Safety recall fixes have to be done at a dealership. Like when GM issues a recall for the ignition switch that can catch a car on fire.
No they don't. That's just mostly how the current companies handle it. Safety recalls have happened with Tesla. They've simply used company techs to do the work by picking the vehicle up from your house/work if the fix can't be done on the spot, sometimes delivering a loaner vehicle.
Also, much like repair shops working with lots of insurance companies, there's nothing except laws preventing a car manufacturer from simply paying any qualified shop for doing the work.
Let's see: Lithium is.1% of the cost of the final battery; We could run short on cobalt, but not all chemistries use it, and the biggest concern is the graphite required. Of course carbon is 'everywhere', the biggest difficulty(read: expense) is purifying it enough to use for anode material.
Then again, we're doing huge amounts of research into carbon materials, so we might figure out some stuff there.
I thought that hybrids with very large caps still make sense, though?
Caps large enough didn't exist. Even now I think they're not improving quite as fast as batteries.
Plus, well, as battery prices decrease you can increase capabilities by enlarging the battery(at the same cost), which increases power availability and regenerative braking efficiency.
Consider what's going on in the article - hybrid owners are trading up to EVs and plug-in hybrids. Their goal isn't to burn gasoline efficiently, it's to get off of gasoline.
I wouldn't consider a range rover hybridized with a 47 hp electric motor vs the 288 hp diesel engine to be 'strong'. To me a 'strong' EV has the electric motor be at least as strong as the engine.
Still, per this article it gives V-8 performance at V-8 cost with V-6 gas mileage.
Frankly if most of your driving is highway I don't see the point, my $17,000 non-hybrid Honda Civic is competitive with the Prius when it comes to highway driving.... I can milk 43-44mpg out of my Civic without trying that hard, and that's despite living in a hilly region.
If you're a highway warrior for the forseeable future your best bet is diesel. Electric power-trains truly show their strength in city driving due to the ability to regenerate from braking. On the highway the savings are too marginal.
As for your 1-2 second wait until you get power - that's probably the electric motor putting energy towards starting the gasoline engine to provide the power you want. A strong hybrid(IE one capable of highway speeds without using the gasoline engine) would fix that, but is a touch more expensive and even cheaper to convert to a plug-in hybrid design(more power = bigger battery = longer range = just need to add a wall charger and change the computer logic).
The way I understood it, hybrids were meant as a bridge between gasoline powered cars and electric cars. Especially with Tesla's recent decision on releasing its patents, we'll only see more electric cars. So hybrids will eventually go by the wayside anyway.
Indeed. The problem with a 'standard' hybrid is that it's still purely powered by gasoline. You go to a 'strong' hybrid or outright EV with a battery pack large enough and set up for charging from the wall you can actually enjoy the lower 'fuel' price of electricity. Battery pack prices aren't dropping like a rock, but they are on a strong decline, such that the weak hybrid battery pack of a decade ago was more expensive than the strong battery packs of today.
If you can chop half your fuel bill by spending roughly $2k to get a car with a plug on it, why wouldn't you? That's roughly $1.6k for a larger battery and $400 for the charging system. At ~$200 per kwh, that's an extra 8 kwh or ~24 miles of range. Remember, hybrid. That's enough to increase the pure EV range to 30-40 miles, which will cover 'most' commutes, and gas station visits to less than once a month in most cases.
It seems to me like they are trying to exploit the little man. Because people do drive taxies, uber and deliver pizzas for a living, making them contractors is a distasteful way to cut money from people who make very little.
I think that at least the pizza places got slapped down for trying to say their drivers were independent contractors. Taxi drivers are more complicated.
Remember it's about control. A true independent contractor has to have much more freedom in controlling how they work. Like I mentioned, somebody who's driving 'for' Uber can actually decide his or her own hours, work with competing dispatch companies, decide on what individual fares to accept or not accept with the only penalty being not getting paid for that individual job.
If the pizza driver isn't being allowed to also deliver competitor's pizzas or even pull jobs for Uber during slow periods they aren't a contractor.
Sorry, but Dyson Spheres can also be constructed in pieces. Lots of little banks of photocells connected by strong threads.
Uh, what part of 'act of constructing it' implies that I wouldn't think that it'd be constructed in pieces? As for the photocells - that's the 'little more than foil'.
