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Fargo, ND

Requested

This is a planning tool, not a prediction. Of the 76 numbers behind a season in Fargo, 28 are published figures, 31 are worked out from published figures, and 17 are our own estimates. 38 of them were read straight out of a federal file that covers every city in the country, so there was no citation to trust and no page to misread. You can change any of them. Your result is only as good as the numbers you agree with.

How long until you have your $10,000 back
2.4 months
After 90 days the project is worth
$11,059
Against the $10,000 you put in
+$1,059
This projects the first 90 days forward in a straight line. Early months carry start-up drag, so later ones may run better. It is a direction, not a date.

Where the money goes on day one

The project is behind before the car turns a wheel. That is true in every town on this list, and it is the hole the months above are measured against.

You put in$10,000
Hard costs, paid once
Down payment on a $28,900 car -$2,900
Installing home charging -$2,250
Permits and onboardingplaceholder -$650
Money left to operate on$4,200
Plus the car equity. You paid $28,900, but it would only fetch $27,166 the moment it is yours, and you owe $26,000 of that +$1,166
What the project is worth on day one$5,366

The project is $4,634 down before the first fare: $2,900 genuinely spent, and $1,734 that vanished the moment the car stopped being new.

Two honest caveats. The permit figure is marked placeholder because the model invents it — the obligation is real, the amount is not researched. And nothing here counts sales tax, excise, title or registration on the purchase, which vary by state and this model does not yet carry, so every figure is a best case.

What comes off every fare before you see it

The rider pays100%
The network takesour estimate −30%
Reaches the business70%

That 30% comes off the top — before energy, cleaning, insurance, the depot or the loan payment. Every figure on this page is already after it.

Tesla has published no owner-operator revenue share for Robotaxi, anywhere, so this is an expectation rather than a reported figure. 30% is roughly what the established ride-hail platforms take and what people following the rollout broadly expect. It is the largest single lever in the whole model: at 25% instead, the same season leaves about 7% more in your hand — more than any driving decision you can make. Fares also settle 7 days after they are earned.

People
136,275
Cass County
Rides a day
6,963
all operators, town-wide
Airport
3.9 mi
worked out
Fast charging
$0.51
per kWh, public

Why this town is in the game

Asked for by Dave, to put North Dakota on the ladder. It is the best-sourced town of the twenty-nine: every one of its twelve citations was re-fetched and held, the only clean sweep on the list. Power is cheap -- 7.9 cents off-peak, third behind Las Vegas and Stillwater -- which is most of why its row runs the way it does. One thing the research had to settle rather than assume: five utilities file a service territory for Cass County, and it resolved to Xcel Energy (Northern States Power) rather than the larger Minnesota filer.

Other lenses on Fargo, ND

The same research pack feeds more than one simulator. ⚡ A two-stall DC fast-charging site is marginal here under the default assumptions: about 10.0 stops a day against a break-even of 10.6, 11 public fast-charging sites already within 10 miles, payback 12.6 years.

See the arithmetic and change the assumptions →

Counted again from the US DOE station list by a second route — American Adventurer’s copy of the same 2026-09-16 AFDC snapshot, filtered the same way (open, public, unrestricted, at least one DC fast port):

🧺 A coin laundromat is marginal here under the default assumptions: about 1,441 laundromat households inside 1.5 miles (no car, renters, owners), 560 loads a week (the store is full) against a break-even of 549, attended 84 hours a week at the local $17.70 wage, payback 10.7 years. Run unattended, nothing else changed, it pays back: payback 2.6 years.

See the arithmetic and change the assumptions →

OpenStreetMap maps 1 laundromat within 1.5 miles of the town centre as of 2026-08-14. That is a floor, not a survey: it counts what somebody has mapped, and mapping coverage varies enormously between towns. The model above is still splitting demand with its own editable estimate of 3 stores, which is what the payback figure rests on; move that one for the town you know. Laundromat locations: © OpenStreetMap contributors, via American Adventurer.

Camping near Fargo, ND

2 public-land camps within 30 straight-line miles of the town center in the American Adventurer record: 1 free · 1 fee · 0 unpriced.

None of them carries an agency season record in this data, so nothing here is called open.

