I found a website a while ago Edmunds TCO that breaks down what it costs to own a car. It uses the assumption of 15,000 miles per year and breaks it into:
- Depreciation
- Taxes & Fees
- Financing
- Fuel
- Insurance
- Maintenance
- Repairs
I wanted something other than 15K per year so I took the data from Edmunds TCO site and created a spreadsheet that allowed me to play with annual costs, and "per mile" cost to see how much it cost to drive a number of different cars per mile. Feel free to make a copy and play with it yourself.
Here are some per mile costs for a few different cars assuming 15,000 miles per year:
2006 Subaru = $0.44
2011 Prius = $0.52
2006 Tacoma = $0.56
2007 Prius = $0.34
Having just put over $2K in repairs in my old Subaru, I can believe it. It is easy to fool yourself into thinking it's "just gas money" to go to town and back.
One thing I realized is that almost every car I have owned was "put down" because of rust. I can usually get 200K+ miles on a car but the rust kills them first. So if I can somehow share a car and put a lot more miles on per year, say 50K, then I can wear it out before the rust gets me. Lets run those numbers in the spreadsheet:
2006 Subaru = $0.31
2011 Prius = $0.24
2006 Tacoma = $0.40
2007 Prius = $0.22
You can see the effects of gas mileage in the Prius.
So the only other point I want to make is that if I drive less miles per year, I still have to pay the fixed cost. So lets plug in 2000 miles per year
2006 Subaru = $01.56
2011 Prius = $3.11
2006 Tacoma = $2.05
2007 Prius = $1.52
So the next step is to get rid of the car. Rent a car. Pay your brother $1 per mile to use his car. This is where carsharing, taxis, ZipCars, etc could work.
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