The €88,000 question every fleet CFO should be asking

Most conversations about autonomy start with the technology. Let me start with a single number instead.

€88,000.

That's the value of the driver time lost to depot manoeuvres for one bus, across a 12-year lifecycle, as calculated by MZA Warsaw — one of the largest and most complex operators in Central Europe. Not the cost of the vehicle. Not the technology. Just the driver minutes spent every day moving a bus around inside the fence.

Here's how that number is built, and why I think it settles the business case on its own.

Manual shunting — parking, charging approach, wash-bay positioning, dispatch staging — consumes 25 to 35 minutes per vehicle, per day across the European depots where we've run operational assessments. This time isn't discretionary. It happens every day, for every bus, regardless of the timetable.

Now scale it to a depot of 100 buses, and use the conservative end — 25 minutes:

• About 2,500 minutes a day recovered — over 41 driver-hours.
• Roughly 240 full driver shifts a year that could be redeployed.
• The equivalent of 4–5 extra driver shifts every day, available for passenger service.
• Safety and collisions. Three to four minor incidents a week, at roughly €1,500 each, plus downtime and admin. Over ten years a 100-bus depot can expect 1,000–2,000 of them — more than €1.5 million, or over €15,000 per vehicle. Precise, LiDAR-guided low-speed movement attacks the root cause.
• Energy. Charging shifted to off-peak windows and matched to the right charger typically cuts energy costs 9–15% — around €250,000 a year for a 100-bus fleet, €2.5 million over a decade.
• Infrastructure. Tighter autonomous parking can lift capacity per square metre by 10–15% — sometimes the difference between needing another parking hall (or more city land) and not.

Put a cost on it. At a fully-loaded European driver cost of €35–45 per hour, that's €500,000 to €700,000 a year for a single 100-bus depot — €5–7 million over a decade in recovered labour value. And that's before you count the fare revenue those redeployed hours can generate.

That alone is the case. But it isn't the whole case, and a serious CFO should see the rest of the stack:

Add it up and the indicative range lands at €8.5–13 million-plus over the lifecycle for a 100-bus depot. Driver time recovery is the foundation; the other three streams are what make the business case resilient and pull the payback forward.

This is what I mean when I say ROI now. The depot business case doesn't depend on a regulatory breakthrough, a public-road approval, or a technology that's still five years out. It depends on work that is already happening every night, that already costs you money, and that doesn't actually require a driver.

The €88,000 question is simple: what is that number at your depot — and what would you do with the hours if you got them back?

The full ROI model — all four value streams, the assumptions behind them, and how it changes with fleet size — is in The State of Smart Depots 2026.

Then run the numbers against your own depot.

(Figures are indicative estimates from our own operational assessments across multiple European depots; a site-specific feasibility study through our Smartbus Onboard Program is recommended before any investment decision.)