Originally Posted by
buzzman
uke, if you managed to purchase a 10 year old car for $2000 that has required virtually no maintenance then you are indeed lucky and rare. You are, without a doubt, a statistical anomaly.
Of course. I simply gave my personal numbers. Naturally, these will vary for everyone.
$600/year for auto insurance is cheap relative to auto insurance. But is it cheap compared to the fact that you could buy an entire new bicycle to commute on every year for the same price?- no. That you would leave it out of your calculations is interesting.
I didn't calculate it because it's irrelevant to my needs. A new bicycle each year wouldn't fill the requirements my car does, which is why I have a car as well as bicycles.
The evidence that autos are more expensive to own than a bicycle lies not even so much in their cost/mile but simply the cost to own it. Leaving out the initial cost of the vehicle and depreciation even if your car sat in the driveway for one month and didn't travel one mile it would cost you $50/month for insurance, taxes and registration costs. If both of your bicycles sat in the garage for the same period of time without moving an inch they would cost you nothing. It costs money just for a car to sit unused.
Certainly--but I don't buy cars or bicycles to have them sit unused. If I didn't need a car, I wouldn't keep one. The car I'd used before getting this one stopped working. Once it did, we canceled insurance, etc. It costs nothing to sit there now.