how to work out pence per mile?

Allkid

is there a simple way to work out how much the cost per mile i travel?
or a simple rule of thumb.
I was was told 15p per mile is a good appox.

i know there are some mileage calculator on the internet, but simple things like mile per gallons- i do not know how to work that out..

i am trying to work out what it will cost me to travel to a new place of work.

JGB1955

You need to include the cost of servicing, MOT, depreciation, insurance, as well as fuel. HMRC work on 45p per mile.
.that"d not far off it. My husband was a Private Hire Driver and 45p per mile was his base cost (adding on his time as earni GS).

hollie.weimeraner

Ha ha still school holidays 😀 but just in case, add up depreciation of vehicle, all running costs including fuel servicing, insurance and divide by the mileage. So many variables no one scenario fits all.

Allkid

oh wow, i see, did not think i had to include all that...
i was just thinking of my petrol cost...to work and back...

thanks a lot for you suggestion.

PasturesNew

My car does about 45-50mpg.
A gallon of fuel is about 4.546 litres.

I therefore guesstimate that my car does 10 miles/litre. When I pull into a garage and see the price/litre I know that 1/10th of that is per mile.

Then there's the car cost ... so I tend to add 5p/mile for that (based on a figure I worked out years ago, but I don't need to be specific).

So ... buy a car that does about 45.46mpg and you can use the "1/10th of the cost of a litre" calculation

mattyprice4004

You can’t work out miles per gallon?
I’m sure this has to be a wind up, as anyone intelligent to pass a driving test must be able to work out that number of miles driven divided by gallons used = miles per gallon.

Reset the mile counter when filling, brim the tank, run until nearly empty then see how many gallons to fill back to full again. Divide miles by the number of gallons used.

unholyangel

Really, unless you're going to drive the sort of routes you would when working there, its only ever going to give you a rough figure so be prepared for it to be slightly more - or less!

Hill, type of traffic/roads, load etc can affect fuel efficiency.

But I can tell you my normal car is far from fuel efficient yet is just under 15p per mile for fuel doing a fairly even split of town driving with start/stop traffic, country roads, main roads with a smidgen of motorway - in some areas that have quite steep hills.

Supersonos

JGB1955 wrote: »

You need to include the cost of servicing, MOT, depreciation, insurance, as well as fuel.

Incorrect. If it's simply working out "what it will cost me to travel to a new place of work" then it's simply fuel and possibly a slightly increased level of depreciation because of the increased mileage.

Servicing, MOT, insurance etc. would be the same as driving to the current place of work.

AdrianC

Allkid wrote: »

oh wow, i see, did not think i had to include all that...
i was just thinking of my petrol cost...to work and back...

How much fuel do you put in? How far do you get before you need to put more in?

Bingo, fuel cost per mile.

Let's say you do 400 miles from 45 litres at £1.30/litre. £58.50 / 400 = 14.6p/mile

But is that a useful figure? What about other variable costs? Servicing? Tyres? Depreciation?
And how are you apportioning the annual fixed costs? Is your servicing time-based or distance-based?

It's not easy to get to a solid figure - and there's various different ways to calculate it, depending on what you want to include and what you're trying to figure. Just how much it costs you to go to a different place of work? Fuel alone may be appropriate, if you're not increasing your mileage enough to justify more maintenance etc, and would incur all the other costs anyway.

Ebe_Scrooge

mattyprice4004 wrote: »

Reset the mile counter when filling, brim the tank, run until nearly empty then see how many gallons to fill back to full again. Divide miles by the number of gallons used.

This is a really simple way to work out how many miles-per-gallon your car really does - which is likely to be substantially different to the claims made in the brochures. Just keep a notebook and a pencil in your car, make a note of the mileage and the amount of fuel you put in, every time you fill up. The longer period of time you do this for, the more accurate it becomes. I'm sure you can work out how to convert litres to gallons to convert the litres you buy into an MPG figure. Over a period of time, you'll come up with a figure like "I've used 152 gallons of fuel to travel 6500 miles".

This will enable you to work out pretty accurately what your fuel costs will be for any given journey (of course, you'll tend to get better MPG by steady cruising on a motorway that you will in stop-start town driving, but if your long-term average that you've calculated includes a mixture of both, you won't be far off).

The 45 pence-per-mile used by HMRC is designed to include the cost of fuel, MOT, insurance, maintenance, etc. If you want to work out the true overall cost of running your car, then you need to factor these costs in. However, if you assume that these costs are a given anyway (i.e. you're going to be running the car whether or not you also use it for commuting to your new place of work), then you can just use the cost in fuel as described above. It could be argued that you'll have additional wear-and-tear to factor in, but this is going to be very difficult to quantify.

AdrianC

Ebe_Scrooge wrote: »

I'm sure you can work out how to convert litres to gallons to convert the litres you buy into an MPG figure.

You don't even need to do that - just cost/distance.

But don't get confused between 3.8 liters/US gallon and 4.5 litres/imperial gallon...