Can you make a living driving for BlaBlaCar?

Long live the knowledge economy?

Uber/Covoiturage/etc will be welcomed by governments as soon as they find a way of taxing the transactions, at which point they will cease to be competitive with Brian Souter’s Megabus etc, but I was curious how things pan out currently for transport entrepreneurs. This guy’s a more-or-less random example – I don’t know him.

Ladders: If Pablo manages to fill the four (!) passenger seats he’s offering for Barcelona-Calais in a Volkswagen Passat at what BlaBlaCar says is the moderate price of 93, he takes 372. (Inspection suggests that if he doesn’t manage to pack them in then he cancels.)

Snakes: Avoiding tolls (“I use mixture of roads (70% Highways, 30% National Roads)”) this apparently costs €201. As a 25-yo “sports journalist” I reckon he’ll do the 1348km non-stop and in rather less than 19h47 on caffeine and sticky buns, but let’s forswear the morgue and subtract two days bed & board – say 35/night at the cheap French motel chains and 20/day grub.

So at the end of the immediate exercise he’s only 61 up.

On that basis if he drove five days out of seven and stayed with his mum for the remainder, he’d accumulate enough to cover depreciation on car and driving pants, as well as the occasional holiday. Maybe that counts as making a living.

However, he’s only (!) advertised 138 trips in the 435 days since he joined, so if he were to really want to live from the open road, then he’d still have a little way to go.

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