Also, a topopolis wouldn't be a dyson sphere, though it could be part of one. Mobile space habitats, especially.1c ones traveling between systems wouldn't be a dyson sphere either. Though yes, the ship would be their home, as my initial post of 'so adapted to space' would imply. I just didn't want to restrict them to '1' ship.
We are a long way from being able to build such a thing, and our obstacles aren't mainly in sources of power (well, electric power).
That is so true, but there's time for significant evolution between solar systems if you're looking at.001c or so for velocities.
As long as they're still stuck using reaction drive systems and such. If FTL/non-reaction drives are physically possible it changes some assumptions about the Fermi equations rather radically.
Of course there is the unsettling fact that humanity just hasn't invented the technology to allow us to easedrop on other folks messaging.
We're working on developing it, but I'm thinking that it might also end up being a giga-project such as a huge interferometer antenna array located in orbit around the sun, giving an effective antenna size measured in AUs.
I think the problem here is that infrared doesn't penetrate our atmosphere that well, there's too much 'noise', and how do you tell the difference between a dyson sphere and a brown dwarf?
Unless we caught them in the act of constructing it we'd need to both spot the signature and recognize that it's unusual(we barely know what's usual as is), and figure out WHY it's unusual.
For that matter, even the lightest of dyson spheres, which would consist mostly of panels that are little more than foil, elicit comments of 'You need HOW many planets worth of mass?"
Either that or they're using high-compression spread-spectrum data streams and it's all just slightly different noise underneath the noise.
Yep, that's what I meant with digital technology making us quieter. We're actually transmitting more, but generally at lower power levels, over wider chuncks of spectrum, and using technology where if you don't know the pattern to look for looks a lot like noise. And we're not even doing it for secrecy - but because it allows you to move more bits with less power, at least at the ranges we want.
Even if Aliens haven't moved past the EM spectrum for data transmission, such technologies means that we wouldn't 'hear' them unless we both knew the intended protocol and it was aimed at us.
Even at our brightest we're not even a rounding error against the sun at interstellar distances. Dyson Spheres may be impractical/impossible, and yes, I'm talking about the 'soft core' types. Besides, we'd need to somehow detect a non-radiating body then figure out that it SHOULD be radiating. Or more likely finding a body radiating in infra-red that should be radiating visible light.
We can barely detect planets at this point, so planetary engineering is going to be a long shot. Hell, we don't even have good theories for determining how solar systems were formed in order to look for artificial changes. Because of that, the 'best' way to detect planetary engineering would be unexpected change over time - which like my 'eyeblink' comment for radio, we haven't been able to detect planets long enough to really be looking for said artificial changes.
I suppose we could be looking for lasers being targeted at us as well, but that's an even smaller chunk of time for us to be able to detect that, and again, you're looking at the alien species needing to take very deliberate action to transmit to us, dedicating the equivalent of several major power plants to the effort.
It may also be possible that we are part of a nature preserve, or that there are more than enough planets with similar conditions to inhabit, to not have to displace or destroy an entire culture.
I've been told off for proposing the nature preserve idea. Various arguments were that the aliens would need a 'huge fleet' to stop colonization efforts from reaching our system, that we'd notice our neighboring systems are inhabited, etc...
They didn't have a good response to my point that our radio reception efforts have been primitive enough that in order to 'hear' Alpha Centari the aliens would need to deliberately transmit an easy to intercept radio signal at us using several GW of power using the best dish technology we have.
The Earth, at it's loudest(digital technology is actually making us 'quieter' on the interstellar scene), wouldn't be 'heard' by the Arecibo Observatory at distances over a light year.
In short, I don't see an alien civilization beaming GW level signals at prospective systems more or less continously for millions of years in the vague hope that we'll notice and answer back. Meanwhile, we've been able to 'listen' for the equivalent of not even an eyeblink.
Eh, whatever. My other pet theories are that by the time a civilization is capable of colonizing other solar systems it's either become too insular to want to bother(you give up a LOT going to another solar system), or so adopted to space that colonizing planets is no longer a thing. Which makes 'nature preserve' for potentially life-bearing planets, cradles for new civilizations, not an expensive strategy at all.
I'd argue that that's a bad deal, and not really a true sharing of costs.
Yeah, I got called away and hit submit before I could make WAGs for more consumables like brakes, insurance*, and what not. Hell, even my $15k worth of depreciation estimate is just that.
Another factor to consider is that the federal reimbursement rate is deliberately fudged a bit towards 'worst case' vs average or median. I think they figure on you having a semi-expensive 20mpg truck paying 'next to airport' rates for gasoline.
