I am looking to drive a car to uni but am wondering if it is worthwhile. Trip wise I make a saving. £18 round-trip by train vs. ~£15 74mi round-trip by car 1.5~2hrs vs. 50mins no traffic But the running costs look very high (figures obtained from dad, I have no clue): Code: £200 - Road Tax £300 - Tyres £100 - Brakes £60 - air/fuel/2x oil filters £50 - oil £3100 - annual fuel expense (commuting + running around) £1500~£2000 - car insurance (turned 25 in Sept., live in inner London, will be first policy since passing 5.5yrs ago) ------------------ £5810 Taking the upper insurance figure I'm looking at almost £6k. This is without fixing any wear'n'tear or major breakdowns. It feels a little too high. I'm going to show my naivety by saying this but surely it doesn't cost this much to run a car? Any input?
What car is that based on? I doubt your first car would have to cost that much. I have owned two Renault scenics that were £30/year tax, £120 for a set of tyres (maybe once every 3 years?) and at 58mpg my 9000/year would cost me around £800. Add a bit for servicing and mots and we're at maybe £2000 a year for me? Then again, my vintage Land Rover costs me a lot more than that! Sent from my Hudl 2 using Tapatalk
£2000-ish on fuel, I drive an hour to work every day. £200-ish tax £2-300 on repairs, tyres, spares etc (countryside roads + high mileage = lots of wear) £50 on oil (2 x 5l bottles is more than plenty for a year even on my oil heavy automatic) £300-ish insurance, eight years driving no claims or points. So yeah, I'd guess I spend £3k on my car every year and it's an old Skoda that'll do 40mpg even on bendy country roads. Inner city insurance is a real bugger, provided you don't hit anything it should fall rapidly though. My first year of insurance was well over £1500 but halved the second year and halved again the third. Parents helped me with year one and two. I'm afraid your Dad isn't far off the truth, life is brilliant sometimes!
I guess finding a house share somewhere is even more expensive and not an option? For me: Road Tax - £515 waah Fuel - £1.7k (10k miles at ~30mpg using premium unleaded) Insurance - £941.70 (22, student, license for just under 2 years, 0 NCB, on a 3.5L V6 350Z) You might wanna have a look round at some alternative cars. As Jake says, there are plenty of cars with significantly lower tax than what you are budgeting for and the same goes for insurance. I guess it's a bit more expensive in London, but you should have seen a large drop in premiums when you turned 25 - get some fresh quotes and see what they say. Also you should look into Admiral MultiCar (took ~£300 off my policy), and maybe putting your parents on the policy (might not bring it down much at your age, but every little helps and it can come in useful). The trick with insurance is to avoid cars that kids have. Funnily enough, the insurance on a 6L V8 AMG Merc was the same, if not cheaper than, a lot of small "first-time-buyer" cars when I was getting quotes. Go figure...
I don't drive but the 'rents van costs them more in insurance than I'd pay for a year's travel pass... I'd get stuck in the same traffic jams either way...
I can only assume you travel less than a mile per day ? Just wondering how this links in with the OP's requirements.
Just highlighting that, depending on where you live, public transport can be a fair chunk cheaper than car running costs. If I were a student it'd be cheaper still. And my travel pass covers a fair bit more than a mile And fwiw, my OP meant to say tax and insurance... at one point though it was cheaper than the insurance alone.
With the discount I get I could get a bus to work for under £400. I pay tripple that for tax and insurance. Add on fuel and wear and tear and your dad is not far of the true costs.
What about parking costs? If I take the car to uni I always park residentially because street parking in the city centre is ludicrously expensive and using the car park would nullify taking the car to save money on a bus fare. IMO running a car is a convenience, not a money saver by any means. You mention time above, so if time is one of the things you want to get back, it may have to be a compromise in terms of £.
Don't forget to include the deprecation in the value of your car. Especially if you buy a new or reasonably new car you will be loosing hundreds (or thousands) of pounds per year in the resale value of your car.
