Not including insurance the last time I had the Ferrari on the road for a while it set me back about 5 pounds per mile. Good fun though.
I sometimes try to get people to realistically work out their actual running costs. Mostly people don't bother or don't want to believe the results if they do. For instance the economics of repairing their existing car rather than buy another one (and repair the unknown faults on the new one)
I think life is too short to detail every expense though it is handy to have an idea.
Thus spake Mrcheerful ( snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com) unto the assembled multitudes:
I do agree with you, but having done this for 16 years it has become a hard habit to break ;-) I get terribly upset with myself if I ever lose a petrol receipt before entering it in the table, and have to interpolate to keep the figures in line...
I'm with Mr. Cheerful on this, life is too short (so I just slap data into a PDA and it does all the number crunching for me).
Most people think that the railways are expensive because they don't have a clue about how much their car really costs to run. Petrol, service, VED, tyres - all visible. People get used to seeing car payments leave their bank account so tend to forget about them. As for depreciation, depr-what you say? ;-)
Lol. That sounds uncomfortably close to home. I had to stop on the motorway on the way up to Aberdeen some years ago for a splash and dash as I came close to running on fumes before reaching my destination. The thieves running the station wanted far too much per litre for me to fill the tank so I grudgingly put a tenner's worth or whatever in and then brimmed it later somewhere cheaper like Asda. Well I never part fill a tank, it spoils my mpg spreadsheet. You have to keep the milometer running and add that part fill to the next full one to get the figures back in line. Even worse though, I lost the bloody receipt and couldn't remember how many litres that tenner had represented. I hunted high and low but eventually had to resort to putting an estimate in! Oh the horror. Happily about 2 years later it turned up when I was doing my accounts so my spreadsheets for every car back to
1983 are pristine again :)
Ah the simple pleasures of the OCD brigade.
Oh here's another thought. Do you ever jot down the mileage as you pass each
1/4 tank marker on the fuel gauge so later when you fill up you can extrapolate back from the mpg to exactly how many litres each segment represents and so get a better idea of whether you're getting good or bad mpg on every trip? Ah, just me eh? Oh dear.
Thus spake Dave Baker ( snipped-for-privacy@null.com) unto the assembled multitudes:
I've done that once or twice. I does make me a bit nervous.
No, I'm not *that* extreme, but I do check the trip mileage (always reset to zero at each refill) as the gauge hits the 3/4 and 1/2 full marks [1]. Anything less than 140 miles at 3/4 full, or 220 miles at 1/2 full and I know I'm in for a bad mpg day. You can imagine my unconfined joy when I once had a reading of 260 miles at 1/2 full during a long but fairly restrained drive. That led to 46mpg at the next fill-up!
[1] I realised long ago though that the marks on the gauge in no way actually represent 1/4, 1/2 and 3/4 full.
Thus spake Dave Baker ( snipped-for-privacy@null.com) unto the assembled multitudes:
I paid GBP 8,300 for my Astra in 2002 when it was about 20 mths old. Total costs so far (including purchase and taking depreciation into account) come to a little over GBP 18k, and I'll have spent 7k on fuel at the next fill-up.
Well, my accumulated costs come to a lot more than I've spent on fuel...
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