Methodology

What this site does

driver-reviews.com does not test drive cars. It builds cost models for vehicles used in rideshare and delivery driving from public data — EPA fuel economy ratings, published maintenance estimates, used-vehicle price guides, and current fuel and electricity prices — and it publishes the arithmetic that turns that data into per-mile costs, weekly take-home pay, and break-even mileage. Anywhere this site states a number, that number can be traced back to a formula on this page and a source in the table below.

The four calculators

Rideshare profit

Turns a gross weekly fare number into a net one by subtracting the costs a driving app never shows.

• energyWeekly = milesWeekly × energyCostPerMile
• variableWeekly = milesWeekly × (maintenancePerMile + depreciationPerMile)
• fixedWeekly = (insuranceMonthly + loanPaymentMonthly + miscMonthly) × 12 / 52
• netWeekly = grossWeekly − energyWeekly − variableWeekly − fixedWeekly
• netMonthly = netWeekly × 52 / 12
• netHourly = netWeekly / hoursWeekly (zero if no hours are entered)

grossWeekly, milesWeekly and hoursWeekly are typed in by the driver. energyCostPerMile, maintenancePerMile and depreciationPerMile come from the selected vehicle's record, described below. insuranceMonthly, loanPaymentMonthly and miscMonthly are typed in, since they depend on a driver's own policy, loan and habits far more than on the vehicle. No self-employment tax is subtracted; the result is pre-tax profit.

Cost per mile

Adds up every ownership cost and divides each one across miles driven.

• totalMiles = annualMiles × years
• depreciation = (purchasePrice − resaleValue) / totalMiles
• energy = energyCostPerMile
• insurance = insuranceAnnual / annualMiles
• maintenance = maintenanceAnnual / annualMiles
• tires = tiresAnnual / annualMiles
• registration = registrationAnnual / annualMiles
• total = the sum of the six lines above

purchasePrice, resaleValue, years and annualMiles describe one ownership scenario, edited by the reader. The four annual cost fields are entered as yearly figures and divided by annual miles rather than by total miles, since each field ties to a specific year of ownership, not the whole span. The total is also compared against the current IRS standard mileage rate — see below.

Break-even

Compares two vehicles' total cost as a function of miles driven and finds where the lines cross.

• cheaperUpfront = whichever of the two prices is lower
• savingsPerMile = costPerMileB − costPerMileA
• priceGap = priceA − priceB
• miles = priceGap / savingsPerMile, when that value is positive and finite
• years = miles / annualMiles

If savingsPerMile is zero, or the resulting mileage is negative or infinite, there is no break-even: one car is cheaper on both counts, or the two are identical, and the page says so instead of returning a number. costPerMileA and costPerMileB are the totals from the cost-per-mile formula above, computed automatically for each selected vehicle rather than typed in twice.

Payback period

How many weeks of net earnings it takes to recover what a car cost to acquire.

• weeks = (purchasePrice + upfrontCosts) / netWeekly
• months = weeks × 12 / 52

If netWeekly is zero or negative, payback never happens under those conditions and the page reports that directly rather than dividing by zero. netWeekly is meant to be the output of the rideshare profit calculator above, not a gross fare figure — feeding gross earnings in here understates the true payback period substantially.

Where the per-mile figures come from

Two formulas — energy cost per mile, and the two figures baked into each vehicle's record — feed all four calculators above, so getting them right matters more than any single tool.

• Energy cost per mile. A gas or hybrid vehicle uses fuelCostPerMile = fuelPrice / mpgCombined. A battery-electric vehicle uses evCostPerMile = (kwhPer100mi / 100) × pricePerKwh. The calculator picks whichever formula applies to the selected vehicle's powertrain automatically; a driver never has to know which one is running.
• Depreciation per mile. depreciationPerMile = (usedPriceHigh − usedPriceLow) / (yearSpan × 15,000), where yearSpan is the width of that vehicle's recorded model-year window (for example, a 2018–2024 model has a six-year span) and 15,000 is an assumed average annual mileage. The denominator scales with the width of the year window on purpose: the used-price spread for a model sold across seven model years is naturally wider than one sold across two, simply because more calendar time and more miles separate the low end of the range from the high end. Dividing by a fixed mileage regardless of that window would have made the depreciation figure an artefact of how many model years we happened to include for a given car, rather than a genuine measure of how fast value is lost per mile — and it would have made the ten vehicle-to-vehicle comparisons on this site meaningless, since a wide-window car and a narrow-window car would not be measured on the same basis.
• Maintenance per mile. maintenancePerMile = maintenancePerYear / 15,000. The same 15,000-mile year is used here as in the depreciation formula, because the published annual maintenance estimates this site draws on are themselves built around a roughly average year of driving — dividing by a different mileage would mismatch the assumption baked into the source figure, not correct for it.

Every vehicle on this site is recorded from a single base trim — the least expensive configuration Uber would still consider eligible for the relevant tier — not an average across trims. Mixing trims would blend a stripped-down price with a loaded one's fuel economy, so each vehicle's page states the specific model-year window (for example "2018–2024") that its used-price, maintenance and fuel-economy figures were drawn from, and that window is what yearSpan above refers to.

Monthly to weekly

Insurance, a car payment, and miscellaneous monthly costs are converted to a weekly figure by multiplying by 12 and dividing by 52 — monthly × 12 / 52 — rather than dividing by four. A year has 52.14 weeks, not 48; dividing a monthly cost by four assumes every month is exactly four weeks long, which understates the true weekly share by roughly 8% and would make net weekly pay look higher than it really is. Multiplying by the actual number of months in a year and dividing by the actual number of weeks avoids that error. The same conversion runs in reverse — weekly × 52 / 12 — wherever a weekly figure is turned back into a monthly one, such as net monthly pay or the payback period in months.

The IRS standard mileage rate

The cost-per-mile calculator compares a vehicle's modeled cost per mile against the IRS standard mileage rate, the flat deduction rate the IRS publishes each year for business use of a personal vehicle. That rate changed mid-year in 2026: 72.5¢ per mile from January 1 through June 30, and 76¢ per mile from July 1, 2026 onward. The calculator shows the current, post-July rate. This distinction matters for anyone using this figure on an actual tax return: which rate applies depends on when the miles were driven, not on when the return is filed, and a driver who drove for part of the year before the change and part after should apply each rate to the miles driven in that half of the year rather than applying one rate to the whole year. This site is not a substitute for tax advice — see the IRS's own page on the standard mileage rates for the authoritative figures and how to apply them.

The rideshare-profit calculator's default annual-mileage assumption, where one is needed, is 30,000 miles a year, a rough figure for a full-time rideshare or delivery driver rather than a claim about any individual driver's actual mileage.

Sources

Sources are checked per vehicle rather than once for the whole site; each vehicle's own page links the specific fuel-economy, maintenance, price and Uber-eligibility sources used for that vehicle.

What these numbers are not

These are model-based estimates, not measured results from test drives. Nobody at this site has driven any of these vehicles for rideshare or delivery work, tracked a real fuel bill, or logged an actual repair invoice. Every figure is derived from published data and a fixed formula, and a formula cannot capture a specific driver's traffic, climate, driving style, insurance history, or luck with any individual car. Your own costs will differ from what a calculator on this site shows, sometimes by a wide margin — treat these numbers as a starting point for comparison between vehicles, not as a prediction of what any one car will cost any one driver.

Data and constants on this page were last checked on 2026-08-27.