Still, even if you have a Tesla Model-S** that you somehow got for free so your fuel&maintenance costs are insignficant, $.56 per mile is only $22.40/hour figuring on an average of 40mph, or about $47k/year. Which is lousy when you figure that you have to pay both sides of FICA on it in addition to the other self-employment taxes, other business expenses, health insurance, etc... Note for others: Any job where you'd be an 'independent contractor', divide the reimbursement by 2 to make it equivalent to a salary/hourly wage job.
*Commercial insurance is more expensive on the idea that you're driving more. **There is/was a Uber driver who uses his Model-S for ridesharing, read a blurb about him a couple months ago. Extra vehicle expense is balanced against lower fuel cost, insurance is apparently reasonable(the car has excellent safety characteristics), and generates extremely positive reviews from readers.
Are you even including anything more than fuel, or are you assuming that cars don't have any other consumables and don't lose value from miles driven?
It has to be for fuel alone. Maybe oil as well. $4/gallon 40mpg = $.10/mile 30mpg =.13 20mpg =.20 Oil change $100@10k =.01 $15k car depreciation@5 years@15k miles/year = $.20
That's funny, but going by the histories of murderers and serial killers there's generally signs long before they actually kill somebody.
Now it's not 100% by any means, but if you can blackball 90% of cabby murderers before they get around to actually killing you'd make driving a taxi safer than being a cop(for example).
Some professions have a closed number. Think doctors or notaries for instance. Do you find that anticompetitive?
Yes, and the point is?
If there's too many taxis to the point nobody can make money they'll go out of business until the number is at a sustainable level, with only the most efficient surviving.
Same with doctors, really. Increase the number of doctors and availability would increase even as you need to work them fewer hours.
True, and calling the drivers self-employed, which is also a lie that moves more liability to the drivers and in the US frees uber of having to pay benefits etc...
Can you provide any proof that the drivers are actually employees of Uber? To my knowledge they don't meet the IRS guidelines to be considered employees. Note: There may be exceptions for their explicit 'for hire' cars where Uber owns the vehicle in question. Heck, I think it was in a previous thread here that I read about an Uber driver talking about how he was also signing up to get leads/customers through Lyft and Sidecar.
Facts that provide evidence of the degree of control and independence fall into three categories: Behavioral: Does the company control or have the right to control what the worker does and how the worker does his or her job? Financial: Are the business aspects of the worker’s job controlled by the payer? (these include things like how worker is paid, whether expenses are reimbursed, who provides tools/supplies, etc.) Type of Relationship: Are there written contracts or employee type benefits (i.e. pension plan, insurance, vacation pay, etc.)? Will the relationship continue and is the work performed a key aspect of the business?
Behavioral: Uber does have conduct guidelines and will drop you if your customer satisfaction rate is too low. However, they do not set hours or even whether any given driver will take a given ride request. Financial: Uber takes a cut of any ride for providing it's service, but doesn't provide the car, only provides limited insurance coverage, doesn't pay an hourly rate, has the driver/operator worry about maintenance and such. Type of relationship: No employee type benefits, written contract. Driver can drop uber and work with other services at any time, and of course Uber isn't dependent upon any one driver. Heck, the drivers can work with multiple such services at the exact same time if they chose to do the work.
My non-expert opinion: Uber has a strong case that the drivers are independent contractors, not employees. Signs of this are no hourly wages, drivers must provide their own licenses, insurance, and equipment, set their own hours, can decide whether to take any one job or not, and are not tied to Uber for providing driving services.
That's where an extra rider would be handy. It wouldn't be bad if I simply paid an extra 5 cents or so per mile for my 'commercial' driving if I only do Uber during the highest demand periods when Uber jacks up the rates.
Slashdot Mirror
Safety recall fixes have to be done at a dealership. Like when GM issues a recall for the ignition switch that can catch a car on fire.
No they don't. That's just mostly how the current companies handle it. Safety recalls have happened with Tesla. They've simply used company techs to do the work by picking the vehicle up from your house/work if the fix can't be done on the spot, sometimes delivering a loaner vehicle.
Also, much like repair shops working with lots of insurance companies, there's nothing except laws preventing a car manufacturer from simply paying any qualified shop for doing the work.
I specifically noted that I was keeping the trim levels the same. The Tesla model S isn't competing with honda civics.
Yes, it sucks that hybrids and other such vehicles are generally only available in premium trims.
