Where these numbers come from

Cybercab Fleet Operator answers one question: if you bought a self-driving taxi and ran it as a business in your town for ninety days, what would happen to your bank account? It is a planning tool, not a prediction, and this page is the whole answer to "says who?"

Every figure below was read out of the numbers the game actually runs on, or out of the live research behind each city. None of it was typed in by hand, which is the only way a page like this stays true after the thing it describes changes.

Built 2026-09-14 from the register in this copy of the game and from the live city research. The page re-checks both when you open it, and says so below if either has moved on.

The honest split

The model runs on 184 numbers. Here is exactly how many of them anybody else can vouch for.

Three quarters of it is ours. That is not a confession, it is the shape of the subject. Nobody has ever run a privately owned robotaxi, so there is no trade body publishing what one earns, what it costs to insure or how often it gets stuck. The alternative to an estimate here is not a fact — it is silence.

What we can promise instead is that every estimate is labeled as one, carries its reasoning, and can be replaced by yours. 144 of the 184 are editable inside the game, and changing one changes the model immediately.

A season in a metro runs on 114 of these; a season in a small town runs on all 184, because a town’s own geography — its radius, how far a fare goes, how fast the traffic moves — is on the list too. The register audits itself every time it loads: a published figure that carries no dated document, arithmetic with no working shown, or an estimate with no reasoning is a failure. It currently reports 0 failures.

What the 184 numbers are about

The same figures as the bar above, grouped by what they describe.

The car itself is the best-documented thing in the subject and none of it is ours: battery, efficiency, motor, weight and seats come off one EPA certificate. The permit rules come off one Nevada Transportation Authority order. Those are also the two groups you cannot edit, because a certificate is not local knowledge.

How a town gets researched

21 towns and cities have been researched so far, and the same machine does every one of them. It runs in three passes, and the order matters.

Anything the United States government already publishes for every city in the country is taken straight out of the national file. Nobody is asked, nothing is searched for, and there is no page that could be misread.

• Census Bureau — Gazetteer place files, subcounty and county population estimates, and the American Community Survey summary files. 24 files.
• FAA — commercial-service enplanements, and the national airport list. 2 files.
• EIA — the Electric Power Monthly state price tables and Form 861. 3 files.
• NOAA — 1991-2020 monthly climate normals, one file per weather station. 91 files.
• BLS — the May 2024 Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics national and area files for vehicle cleaners, and the area definitions that decide which OES area a town falls in. 3 files.

The town is matched to its row by a code, never by its name — a Census place or county FIPS number, an FAA airport identifier, or a coordinate. Names are how you end up with the wrong Springfield. Across the 21 towns, 879 of the 1,656 researched numbers came out of these files, from 123 distinct downloads shared between every town in a run.

What is still researched is the LOCAL STORY, and it is researched because it is real, published and findable: the utility's time-of-use split (a filed tariff, not a table), public fast-charge prices, the visitor economy, the state's minimum liability statute, the city's own parking schedule, and the named demand generators -- hospitals with their bed counts, colleges with their enrolments, the venue that fills the town. That is the half of a pack no federal file will ever carry, and it is the half worth having: Dover, Tennessee is a town of 1,918 people in the federal files and nothing more, and what makes it interesting is that 84% of its rides are visitors to Fort Donelson National Battlefield.

Every record the model returned as 'sourced' had its cited URL fetched. The page had to load, and the figure had to be in its text within 400 characters of one of the record's own keywords. Anything that failed was demoted to 'estimated' with the failure written into its math.

Across the 21 towns 301 citations were checked. 210 passed. 91 failed and were demoted to labeled estimates, which is 30% of everything the model claimed to have a source for. A figure that loses its citation does not quietly stay a fact.

Where a demoted figure was feeding another one, the second is demoted too and says why. That happened ten times. 59 holes are written down across the six packs — things the research could not establish, recorded rather than papered over.

Re-running the same research used to come back with materially different answers, and those answers drive the whole demand estimate. 5 of them were taken off the model altogether and are now computed from a pinned national survey and measured Census ratios. What judgment remains is asked 5 times and reported as the middle answer with its spread. Across all 63 of those figures the typical gap between the highest and lowest answer is 1.25 times, and the worst is 2.50 times. That is the honest width of the part of this that is judgment.

The cross-check: where we can be caught out, we let ourselves be

The demand estimate is the number everything else hangs off. Where somebody publishes a real trip count for a town, we build ours without looking at theirs and then put the two side by side. Where nobody publishes one, we say so and name the five places we looked.

Of the 21 towns researched: 1 had a published figure we landed close to, 2 had one we did not, 17 have no published figure at all, and 1 is a gap in our own work.

What we know is weak

A methodology page that only lists strengths is marketing. These are the four places where, if this tool is wrong for your town, it is most likely wrong here.

Every number is editable. Change these first.

Open Every number behind this game inside the game, tap any figure, and type your own. It goes into the model straight away and stays in your browser. Nothing is sent anywhere — and if you then put a season on the board, it goes up marked as run on custom numbers, because a season played on different figures is not comparable with one that was not.

These 5 are the ones whose own reasoning admits that a figure you know beats ours:

That list is not hand-picked. It is every editable record whose reasoning contains "most worth replacing", "better than ours", "change it here" or "if you know" — matched against the register when this page was built.

What one town costs to research

Between $0.00 and $5.30, measured on the run that actually produced each pack. All 21 together came to $57.30.

190 model calls and 1,270 web searches across the 21, and about 488 minutes of wall clock across the 20 that recorded it. The federal files are free and are downloaded once and shared, so most of that money buys the things no national file carries: the local electricity tariff, what a detailer charges, what a bay rents for, and who fills the town on a Saturday.

measured when the research actually ran on 2026-09-09; rebuilding the pack from the saved answers costs nothing

What this page is not claiming

The game is not a forecast of Las Vegas, Quincy or anywhere else. The fares, the network’s cut, the settlement lag, the loan terms, the insurance, the cleaning prices, the depot rents, the wear per mile, the penalties, how often things go wrong, and every curve describing how a district answers heat or rain — those are ours. They are tuned to make the decisions interesting. Do not quote them at anybody.

Tesla has published no Robotaxi fare table, no owner-operator revenue share and no Cybercab price. The only price on the record is Musk’s October 2024 "below $30,000". The widely repeated "$25,000" is not sourced to Tesla and this game does not use it. Nobody is running a privately owned Cybercab anywhere today; the premise is fiction built on a real statement.

Inside the game, 23 constants are tagged sourced and name their document, 4 are arithmetic on those, 3 are stated as approximate geography, and the rest are tagged ours in the source code itself. The simulation is version 1.5.0.