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The simple reason investors care about robotaxis is the potential profit pool is huge.

Americans drive about 3.3 trillion miles a year. What’s more, people pay Uber Technologies between $1 and $2 a mile to be driven, about two to three times more than it costs to operate a personal vehicle.

Eventually, ride-hailing prices should approach the cost of owning a vehicle. Still, that makes the U.S. addressable robotaxi market somewhere between $1.8 trillion to $6.6 trillion annually. It’s a huge range–that depends on the value of a mile driven–but the low end is still more than the roughly $750 billion Americans will spend on new cars in 2024.

What’s more, leading car makers earn a roughly 10% operating profit margin. Uber Technologies earns an operating profit margin of roughly 7%. Without driver commissions, however, Uber could be earning 10 times more operating profit, generating per-mile profit margins of 20 to 40 cents.

If robotaxis eventually take half of the U.S. driving market, there is $300 billion-plus in annual operating profit up for grabs. That’s multiples of the profit for selling new cars and worth about $6 trillion in stock market value based on how the shares trade today.

Robotaxis can be big.

Robotaxis, of course, don’t take over all at once. Things spread across the country slowly. RBC analyst Tom Narayan estimates Tesla will generate about $115 billion in global robotaxi revenue by 2040. That could become some $50 billion in robotaxi operating profit in the same year. For context, Wall Street projects Tesla will generate an automotive operating profit of about $11 billion in 2025.

“People are willing to spend [more] if they don’t have to deal with owning their own car and all headaches around that: Parking, insurance, cops,” says Narayan. “Consumers will be willing to part with more dollars for mobility because it increases [usefulness].”