WiseOne wrote: ↑Thu May 22, 2014 9:22 am
Zipcars would be great, except that they're pretty pricey for anything longer than a day trip and it's often difficult to find one on short notice. If that model were to become more extensive and cars more easily available and more reasonably priced for multi-day trips, it would be a terrific alternative to owning, licensing, insuring, maintaining, and housing a car. Is anyone able/willing to figure out and post how much they spend on car ownership and use? I'm genuinely curious.
I'm with you dualstow & ps...for whatever reason I really hate driving, makes me feel like I'm in a cage. It's sometimes necessary, not something to do for pleasure or status symbol reasons - that I never really understood.
Since you asked, I could not resist responding!
As a dedicated Quicken user since January 1, 1994, I can report that from then until December 31, 2019 - 26 full years, I have spent a grand total of $76,411.77
That includes everything..
1) Buying used three fully loaded Honda Accords (present one is a 2004 with 155,000 miles on it and should be good for at least another five years). All following expenses also includes a motorcycle I had from prior to 1994. I think it just sat in my garage after 1994 until I gave it away in 2009.
2) Oil changes
3) Gasoline
4) Tires
5) All other repairs
6) Driver's license renewals and vehicle registrations
7) Vehicle excise taxes
Insurance
9) Fines for traffic violations / Parking tickets
10) Radar detectors
11) Air for tires
12) Steering Wheel covers
13) Towing
14) Winter tools - e.g., scrapers
15) Spare keys
16) Battery chargers / Jumper cables
17) Car rentals while major repair work being done
18) Tire gauges
19) Annual inspections
And, for my current vehicle....In more round numbers....for the six plus years I have owned it, I've only driven it about 32,000 total miles at a total cost of about $16,000. Therefore a cost of about $0.50 per mile, which is quite close to the IRS approved mileage rate during all that time.
However, of that $16,000, about $5,300 was related to acquisition costs so only just over $11,000 for the subsequent six years since that. And, as I said above, at the rate at which I currently drive, less than 6,000 miles a year, and it being a Honda Accord, it can easily go another five years. Finally, even though I live in harsh for cars New England, it spends a lot of time protected in a garage.
Vinny
Depending on your situation and choices, depreciation could be the biggest expense. I've made some (in retrospect) dumb car decisions that really killed me on depreciation because I wasn't considering it as a factor.