How to Calculate Real Profitability per TVDE Vehicle

Imagine you have three vehicles. At the end of the month, you add everything up and land on €4,200 net. Looks good. But what that total doesn't tell you is that one car made €2,800, another made €1,800, and the third made €–400. You're paying for that car to be on the road.

Without per-vehicle profitability, you're running your business blind.

Why most operators don't know what they earn per car

The problem starts with the platforms. Uber and Bolt send data in a single CSV per period — and that CSV mixes trips from all your vehicles. To calculate how much each car made, you'd need to filter, group, and total manually. In most operations, that never happens.

The result is gut-feel management: "I think the CC-33 hasn't been doing as well", "I reckon the BB-22 driver is making fewer trips". Impressions, not numbers.

Gross revenue vs. net revenue per vehicle

The first step is understanding the difference between what the passenger paid and what ended up in your pocket.

• Gross revenue: the total value of trips for that vehicle (what the passenger paid)
• Platform commission: what Uber or Bolt keeps (typically 20–25%)
• Net platform revenue: what you actually received from the platforms
• Operator net revenue: net platform revenue minus what you paid the driver

Costs to account for per TVDE vehicle

To calculate real profitability, you need to assign the following costs to each vehicle:

Variable costs (depend on trips)

• Fuel — the largest variable cost; depends on km driven and fuel consumption
• Platform commission — already deducted from net revenue, but important to track
• Driver payment — percentage or fixed amount (see how to calculate)

Fixed costs (independent of trips)

• Car insurance — mandatory, with TVDE coverage
• Servicing and maintenance — TVDE cars do high mileage; maintenance is intensive
• Periodic inspection (IPO)
• TVDE licence — assigned to the vehicle
• Depreciation / loan repayment — if the car is on lease or ALD
• Tyres — at TVDE mileage volumes, you replace them 2–3 times a year

Practical example: profitability calculation for 3 vehicles

In this example, the CC-33 is burning €198 per month. Without per-vehicle calculation, that cost is diluted in the total and never becomes visible.

What to do with loss-making vehicles

When you identify a car with a negative or very low margin, you essentially have four options:

1. Reduce costs: renegotiate insurance, optimise routes to reduce fuel, schedule preventive maintenance (cheaper than reactive repairs)
2. Increase revenue: switch platforms, adjust the driver's hours to zones/times with higher surge pricing
3. Renegotiate with the driver: if the car is underperforming, find out whether it's an issue of availability, zone, or motivation
4. Take the car off the road: sometimes the most profitable decision is to stop running a vehicle that costs more than it earns

Recommended analysis frequency

Per-vehicle profitability is not a year-end exercise — it's a monthly analysis, ideally weekly.

• Weekly: gross revenue and fuel costs per vehicle
• Monthly: full analysis including fixed costs and driver payments
• Quarterly: trend review — what improved, what worsened, fleet replacement decisions

The problem is that doing this calculation manually, across multiple vehicles, with data from two platforms, takes hours. It's the kind of work that always gets postponed.