15k miles is the median driven per vehicle in the USA. It's 'only' 40 miles per day, 58 if you only drive during the weekday.
Less than 2 hours of driving even at only an average speed of 25-30 mph.
There are people out there that commute further in stop&go driving, we're talking 2 hours each way every day.
FTA: "So that's the hook: V6 economy, V8 performance. The price is the same as the V8 too by the way."
I did look at the price.
Let's see: Lithium is .1% of the cost of the final battery; We could run short on cobalt, but not all chemistries use it, and the biggest concern is the graphite required. Of course carbon is 'everywhere', the biggest difficulty(read: expense) is purifying it enough to use for anode material.
Then again, we're doing huge amounts of research into carbon materials, so we might figure out some stuff there.
Let's check the math.
2014 Highlander 4WD Limited*: $41,960 18/24 mpg (21 averaged)
2014 Highlander Hybrid Limited AWD: $48,160 27/28 mpg (27.5 averaged)
Price difference: $6,200
Fuel cost per mile, $4 gallon: 19 cents vs 14.5
Savings per mile: 4.5 cents
Break Even: 138k miles
Time: 9.2 years.
Conclusion: Not worth it.
What if you're a 'city slicker'?
Cost per mile: 22 cents vs 15, diff 7
Break Even: 89k miles, 5.9 years. Worth it.
*Keeping the trim levels the same t
I thought that hybrids with very large caps still make sense, though?
Caps large enough didn't exist. Even now I think they're not improving quite as fast as batteries.
Plus, well, as battery prices decrease you can increase capabilities by enlarging the battery(at the same cost), which increases power availability and regenerative braking efficiency.
Consider what's going on in the article - hybrid owners are trading up to EVs and plug-in hybrids. Their goal isn't to burn gasoline efficiently, it's to get off of gasoline.
I wouldn't consider a range rover hybridized with a 47 hp electric motor vs the 288 hp diesel engine to be 'strong'. To me a 'strong' EV has the electric motor be at least as strong as the engine.
Still, per this article it gives V-8 performance at V-8 cost with V-6 gas mileage.
Frankly if most of your driving is highway I don't see the point, my $17,000 non-hybrid Honda Civic is competitive with the Prius when it comes to highway driving.... I can milk 43-44mpg out of my Civic without trying that hard, and that's despite living in a hilly region.
If you're a highway warrior for the forseeable future your best bet is diesel. Electric power-trains truly show their strength in city driving due to the ability to regenerate from braking. On the highway the savings are too marginal.
As for your 1-2 second wait until you get power - that's probably the electric motor putting energy towards starting the gasoline engine to provide the power you want. A strong hybrid(IE one capable of highway speeds without using the gasoline engine) would fix that, but is a touch more expensive and even cheaper to convert to a plug-in hybrid design(more power = bigger battery = longer range = just need to add a wall charger and change the computer logic).
The way I understood it, hybrids were meant as a bridge between gasoline powered cars and electric cars. Especially with Tesla's recent decision on releasing its patents, we'll only see more electric cars. So hybrids will eventually go by the wayside anyway.
Indeed. The problem with a 'standard' hybrid is that it's still purely powered by gasoline. You go to a 'strong' hybrid or outright EV with a battery pack large enough and set up for charging from the wall you can actually enjoy the lower 'fuel' price of electricity. Battery pack prices aren't dropping like a rock, but they are on a strong decline, such that the weak hybrid battery pack of a decade ago was more expensive than the strong battery packs of today.
If you can chop half your fuel bill by spending roughly $2k to get a car with a plug on it, why wouldn't you? That's roughly $1.6k for a larger battery and $400 for the charging system. At ~$200 per kwh, that's an extra 8 kwh or ~24 miles of range. Remember, hybrid. That's enough to increase the pure EV range to 30-40 miles, which will cover 'most' commutes, and gas station visits to less than once a month in most cases.
It seems to me like they are trying to exploit the little man. Because people do drive taxies, uber and deliver pizzas for a living, making them contractors is a distasteful way to cut money from people who make very little.
I think that at least the pizza places got slapped down for trying to say their drivers were independent contractors. Taxi drivers are more complicated.
Remember it's about control. A true independent contractor has to have much more freedom in controlling how they work. Like I mentioned, somebody who's driving 'for' Uber can actually decide his or her own hours, work with competing dispatch companies, decide on what individual fares to accept or not accept with the only penalty being not getting paid for that individual job.
