Comparative Study Between Taxi and Uber Platforms in the Deployment of Electric Vehicles

Abstract

Uber-like platforms provide important opportunities to leverage idle vehicle capacity to meet urban mobility needs and reduce the costs of urban transportation. Most existing systems have relied on gasoline and diesel vehicles. At the same time, the development of electric vehicles has created opportunities to lower operating costs and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from urban transportation. In this talk we present two mathematical models for traditional taxi and emerging Uber platforms, respectively, to derive the closed-form solutions that maximize the respective platform’s operating profit. Given that electric vehicles are cheaper to operate but more expensive to acquire than gasoline vehicles, sensitivity analysis is also performed to find out which fuel type vehicle is more suitable for each platform under various vehicle setting scenarios.