Comparing Total cost of ownership

Herzlos

Cars lose about half of their value every 3 years. So buying older or cheaper cars means less money lost over time, until some mystery point where the repairs eclipse the cost of upgrading.

If you're not doing huge miles and have somewhere you can charge cheaply, a used/nearly/new Dacia Spring is probably your best option long term, because it's cheap to buy, no frills and cheap to run.

Generally though the car you already have is the cheapest option, if it still does what you need.

MyRealNameToo

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/6667120/comparing-total-cost-of-ownership

Any model is going to be very sensitive to your assumptions and the longer your planned ownership the less certainty you can have. For example in the space of 4 years diesel went from £1.12 to £1.91. ULEZ destroyed the value of older non-compliant vehicles in London, there was a 5 year lead time that time but in principle something could be done much quicker.

Even "experts" that help finance companies set the pricing for finance deals (PCP, PCH etc) often get it wrong and at least some of them have access to insider information which you or I dont have access to.

So, are you going to assume the model of car you are thinking of getting gets superseded? Does that have a negative or positive impact on the depreciation? What non-routine maintenance assumptions are you going to make? The older the car is going to get whilst in your ownership the more relevant this is. What's going to happen to fuel prices?

Modelling for a new car only to be kept for 3 years its not too bad because most failures will be covered by warranty, not too long distance inflation predictions etc whereas modelling for buying a 5 year old vehicle and keeping it for 10 years is much more spurious.

Spend a lot of time with Actuaries that do this sort of thing, the reality is that their jobs are very much like weatherman in that no one assumes the predictions will be exactly accurate but its generally considered acceptable as long as they can explain afterwards why they weren't. It's also much easier for them to do their calcs over a large population because averages start to kick in. They will probably be ok at calculating the average age of death of the 100,000 former employees of a pension scheme but very poor at predicting the age Beth who used to work at Reception will be on her death.