If the pizza driver isn't being allowed to also deliver competitor's pizzas or even pull jobs for Uber during slow periods they aren't a contractor.
Sorry, but Dyson Spheres can also be constructed in pieces. Lots of little banks of photocells connected by strong threads.
Uh, what part of 'act of constructing it' implies that I wouldn't think that it'd be constructed in pieces? As for the photocells - that's the 'little more than foil'.
Also, a topopolis wouldn't be a dyson sphere, though it could be part of one. Mobile space habitats, especially .1c ones traveling between systems wouldn't be a dyson sphere either. Though yes, the ship would be their home, as my initial post of 'so adapted to space' would imply. I just didn't want to restrict them to '1' ship.
We are a long way from being able to build such a thing, and our obstacles aren't mainly in sources of power (well, electric power).
That is so true, but there's time for significant evolution between solar systems if you're looking at .001c or so for velocities.
For every physically possible drive system?
As long as they're still stuck using reaction drive systems and such. If FTL/non-reaction drives are physically possible it changes some assumptions about the Fermi equations rather radically.
Of course there is the unsettling fact that humanity just hasn't invented the technology to allow us to easedrop on other folks messaging.
We're working on developing it, but I'm thinking that it might also end up being a giga-project such as a huge interferometer antenna array located in orbit around the sun, giving an effective antenna size measured in AUs.
I think the problem here is that infrared doesn't penetrate our atmosphere that well, there's too much 'noise', and how do you tell the difference between a dyson sphere and a brown dwarf?
Unless we caught them in the act of constructing it we'd need to both spot the signature and recognize that it's unusual(we barely know what's usual as is), and figure out WHY it's unusual.
For that matter, even the lightest of dyson spheres, which would consist mostly of panels that are little more than foil, elicit comments of 'You need HOW many planets worth of mass?"
Next, pick a nice, large asteroid and give it a nudge in just the right way.
It's actually mostly too late for this. We can pick up drive emissions from beyond Pluto.
Either that or they're using high-compression spread-spectrum data streams and it's all just slightly different noise underneath the noise.
Yep, that's what I meant with digital technology making us quieter. We're actually transmitting more, but generally at lower power levels, over wider chuncks of spectrum, and using technology where if you don't know the pattern to look for looks a lot like noise. And we're not even doing it for secrecy - but because it allows you to move more bits with less power, at least at the ranges we want.
Even if Aliens haven't moved past the EM spectrum for data transmission, such technologies means that we wouldn't 'hear' them unless we both knew the intended protocol and it was aimed at us.
Even at our brightest we're not even a rounding error against the sun at interstellar distances. Dyson Spheres may be impractical/impossible, and yes, I'm talking about the 'soft core' types. Besides, we'd need to somehow detect a non-radiating body then figure out that it SHOULD be radiating. Or more likely finding a body radiating in infra-red that should be radiating visible light.
We can barely detect planets at this point, so planetary engineering is going to be a long shot. Hell, we don't even have good theories for determining how solar systems were formed in order to look for artificial changes. Because of that, the 'best' way to detect planetary engineering would be unexpected change over time - which like my 'eyeblink' comment for radio, we haven't been able to detect planets long enough to really be looking for said artificial changes.
I suppose we could be looking for lasers being targeted at us as well, but that's an even smaller chunk of time for us to be able to detect that, and again, you're looking at the alien species needing to take very deliberate action to transmit to us, dedicating the equivalent of several major power plants to the effort.
It may also be possible that we are part of a nature preserve, or that there are more than enough planets with similar conditions to inhabit, to not have to displace or destroy an entire culture.
I've been told off for proposing the nature preserve idea. Various arguments were that the aliens would need a 'huge fleet' to stop colonization efforts from reaching our system, that we'd notice our neighboring systems are inhabited, etc...
They didn't have a good response to my point that our radio reception efforts have been primitive enough that in order to 'hear' Alpha Centari the aliens would need to deliberately transmit an easy to intercept radio signal at us using several GW of power using the best dish technology we have.
The Earth, at it's loudest(digital technology is actually making us 'quieter' on the interstellar scene), wouldn't be 'heard' by the Arecibo Observatory at distances over a light year.
In short, I don't see an alien civilization beaming GW level signals at prospective systems more or less continously for millions of years in the vague hope that we'll notice and answer back. Meanwhile, we've been able to 'listen' for the equivalent of not even an eyeblink.