Nearest listed-open DC fast charger to a free camp: 25.6 mi straight-line — CCEC CHARGERS HORNBACHERS (CCS, NACS (Tesla)), per the US DOE station list. “Listed open” is the list’s word; check the network before you count on it.

Closest to the town center

The full list, as JSON → · Browse every camp in North Dakota → · The map, centered here with a 30-mile ring →

Data: American Adventurer (davelalande.com), built 2026-09-18T07:30:56Z; read 2026-09-18. Straight-line miles from the Census town center, not driving distance; the American Adventurer record, not every campground.

What this row rests on

76 numbers describe this town. Every one of them says where it came from.

28 published by somebody else 31 worked out from those 17 our own estimates
Citations we went back and checked
12 held / 0 failed
Anything that failed was demoted to an estimate and says so.
What we could not find out
2
  • power_utility: 5 utilities file a service territory for Cass County, and the two largest -- Northern States Power Co - Minnesota with 82,987 customers and Cass County Elec Coop Inc with 51,968 -- are close enough in size that the county file cannot say which one this city is on. No utility and no utility rate were taken from it; the question goes to the research pass instead.
  • rides_per_day: the five named sources were checked and none publishes a trip count for this city, so the estimate stands on its own arithmetic

Some of the numbers, and where they came from

A sample. The whole pack is in the data API.

Rides a day, whole townour estimate6,963 rides/day
Total app-hailed trips a day across every operator in the city -- the pool your fleet competes for a share of, not the number you will get. no published figure we could verify
Average paid trip lengthour estimate4.5 miles
Nobody publishes TNC trip length for Fargo; 4.5 miles is reasoned from the city's own 51.888 sq mi land area, the 15.5-minute mean commute, and Uber's published Fargo distances (airport 4 mi, Moorhead 6 mi). no published figure we could verify
Passengers boarding a yearpublished552,860 enplanements/year
FAA calendar year 2024 ENPLANEMENTS -- passengers BOARDING, which is about half of the arrivals-plus-departures figure an airport press release quotes. This is the federal count, read out of the FAA's own file. FAA, CY2024 Passenger Boarding (Enplanement) Data for U.S. Airports
Overnight electricityworked out0.079 $/kWh
Xcel ND Small General Time of Day (D14) and Residential Time of Day (D02/D04) both bill midnight–06:00 at the off-peak energy charge year-round; this is that tariff energy plus the current Fuel Cost, Renewable Energy, and Transmission Cost riders and Fargo’s 4
Evening electricityworked out0.175 $/kWh
Same Xcel Small General Time of Day on-peak all-in rate as daytime: weekdays 16:00–21:00 are on-peak. 21:00–midnight is off-peak, so using the on-peak all-in rate for the whole 16:00–24:00 window is conservative (high). Xcel has no separate evening-only period
Insurance on each car after the firstworked out184 $/month
What each additional vehicle adds to the premium. Lower than the first car because a fleet policy spreads the administrative part of a premium across the vehicles while the risk part scales with them -- which is part of why growing is the way out of the trap.
A small commercial bay, per monthworked out854 $/month
This is a derivation, not a local quote: a national published figure scaled by a published local index. Nobody publishes what a 1,500 square foot bay lets for in a town this size, because small commercial bays let privately, one handshake at a time, and no ind
A full interior cleanworked out76 $
This is a derivation, not a local quote: a national published figure scaled by a published local index. Nobody publishes a full interior detail in a town this size, because it is a manual service: keeping a price list current is work, and the price is whatever
Demand generatorsour estimate
Sanford Health (6,278 FTE; 284-bed Level I, 60% of patients from outside the metro); Essentia Health-Fargo (2,848 FTE; 133-bed Level II); NDSU (11,952 students; Bison football ~19,000 at the Fargodome
These are the named places that actually move people: two hospital systems, the land-grant university and its football dome, the VA, Microsoft, and the interstate mall. no published figure we could verify
Published paid-ride countour estimate0
No public Fargo or North Dakota series counts TNC or taxi trips; the five places that sometimes publish one were checked and none produced a usable city total. no published figure we could verify

Researched 2026-09-14 on pipeline 2.1.0. Measured on sim 1.5.0, 12 seeds, median reported. A result is only comparable to another from the same sim version. The camping card is the American Adventurer record within 30 straight-line miles of the Census town center, read 2026-09-18: not driving distance, and not every campground.