MaaS companies have to charge enough to cover their costs. Most of the costs of owning a car are - not surprisingly - the cost of driving it around. About 80% of the total cost of car ownership for the typical driver are the costs that are generated by driving. Depreciation, mostly. If a car wears out after 200K miles (or whatever the number), then that car needs to be replaced every 200K miles - whether it’s privately owned or being driven as a taxi.
Al, in reality, I would say every taxi we had (mostly Chevy Luminas and Ford vans back in the day) went well over 500,000 miles with the maintenance program we installed. If the cars were not involved in wrecks (I don’t know a cab company anywhere with un-totaled cars) they will last through focused attention to tires, batteries, plugs, belts, and oil changes, filter changes, quarter panel repair, etc.
200 miles plus per 12-hour shift = 400 miles plus per day. (My average as a Supervisor was 225-250 miles per 12-hour shift.)
Most taxis were depreciated over 5 years in our fleet.
Do the math. Taxi companies look at 200,000 miles as “break in” miles.
Meanwhile, back at the $TSLA Cult compound, things have gotten very frosty with people who once owned Teslas, or, who aspired to own one. Buried in the thread is news about who might be coming back to Twitter, which means if he does, Musk will tie him around his neck as his own personal albatross. If he does, I’m outta there for good and will head to post.news as well as hundreds of thousands of others.