Eh, whatever. My other pet theories are that by the time a civilization is capable of colonizing other solar systems it's either become too insular to want to bother(you give up a LOT going to another solar system), or so adopted to space that colonizing planets is no longer a thing. Which makes 'nature preserve' for potentially life-bearing planets, cradles for new civilizations, not an expensive strategy at all.
I'd argue that that's a bad deal, and not really a true sharing of costs.
Yeah, I got called away and hit submit before I could make WAGs for more consumables like brakes, insurance*, and what not. Hell, even my $15k worth of depreciation estimate is just that.
Another factor to consider is that the federal reimbursement rate is deliberately fudged a bit towards 'worst case' vs average or median. I think they figure on you having a semi-expensive 20mpg truck paying 'next to airport' rates for gasoline.
Still, even if you have a Tesla Model-S** that you somehow got for free so your fuel&maintenance costs are insignficant, $.56 per mile is only $22.40/hour figuring on an average of 40mph, or about $47k/year. Which is lousy when you figure that you have to pay both sides of FICA on it in addition to the other self-employment taxes, other business expenses, health insurance, etc... Note for others: Any job where you'd be an 'independent contractor', divide the reimbursement by 2 to make it equivalent to a salary/hourly wage job.
*Commercial insurance is more expensive on the idea that you're driving more.
**There is/was a Uber driver who uses his Model-S for ridesharing, read a blurb about him a couple months ago. Extra vehicle expense is balanced against lower fuel cost, insurance is apparently reasonable(the car has excellent safety characteristics), and generates extremely positive reviews from readers.
Are you even including anything more than fuel, or are you assuming that cars don't have any other consumables and don't lose value from miles driven?
It has to be for fuel alone. Maybe oil as well. .13 .20 .01
$4/gallon
40mpg = $.10/mile
30mpg =
20mpg =
Oil change $100@10k =
$15k car depreciation@5 years@15k miles/year = $.20
That's funny, but going by the histories of murderers and serial killers there's generally signs long before they actually kill somebody.
Now it's not 100% by any means, but if you can blackball 90% of cabby murderers before they get around to actually killing you'd make driving a taxi safer than being a cop(for example).
Some professions have a closed number. Think doctors or notaries for instance. Do you find that anticompetitive?
Yes, and the point is?
If there's too many taxis to the point nobody can make money they'll go out of business until the number is at a sustainable level, with only the most efficient surviving.
Same with doctors, really. Increase the number of doctors and availability would increase even as you need to work them fewer hours.
True, and calling the drivers self-employed, which is also a lie that moves more liability to the drivers and in the US frees uber of having to pay benefits etc...
Can you provide any proof that the drivers are actually employees of Uber? To my knowledge they don't meet the IRS guidelines to be considered employees. Note: There may be exceptions for their explicit 'for hire' cars where Uber owns the vehicle in question. Heck, I think it was in a previous thread here that I read about an Uber driver talking about how he was also signing up to get leads/customers through Lyft and Sidecar.
So, going from what IRS says:
Facts that provide evidence of the degree of control and independence fall into three categories:
Behavioral: Does the company control or have the right to control what the worker does and how the worker does his or her job?
Financial: Are the business aspects of the worker’s job controlled by the payer? (these include things like how worker is paid, whether expenses are reimbursed, who provides tools/supplies, etc.)
Type of Relationship: Are there written contracts or employee type benefits (i.e. pension plan, insurance, vacation pay, etc.)? Will the relationship continue and is the work performed a key aspect of the business?
Behavioral: Uber does have conduct guidelines and will drop you if your customer satisfaction rate is too low. However, they do not set hours or even whether any given driver will take a given ride request.
Financial: Uber takes a cut of any ride for providing it's service, but doesn't provide the car, only provides limited insurance coverage, doesn't pay an hourly rate, has the driver/operator worry about maintenance and such.
Type of relationship: No employee type benefits, written contract. Driver can drop uber and work with other services at any time, and of course Uber isn't dependent upon any one driver. Heck, the drivers can work with multiple such services at the exact same time if they chose to do the work.
My non-expert opinion: Uber has a strong case that the drivers are independent contractors, not employees. Signs of this are no hourly wages, drivers must provide their own licenses, insurance, and equipment, set their own hours, can decide whether to take any one job or not, and are not tied to Uber for providing driving services.
That's where an extra rider would be handy. It wouldn't be bad if I simply paid an extra 5 cents or so per mile for my 'commercial' driving if I only do Uber during the highest demand periods when Uber jacks up the rates.