Dead Legs Are Eating Your Profit: How to Price and Avoid Empty Miles

Ask a chauffeur operator what a job pays and they will quote the fare. Ask what the job cost and most will talk about the fare distance too. The car does not. Between leaving base and getting back, a “profitable” trip can spend more kilometres empty than paid, and those kilometres are invisible on every invoice.

A dead leg (deadhead, empty leg) is any distance the vehicle covers without a passenger in it. Three kinds show up in a normal week:

1. Positioning: base to a distant pickup.
2. The empty return: dropping a one-way transfer and driving home.
3. Repositioning between jobs: the last dropoff is nowhere near the next pickup.

What an empty kilometre actually costs

The direct costs sit with the vehicle. A premium sedan using 10 to 12 litres per 100 km burns roughly $15–20 of fuel on a 70 km positioning leg at today’s pump prices, and fuel is only part of the story: the ATO’s standard rate is 91 cents per kilometre (2026–27) precisely because tyres, servicing and depreciation accrue with every kilometre driven, empty or not. By that benchmark a 70 km empty leg is over $60 of car before the first toll gantry.

The larger costs have no receipt at all. Contracted drivers are paid for trips, not positioning, so a job wrapped in heavy empty running collapses the driver’s effective hourly rate: three hours behind the wheel around one billable hour. Offer enough of those and drivers start declining them, or quoting a minimum that reprices the job anyway. The car has the same problem. Every empty hour is an hour it cannot spend earning, and for a small fleet at peak time that forgone fare is the biggest number in the whole equation.

So a $180 remote transfer with 140 km of empty running around it is carrying $30–40 of fuel (nearly $130 of vehicle cost if you count the way the ATO does), a driver who needs convincing, and three hours of car time that could have covered two airport runs. Operators who quote from a rate card that only sees pickup to dropoff are pricing blind on exactly these trips, and they are usually the trips that felt like a win when the enquiry landed.

Charging for it without punishing good work

The fix is a positioning fee (we call it a rebasing fee), but a crude one will cost you bookings you wanted. A blanket “call-out fee” annoys the airport regular; charging the full round trip prices you out of remote work entirely. Four rules make the fee fair, and they are worth adopting whether or not you automate them:

Give your home zone away free. Set a radius around base (30–40 km works for most metro fleets) inside which positioning is simply the cost of being in business. Local work stays clean and competitive.

Never charge both legs. Charge the shorter of base-to-pickup or dropoff-to-base, not the sum. One leg of dead running is real; billing the round trip double-counts, because the car had to come home regardless.

Exempt trips that touch your zone. Mountains to the airport needs no fee even though the pickup is 100 km out: the empty leg out is mirrored by a paid leg back. Only trips where both ends are remote deserve a fee.

Taper the fee as trips get longer. From the same remote pickup, a 5 km local hop should carry a bigger positioning fee than a 140 km transfer, because every paid kilometre partly pays for the drive out. A long trip can amortise its own positioning down to zero.

Applied to a Blue Mountains example with a Sydney base: a Katoomba to Leura hop (4 paid km, 100+ km of positioning) attracts close to the full fee. Katoomba to the airport attracts none. Katoomba out to the Hunter Valley attracts almost none, because the trip is long enough to carry its own dead running. That is the shape you want: the fee lands precisely on the jobs that were quietly losing money and nowhere else.

One more rule from hard experience: derive the fee from fixed base locations, not from wherever the fleet happens to be sitting. Quotes have to be reproducible. The same enquiry should get the same price on your website, over the phone and by email, today and tomorrow.

Shrinking the legs you cannot charge for

Some empty running survives any pricing policy. The return after a one-way transfer is the classic. You have three levers:

Backfill with farm-in work. If you are already driving back empty from the airport at 2pm, a farmed-in job in that direction at 70–75% of retail is nearly pure margin. Affiliate networks exist for exactly this.

Sell the empty direction. Private aviation has traded discounted empty legs for decades, and the logic transfers to ground transport. A standing 20–30% one-way discount on your known empty directions turns a cost into a cheap acquisition channel for passengers who become full-fare clients later.

Thread the diary. When dispatch can see the whole day, jobs can be sequenced so one trip’s dropoff feeds the next trip’s pickup. At 3 or more cars this stops being something you can hold in your head, which is one more reason admin swallows founders at that size (the 3-car wall again).

Where software fits

Vecturo prices positioning automatically: you set a home-zone radius, a per-kilometre rate and how generously the fee tapers, and every quote on every surface (web form, email, phone, portal) applies the same deterministic maths, charging one leg at most and exempting anything that touches your zone. The remote jobs that used to lose money quietly now pay their way, and the quote still comes back in seconds.

Dead legs never show up on an invoice, which is exactly why they deserve a line in your pricing.

Frequently asked questions

What is a dead leg in the chauffeur industry?

A dead leg (also called a deadhead or empty leg) is any distance a vehicle travels without a paying passenger. That includes driving from base to a distant pickup, returning empty after a one-way transfer, and repositioning between jobs. The fare only covers pickup to dropoff; a dead leg is everything else the car drove that day.

How much does an empty kilometre cost to run?

The direct costs are the vehicle's: roughly $12 to $18 of fuel per 70 km in a premium sedan, plus tolls, servicing and tyre wear. Contracted drivers are only paid for the trip itself, so the larger costs are indirect: the car is out of circulation while it repositions, and jobs wrapped in heavy empty running are harder to get drivers to accept, because the driving time doubles while the pay does not.

Should I charge customers for dead legs?

Charge a positioning fee only when both ends of the trip are far from your base, and never charge more than one leg. A trip that starts or ends near base needs no fee, because the empty leg is mirrored by a paid leg and normal per-kilometre rates already cover it. The fee should also shrink as the trip gets longer, since every paid kilometre partly amortises the positioning.

How do I reduce empty running I cannot charge for?

Backfill it. Farm-in work from affiliate networks fills known empty directions, discounted one-way (empty leg) fares sell the return you were going to drive anyway, and threading compatible jobs in dispatch turns two trips' worth of dead running into one. Most operators use all three.