An Uber driver picked up a passenger at Newark Liberty International Airport for a run into Manhattan. About 35 minutes, $65 on the app. The passenger tipped $32.
Then, at the curb, he asked whether the driver would take his car to Miami.
The driver posted the account to r/uberdrivers on June 10 under the username @Budget-Abalone2057, where it drew more than 1,900 upvotes and close to 500 comments. The passenger was relocating, he wrote, and wanted to move both his car and some of his belongings south without shipping either one.
They worked out terms in the driveway. The trip would take about 20 hours. The driver asked how he was supposed to get home. “He would pay me $1500 plus fly me back to Newark airport,” he wrote. They settled on a Friday 5 a.m. pickup and a Sunday night flight out of Miami.
Uber is not his main job. He has a salaried 9-to-5 and drives on the side.
The driver never asked what the car was. He showed up at the apartment building at 5 a.m. and was handed the keys to a new Mercedes GLS, plus $750, half the fee, and another $300 for gas.
Photo credit: dominik hofbauer/Unsplash
The route down is I-95, roughly 1,288 miles. Somewhere in Georgia, by his account, officers stopped him at a checkpoint and searched the vehicle.
“I mean, I’m 26 years old guy stopped at a checkpoint in $150,000 car with New York plates not registered under my name headed to Miami,” he wrote when another user pressed him on it. “How much more suspicious can you get?”
He delivered the car to a mansion in Miami and called the owner, who was still in New York. The remaining $750 and the return ticket came through. He paid for his own hotel and stayed the weekend.
Then he asked the subreddit whether they would have taken the job.
Plenty said yes immediately, citing half the money up front and zero wear on their own vehicles. Others ran the numbers from the passenger’s side and could not make them work. “This doesn’t even make any sense because transporting a vehicle is about $1000 and it doesn’t need to be driven,” one user wrote. The driver’s reply? “Tell him that.”
A smaller group suggested the driver had used him to move something other than furniture. Nothing in the post supports that, and the Georgia search turned up nothing.
The math is closer than the skeptics allowed. Shipping a car from New York to Miami on an open carrier runs roughly $1,100 to $1,700 depending on the season and vehicle, and June sits near the low end. The passenger paid $1,500 plus gas plus airfare and added 1,288 miles to the odometer of a new SUV.
The carrier quote does not cover the belongings. Auto transport companies generally cap personal items left in the vehicle at around 100 pounds. Driveaway services, where a hired driver takes the car on its own wheels, have no such limit, which is a large part of why the industry exists. Professional driveaway service on a trip that length runs about 55 to 80 cents a mile, so a licensed company would have quoted somewhere near $700 to $1,000. What the passenger bought with the difference was not having to vet anybody.
Nobody in the thread settled the insurance question. Personal auto policies generally extend liability to permissive users, meaning people you lend the car to. They also generally exclude business and commercial use. GEICO’s own guidance says personal auto policies do not cover business, delivery, or rideshare activity. A paid driver on a 1,288-mile relocation is not a friend borrowing the car for an afternoon, and an insurer looking for grounds to deny a claim would not have to work hard for them.
The driver came out of it with $1,500, a weekend in Miami, and a hotel bill he covered himself.
“Bro $13 mil house was crazy I should’ve asked for $2500 lol,” he wrote.
