Work out how much your journey costs you when using your car.

redballoon_2

http://www.markcarter.me.uk/politics/petrol.htm

Found this link and thought to share it. I have just calculated that it costs hubby under £10 a day to get work and back so thats £200 a month!! I am job hunting for him now to hopefully find something nearer.

hope it helps someone!

harveybobbles

79p it costs me to drive 5 miles apparently...

Andy_L

Looks like this calculator makes no allowance for Depreciation, Insurance, Tax or Maintaince

Conor_3

Andy_L wrote: »

Looks like this calculator makes no allowance for Depreciation, Insurance, Tax or Maintaince

Why should it? All of those still occur even if the car sits on the road and doesn't move.

save-a-lot

It is telling me I spend £3.62 to do a 38 mile journey (work and back every day) which is about right.

save-a-lot

well, about right for the petrol only costs

moonrakerz

That so-called "calculator" is a waste of space, it gives only petrol costs, which you can work out in your head anyway.

ALL costs have to be taken into account, as has already been pointed out. The two biggest costs are usually depreciation and loss of interest on capital.

Conor_3

Not quite as it's not that simple and that's why you cannot take all costs into account for working out a journey.

In haulage when calculating costs, you have two types - mileage based and time based. The time based includes tax, insurances, MOT. Mileage based includes fuel, tyres and servicing.

Now the problem with trying to work out the true cost of a journey is that you can't accurately work out the time based cost. I'll explain.

For the purposes of this example, we'll assume it costs, say £10 a day in tax/insurance/MOT for your car to sit there doing nothing and the fuel costs are 10p per mile.

Day 1. 10 mile trip.
Day 2. 100 mile trip.
Day 3. Go nowhere.
Day 4. Go nowhere
Day 5. 10 mile trip.

So working on the premise that it includes all costs to placate those who are whinging about it not including time costs.
Day 1 costs you 10p per mile in fuel but you have to split the time cost over that a well so it costs you £1.10 a mile.
Day 2 costs you 10p per mile and again, £10 in time costs but this time, the time costs are spread over the 100 miles so it actually costs you 20p per mile.
Day 5. Well this is interesting. You've gone nowhere on Day 3 and 4 so now have £20 in time costs accrued for no mileage. So what do you do? You've still paid them out. So do you include them in the journey cost for day 5? This would mean that journey has cost you £3.10 a mile.
Wow...what a lovely consistency in the mileage cost figures.

Now imagine the car hasn't moved for a week then you do a 10 mile journey. Does that mean that journey costs you £8.10 per mile. No, thats just quite frankly, ridiculous.

Time costs have to be paid regardless of the vehicle usage When you undertake to own a car, you accept this and quite rightly it should not be included in working out journey costs for non transportation industry vehicles. Mileage depreciation only has an effect if you're doing 15k+ per year. Both are quite rightly excluded from such calculators but those calculators should factor in tyre wear and servicing costs which work out at roughly 1-2p per mile.

Thunderbird_2

Conor is absolutely right!

I think we can apply the time costs when calculating the annual mileage costs. Because that way we will have a more accurate figure of what each mile costs us per year and for some people it is very useful to know whether it's cheaper to have a car or better to use the public transports ( I am not considering the convenience factor here)

Insurance + Tax + M.O.T. + Service + Estimated depreciation + Petrol costs of your annual mileage divided by your annual mileage will be more accurate figure of how much it costs you per mile to own a car

To me, it's worth it!

P.S ( If you are nerd, you can add how much estimated interests you have lost of the capital used to buy the car as moonrakerz mentioned earlier!)

Bob63

Definitely flawed logic.

Bike does 45mpg which is around 10p/mile at today's fuel prices. A rear tyre for my bike is £85 fitted and lasts around 2500 miles. A front tyre is £75 and lasts 7000 miles. So that's 4.5p/mile in tyre costs. 6K service is £150, 12K service is £250 so that's another 3.5p/mile. This excludes the annual maintenance costs such as fluid changes which need to happen regardless of whether the bike is used or not.

The fuel, service and tyre costs for my bike are therefore around 18p/mile. However, cost is immaterial when I'm swanning around the centre of Bristol in the bus lanes and laughing at all the four-wheeled traffic stuck in long queues

moonrakerz

Conor wrote: »

Not quite as it's not that simple and that's why you cannot take all costs into account for working out a journey.

In haulage when calculating costs, ...............

You are contradicting yourself there - you say you "cannot take all costs into account", then quote "haulage" where you include time based costs. Incidentally, you also forgot labour costs too !

Trying to compare business mileage costs with private car costs really is like trying to compare apples with coconuts.