Uber & Revel have announced a strategic partnership on EV charging in exchange for financial support and charging discounts. We predict Revel will close its NYC rideshare service in near future
What a hard hitting article and prescient opinion piece that I, too, believe will come to fruition. When Revel first came out with W-2 driver pay AND benefits something smelled fishy because those costs just seemed to high to perpetuate to eke out a profit. My guess then was investor money was funding this venture until maaaaybe there might be some scale to overcome their costs on the rideshare side. Nevertheless, if Revel is going to end those rideshare operations, they must give a WARN notice. WARN, the New York State Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, requires that companies with at least 50 full-time employees file a notice of a mass layoff or a closing 90 days in advance. See what happens but this will be more devastating than Juno in my opinion. With Juno you had drivers still driving for Uber and Lyft as independent contractors and they merely lost their multi-hundred dollar investment. If Revel lays off hundreds of drivers they will be left scrambling to secure rentals all at the same time (this causing a temporary bump in rental rates). Those drivers would be wise to leave now and find those rentals before they’re in competition with their fellow Revel drivers for the same vehicles. It’s also possible Revel gets into the EV rental business but at terms much less favorable to the current drivers they have on payroll and, of course, with no payroll benefits at all. Revel can also sell their EV vehicles and keep the FHV license to lease thereby getting out of the business of fleet management. It’ll be interesting to see what unfolds.
What a hard hitting article and prescient opinion piece that I, too, believe will come to fruition. When Revel first came out with W-2 driver pay AND benefits something smelled fishy because those costs just seemed to high to perpetuate to eke out a profit. My guess then was investor money was funding this venture until maaaaybe there might be some scale to overcome their costs on the rideshare side. Nevertheless, if Revel is going to end those rideshare operations, they must give a WARN notice. WARN, the New York State Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, requires that companies with at least 50 full-time employees file a notice of a mass layoff or a closing 90 days in advance. See what happens but this will be more devastating than Juno in my opinion. With Juno you had drivers still driving for Uber and Lyft as independent contractors and they merely lost their multi-hundred dollar investment. If Revel lays off hundreds of drivers they will be left scrambling to secure rentals all at the same time (this causing a temporary bump in rental rates). Those drivers would be wise to leave now and find those rentals before they’re in competition with their fellow Revel drivers for the same vehicles. It’s also possible Revel gets into the EV rental business but at terms much less favorable to the current drivers they have on payroll and, of course, with no payroll benefits at all. Revel can also sell their EV vehicles and keep the FHV license to lease thereby getting out of the business of fleet management. It’ll be interesting to see what unfolds.