Well that all depends on what you classify as profitable? Also whoever wrote that piece has never taken a class in accounting. There's something known as usefu

Well that all depends on what you classify as profitable? Also whoever wrote that piece has never taken a class in accounting. There's something known as useful life of an asset.( You can write off a lot of expenses and do other clever accounting tricks that I'll never post on a public forum) They also bought one of the safest vehicles. Wait until they ( insurance companies) start charging higher rates of insurance for having a less safe vehicle AKA not newer model. They also bought the same vehicle so they can actually use scale for buying parts and services to maintain it. They also just bought a mapping fleet because wherever it goes it will take images similar to Google Street View. Uber could build its own map service. All of this reduces costs on the back end. In terms of operating costs, they can buy fuel at scale and possibly hedge which makes it incredibly cheap, talking about 20-40% cheaper than anyone else. There also was nothing mentioned about prices increasing. The fact of the matter is that prices will increase. If that's the case they can easily make that money back over 5 years. These are some thing that was not mentioned in the calculations you referenced.