Rails inherits subclass - ruby-on-rails

Question

I have this three classes user, driver, company.
every company or driver belongs a user. The models look like
class Company < User
has_many :driver
end
class Driver < User
end
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
enum role: [:admin, :support, :B2B , :B2C]
end
and the database looks like
class CreateUsers < ActiveRecord::Migration
def change
create_table :users do |t|
t.string :email
t.timestamps null: false
end
end
end
class CreateCompanies < ActiveRecord::Migration
def change
create_table :companies do |t|
t.string :comp_name
t.string :first_name_counterpart
t.string :last_name_counterpart
t.string :iban_nr
t.string :bic
t.string :email_counterpart
t.string :addresse
t.string :city
t.string :zip
t.references :user
t.timestamps null: false
end
end
end
class CreateDrivers < ActiveRecord::Migration
def change
create_table :drivers do |t|
t.string :first_name
t.string :last_name
t.date :birthday
t.integer :sex
t.integer :dpi
t.integer :score
t.references :user
t.timestamps null: false
end
end
end
Why can't I create a Driver-instance. For example, if I try d = Driver.new, I get a user-instance.d = Driver.new
=> #<Driver id: nil, email: nil, created_at: nil, updated_at: nil>

Answer 1

This is how Rails guesses the table name from the model classes. Quoting from the ActiveRecord docs for table_name:
Guesses the table name (in forced lower-case) based on the name of the class in the inheritance hierarchy descending directly from ActiveRecord::Base. So if the hierarchy looks like: Reply < Message < ActiveRecord::Base, then Message is used to guess the table name even when called on Reply.
You should be able to force the proper table name by the table_name= setter, e.g.:
class Driver < User
self.table_name = "drivers"
end
On the other hand, I am also not sure that your approach (with such inheritance) will not cause problems somewhere else.

Answer 2

If you have models with inheritance like you do:
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
enum role: [:admin, :support, :B2B , :B2C]
end
class Company < User
has_many :driver
end
class Driver < User
end
rails infers that you are after Single Table Inheritance (STI) and expects there is just a base table users with a column type which stores the records of User, Company and Driver with actual class name (ex: Company or Driver etc).
If you would rather want to have separate tables users, companies and drivers because each of those tables have different set of columns, and the only reason why you are put inheritance in place is to share some common functionality, then you should extract the common functionality into modules and mix them into those models (by just inheriting from ActiveRecord::Base.
rails, through active_support provides whats called concerns to extract the common functionality into modules and mix them intuitively.
You could probably get away with inheritance and still have these models point to separate tables with the declaration of self.table_name = "table_name". But it is not a good idea, as it goes around the rails conventions and may cause problems down the lane.
Refer to ActiveRecord::Inheritance and ActiveSupport::Concern for more info.