We looked into the cost of hiring a coach bus for the day. $1,300.

Multiply that by 5 and you can buy a used coach bus. (Granted, they’re easily $200,000 new, but there are a ton of used ones, and they’re the type of things that are usually driven until 1,000,000 miles or so.)

Assume 200 miles. (This is actually way, way more than we need.) 8 miles to the gallon. (You may do better.) $3/gallon. That’s $75 in fuel.

Assume you pay the driver very well: $20 an hour, and that we have the bus for 8 hours. (He surely makes less, and we don’t need 8 hours.) $160 in labor.

I want to start my own bus company. (More for being hired out for the day than anything than being a Greyhound / Fung Wah, though.) I think I could do it for a lot less.

Buy something like this, spruce up the interior (carpeting?), and re-install the seats, and you’ve got one heck of a bus with 750,000 miles of life left. And, apparently, 100 gallons of fuel already in it…  $10-15,000 buys a nice, complete bus.

$750 a day… Assuming $20,000 fixed costs, you break even after 26 days. You have variable costs (fuel, labor, insurance), too, but really, I think that if you could book the bus regularly, you’d do well.

Oh, and there are lots of little “extras” you could do. Replace those huge old TVs with a few LCDs. Probably under $1,000 total cost if you do it yourself? And, in lieu of showing a movie / TV, you could always do an airplane-style display of where you are or something… Or show ads! No direct value, but I think it’d raise the perceived “value” of the bus.

You could invest your profits into a budget limo service. You compete in the taxi market, not the limo market. If I had the choice in riding in a 12-year-old limo (after removing the garbage from the floor?!) or riding in a taxi, I’d pick the limo. Although I wager most of the costs there are variable costs: labor, insurance, maintenance (probably big on a really old American car?), etc. But really, you’re paying less than it’d cost to buy a used taxi. And this one is even less!