Should You Use Your Car to Make Extra Money?

By Tamra Fakhoorian

I’ve used Uber all over the world, and every once in a while I find myself wondering about the car.

Not the ride. The actual car.

How many miles is this person putting on it every week? How long before the tires go? When does the transmission start complaining? And if they have a car payment, will they get the thing paid off before they’ve driven it into the ground?

I don’t want to be too hard on Uber here. Years ago, I delivered pizzas for Domino’s. I knew I was putting miles on my car to earn that money, and I accepted that as part of the job. I imagine plenty of Uber, Spark and DoorDash drivers see it exactly the same way. The car is one of the tools they use to earn money.

But if you’re sitting at home thinking, “I could drive a little bit and make an extra thousand dollars for that cruise,” I’d want you to know what the deal really is before you start. Because the number that pops up on the app is not necessarily what you made.

Gas is easy. Everybody sees gas. You put $40 in the tank and there it goes. It’s the other stuff that gets fuzzy. AAA’s vehicle-cost study found that fuel averaged about 13 cents a mile, while maintenance, repairs and tires added another 11 cents or so. Depreciation was actually the biggest ownership cost of all.

Now, I’m not going to tell you that means you should automatically subtract 76 cents from every mile you drive. I’ve seen people do that online using the IRS business mileage rate, and that’s not quite fair either. As of July 2026, the IRS business mileage rate is 76 cents a mile, but that’s a tax deduction figure meant to represent vehicle costs in general. It does not mean your particular Corolla just consumed exactly 76 cents because you drove it one mile.

Your car matters. A lot. One Uber driver I ran across on Reddit drives a 2012 Camry Hybrid with 374,000 miles on it, does much of his own maintenance and says he keeps $4,000 set aside in case the car finally gives up. That is a completely different business equation from somebody running Uber in a fairly new $45,000 SUV.

And that got me thinking. Maybe the question isn’t simply, “Should I drive for Uber?” Maybe it’s, “If I’m going to use up a car making money, what car should I use up?”

Uber itself tells prospective drivers they’ll make more if they keep their vehicle costs low. In many markets, UberX vehicles can be as much as 15 years old. That makes sense to me. If I were going to seriously pile on miles, I’d be looking hard at something reliable, fuel-efficient and already well down the depreciation curve. I would not be eager to chew through the value of the nicest car in my driveway just because it happens to be sitting there.

There are rental options too. Uber currently advertises Hertz rentals starting around $240 a week, with insurance, basic maintenance and unlimited miles included, although taxes, fees and fuel are extra. But $240 a week is roughly a thousand dollars a month before those other expenses. If my whole goal was to make an extra thousand dollars a month, I’d have to do some serious staring at that math.

Then there is another cost that doesn’t show up quite so neatly on a spreadsheet: your body. Sitting in a car for hours sounds pretty easy until you do it for hours. I spent enough time driving for a living to know that sitting itself can wear you out. With something like Spark, you add getting in and out of the car over and over, loading groceries and carrying them to somebody’s door. Maybe there are stairs. Maybe somebody ordered three cases of bottled water because of course they did.

None of that means driving is a bad option. I have several Spark drivers in my own family. But I do think physical wear belongs in the calculation right alongside tires and gasoline. If I make $150 today but I’m so stiff and tired afterward that the rest of my day is shot, I want to know that too.

Still, there is a lot I like about driving as a source of extra income. You can get started relatively quickly. You don’t have to build a website or buy a bunch of inventory. And there is something very appealing about being able to say, “I need another $400 this month,” and go out and earn it.

There are drivers who get pretty sophisticated about it too. They learn when demand is good, which orders are worth taking and which ones aren’t. They watch miles as carefully as they watch dollars. One Uber driver on Reddit recently described thinking he was doing nicely at about $28.50 an hour. Then he started looking at how many miles he had driven and realized his real result might be dramatically lower. He also admitted that when he had driven full time before, he had essentially ground a vehicle into the ground.

That’s the piece I’d want to understand before I signed up. Not whether I could make money. Of course I could make money. The question is how much of it I get to keep after the car has taken its share.

If I were considering Uber, Spark or DoorDash for extra income, I’d try it for a few weeks. I’d track every mile and every dollar. I’d pay attention to how much time I spent sitting around waiting for something to happen, and I’d pay attention to how I felt afterward.

No new car. No grand business plan. No six-month commitment. Just find out whether it works for you.

Turning miles into cash can be a perfectly good trade. You’re spending some of your time, some of your car and probably a little bit of yourself to earn that money.

Make sure you like what you’re getting in return.