{"id":136498,"date":"2019-05-16T16:08:17","date_gmt":"2019-05-16T20:08:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thedetroitbureau.com\/?p=136498"},"modified":"2019-05-16T17:11:03","modified_gmt":"2019-05-16T21:11:03","slug":"all-grossed-out-and-nowhere-to-hide-ride-hailing-cars-nastiest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/2019\/05\/all-grossed-out-and-nowhere-to-hide-ride-hailing-cars-nastiest\/","title":{"rendered":"All Grossed Out and Nowhere to Hide: Ride-Hailing Cars Nastiest"},"content":{"rendered":"
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There were more than 6 million germs in the ride-hailing vehicles tested by NetQuote.com.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Rental cars are often considered almost throw away items. We\u2019ve all heard the old axiom: People will do things in a rental car that they won\u2019t do in their own. According to new testing, that\u2019s not true: ride-hailing vehicles \u2013 typically owned by the driver \u2013 are the grossest thing on four wheels.<\/p>\n

Insurance aggregator Netquote recently conducted tests to see just how nasty some modes of transport can be, specifically, taxi cabs, rental cars and ride-hailing cars. While many would have put money on the taxi being the most disgusting, those vehicles are subject to rules, including cleanliness.<\/p>\n

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Plug In With a Free Subscription!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

What vehicles aren\u2019t? Yup. Ride-hailing vehicles.<\/p>\n

Netquote swabbed the seatbelt, door handle and window buttons of three randomly picked taxis and three ride-hailing vehicles, and did the same to the steering wheel, gearshift and seatbelt of three rental cars \u2014 the touch points are different on a rental drive than on a hailed ride. The samples were sent to a lab for testing, the results were provided as colony-forming unit numbers, or CFU.<\/p>\n

(Ride-hailing\u00a0services don’t cut traffic, they add to it. <\/em>Click Here<\/a><\/span>\u00a0for the story.)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

After getting the results back, the last two letters may be what you utter before getting into an Uber, Lyft or Waymo anytime soon.<\/p>\n

The ride-hailing vehicles came back with more than 6 million CFU\/sq. in. while the rental car showed up with about 2.5 million CFU\/sq. in. and the taxi was shockingly clean compared to the others at 27,000 CFU\/sq. in.<\/p>\n

What does this mean in real terms? Well, a typical bathroom toilet seat would have around 171 CFU\/sq. in. A coffeemaker is pretty nasty at 32,000 CFU\/sq. in., but it\u2019s the toothbrush holder that takes the cake at more than 2 million CFU\/sq. in. Not all of the found germs are bad for you, but the more there are, the bigger the likelihood that some might be downright nasty for your health.<\/p>\n

(<\/em>Click Here<\/a>\u00a0for details about\u00a0Lyft\u2019s IPO depending on an autonomous future.<\/em><\/strong>)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The three rental cars yielded CFU levels of more than 1 million, both on steering wheels and gear levers. Seatbelts were nearly toilet clean in comparison, with just 403 CFU\/sq. in. It goes from bad to unbelievably gross when ride-hailing vehicles are involved, starting with an average of 5 million CFU\/sq. in. on the window controls and more than 1 million on seatbelts, with the door handles comparably clean at 1,810 CFU\/sq. in. on average.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also important to note that the presence of germs doesn\u2019t necessarily equate to a dangerous situation, but the fact that they are there and in large numbers increases the odds of something \u2014 unpleasant.<\/p>\n

(To check out more about Waymo\u2019s plans to build driverless vehicles in Detroit,\u00a0<\/em>Click Here<\/a><\/span>.)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

As far as bacteria type breakdowns, 50% of the germs found in rental cars were gram-positive cocci and 50% were gram-negative rods. Taxis yielded 65% gram-positive cocci, 29% gram-negative rods, and 5% yeast. Ride-hailing vehicles hosted the most equal distribution of germs: 34% bacilli, 33% gram-negative rods, 16.5% gram-positive rods, and 16.5% yeast. So what to do? Wipe down those vehicles and bring hand sanitizer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rental cars are often considered almost throw away items. We\u2019ve all heard the old axiom: People will do things in a rental car that they won\u2019t do in their own. According to new testing, that\u2019s not true: ride-hailing vehicles \u2013 typically owned by the driver \u2013 are the grossest thing on four wheels. Find out more at TheDetroitBureau.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4389,"featured_media":136499,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7,8,5,14,12],"tags":[],"make":[],"post-state":[],"category_old":[150,151,123,133,131,132,129,124,136,137,148,128,288],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136498"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4389"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136498\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/136499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136498"},{"taxonomy":"make","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/make?post=136498"},{"taxonomy":"post-state","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post-state?post=136498"},{"taxonomy":"category_old","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/category_old?post=136498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}