• Atelopus-zeteki@kbin.run
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    5 months ago

    People are always talking ‘miles per gallon’. I had a nerdy friend who kept the data and tracked ‘dollars per mile’.

    • NeptuneOrbit@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Pretty easy to do in excel. Or on a napkin.

      I bought my Honda Civic about 9 years ago for, let’s just say 20k including interest on the loan. I could look more into it, but let’s say $500 a year on average for service and $1000 a year on insurance. Gas has been pretty constantly $3/gal and mileage at 30 miles per gallon so that’s ten cents a mile. Driven 110,000 miles so that’s $11,000 in gasoline.

      So all and all ownership has been about 20k+4.5k+9k+11k or $45,000 divided by 110,000 miles.

      That’s about 40 cents a mile. Woooo! I’m probably under estimating the service costs as they have really escalated recently. The IRS says it costs 55 cents a mile to service a car. So yeah. You shouldn’t think of any short trip as free. It probably costs 50 cents to drive every mile.