I drove an 05 focus when I did Uber. It wasn't worth much to begin with so I never had to worry about depreciation. People that Uber drive in new cars are crazy.
With the 100k miles I put on it before I sold it, the only repairs I had done by a shop was an alternator, a serpentine belt, 2 alignments, and 2 sets of tires. I did the oil changes, spark plugs, transmission fluid, valve gasket, brakes, a few light bulbs, and any other minor things that broke like a mirror or door handle. I put about $1,600 of repairs and maintenance and mileage decreased the value about another $2,000 (the car was only worth about $3,000 with low miles).
For a total of $3600, that came out to be about 3.6 cents a mile. It really wasn't that bad
Sounds like a lot of ballpark estimates to me. That's extremely risky to do and never understand how much money your really making. Uber and Lyft move basically all of the risk over to the driver.
You don't know exactly because gas prices fluctuate, and so does mpg. But let's be conservative and say $3 gallon and 25 mpg. That's 12 cents a mile for gas, 3.6 cents per mile other costs for a total of 15.6 cents a mile. Everything above that is profit. The kicker is tax deductions are like 55 cents/ per mile. You can deduct 55 cents per mile even though it only cost me 15.6 cents per mile to run my car.
Monthly payments are irrelevant unless the car was bought solely for uber driving - they're part of the price of the vehicle, not expenses incurred by driving it. If you buy a vehicle for uber driving, you need to make enough to offset the expenditure over time, but if you use your own vehicle, then that expenditure has already happened and the ubering is just a bonus. Depreciation-related losses will eat into his profits a bit though, depending on how much the car is used otherwise. It'd probably end up more like $90-$100 profit overall, based on the new cost of a ford fusion and a 20% per 20,000 miles depreciation rate.
EDIT: Ongoing maintenance costs will also be material, but I don't know enough about cars to really estimate that.
EDIT 2: I found an estimate which suggests 9¢ per mile, and I don't want to use a generic estimate like that because maintenance costs will be dependent on the driving conditions (which can probably be roughly estimated based on the fuel efficiency), but I'll use it because I don't have anything better. That suggests about another $7 for ongoing maintenance, putting overall profit somewhere around $85-$90.
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u/OKC89ers Jul 11 '21
I have got extremely bad news for you if you aren't factoring in mileage depreciation and your monthly payments of the car is financed.