I was looking at the similar dillema a couple of months ago. The main problem is definitely insurance. A way to get around it is to get an older car for which you can get a classic car insurance (since you've turned 25). I have insured my car (first insurance policy since passing) for under 400 pounds - have a poke at footmanjames. The caveat there is that the policy will cover you for 5000 miles, but I reckon once you blow past that, worst case scenario you buy another policy to cover you for another 5000 miles, but I haven't needed to find out yet Now I don't use my car for commuting (nowhere to park near my office) and I have to pay around 200 pounds/year for parking next to my flat. Depending on the make of the car you can get all of the fuel filter/oil change/annual service done for under 250 pounds if your dealer does a deal 6k is a bit much, but you could get a car and run it for under £3.5k. Still more expensive than a bicycle though.
We've got a brand new Citroen thingie on lease at the moment that is £120 a month all-in for 12 months. The only things on top are insurance and fuel. Theoretically we need to pay servicing, tyres etc but we won't need any of that during the lease. Plenty of these deals around if you're not fussy about what you drive.
That seems nuts, when I travelled to work by bus, some 30 years ago, it cost £10 for a weekly ticket - so even at those rates the insurance for your folks seems a bit high.
I had this same dilemma recently. It's only 5.5 miles to work, but I can't cycle every day and the bus takes an hour and is highly unreliable. From the way I saw it, there were two choices when it came to getting a car: get an older cheap runaround; or get a newer car. An older car would be cheaper to buy, but potentially cost a lot more to run due to higher mileage; a newer car would be more expensive, but would have lower running costs due to lower mileage. In the end I went for option 3 and got a motorbike. Servicing will be cheaper, it doesn't need an MOT until next August (and MOTs will be cheaper anyway), insurance is no more expensive than any car I've looked at, my bike was £1900 new with 2600 miles (just over two years old), and the fuel economy figures are *insane* on a 125cc - over 120mpg is not unusual for this model, I reckon I'll spend about £14 per month on a single tank of fuel.
I considered this route, but didn't like the idea of winters. Don't forget the additional cost of a bike license and leathers though.
£135 for the CBT, which will do for now as there's no motorways on my commute - though I suspect I'll want to do direct access before too long. Yeah, you need to budget for protective gear, but if you're not chasing the big brands you can save on price without compromising on safety. My helmet was only £130 but has a 4 star (out of 5) SHARP safety rating.
Weekly tickets become yearly tickets, For similar savings. My yearly bus pass is £408 and so many pence. For all zone travel in the north east. My car despite the fact I do less than 5k miles is 3x that in insurance / tax alone. I once worked out my yearly car cost to be between 3k to 4k a year.
My sums were based on an All Zone Network One ticket [covering all of Tyne & Wear] at [now] £1017, vs £230 VED [yay vans!] and £790 insurance [yay, chav infested shithole!]... add on fuel, MOT, spares and repairs, parking, and the fact Newcastle in particular is complete mare to drive through/around and I'll stick with the travel pass and the odd bus no-show/'Metro Apologises'
I recently did similar calculations using my last 10 months of fuel (logged using fuelly app) and last 2.5 years of owning my current car with servicing cost: (numbers are annual cost) Insurance: £1000 Car depreciation: £1280 (estimated) Road tax: £230 Fuel: £2500 Servicing: £740 TOTAL: £5750 That is to run 60 miles round trip every working day mostly on motorway, in a relatively reliable (so far, *touch wood*), old, dirty diesel Mercedes C class. Based on this calculations, it costs me £400 a month excluding insurance to run my car, 50% of which is fuel cost. If I purchase a BMW i3 REX for £320 a month, I'll still be saving on daily running costs. Only difference is that I don't get a car after 3 years. The fuel cost and servicing has always been a big part of owning a car, but I think electric cars will turn this on its head. It will cost less than £2 to run my daily commute whereas costs £8 now. Electric cars don't have engine oil and all that kind of crap, brake pads also won't wear as much, so servicing cost will go right down to half the amount every 2 years. I'm certainly really tempted.
