabs, tax, depreciation, etc.)
To actually calculate the costs of driving for Uber, we should only be looking at the variable, or the per-mile cost, which as far as I can tell should be:
