These reports always make the same mistake. Namely, they conflate the total cost of car ownership with the differential cost of car ownership. While the TCO may be $0.50/mile, the DCO is usually less, because cars age with time as well as distance, so a car which drives more in a year will have a lower per-mile cost; looked at another way, the first 10000 miles in a year are more expensive than the next 10000. Taking into account that most rideshare drivers would probably prefer to own a car anyway (it's unlikely you'd become an Uber driver if you hate driving) the outlook is not great but it is much less bleak. This is in some ways a case of analysts thinking they know more about people's lives than the people themselves. If it is impossible to live as an Uber driver, how do you explain the people who do it?