The deal is probably similar to the way an airline buys planes. E.g consider when Ryanair bought 200 737s for $22Bn [1] which is about the same in it's entire market cap.
An order like this is probably:
* For a delivery spread over 10+ years
* The vehicles will almost certainly be leased/finance
* Each vehicle will probably assume a 5+ year working life and have a residual of about perhaps 25% of list after 5 years given the likely mileage
* There will be a big initial discount given the size of the order
So assume each car, is $100k new, but given an order that size is perhaps a 40% discount. So that's a $60k sale. After 5 years, the car is perhaps worth 20k.
So the unit economics are that each car costs (before financing costs) 40k over 5 years, or $8k a year. This is a relatively low cost given the number of rides it can take and the cost of the driver who will be driving it.
On that basis is doesn't sound that expensive.
[1] http://corporate.ryanair.com/news/news/14908-ryanair-places-...
An order like this is probably:
* For a delivery spread over 10+ years
* The vehicles will almost certainly be leased/finance
* Each vehicle will probably assume a 5+ year working life and have a residual of about perhaps 25% of list after 5 years given the likely mileage
* There will be a big initial discount given the size of the order
So assume each car, is $100k new, but given an order that size is perhaps a 40% discount. So that's a $60k sale. After 5 years, the car is perhaps worth 20k.
So the unit economics are that each car costs (before financing costs) 40k over 5 years, or $8k a year. This is a relatively low cost given the number of rides it can take and the cost of the driver who will be driving it.
On that basis is doesn't sound that expensive.
[1] http://corporate.ryanair.com/news/news/14908-ryanair-places-...