Comment on Arguing for the car as a good method of transportation is like arguing that having personal diesel generator to power you home is a good idea

• Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I rented a car for a week recently: $1000

  I’ve owned my car (small pickup) for 20 years now, paid $11000 for it. I’ve put nothing but, oil changes, tires, brakes, regular maintenance. Gas is a wash because a rental would use the same gas.

  If I rented a car 2 or 3 times a year I would’ve paid as much as for my little pickup.

  OP is clueless.

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  • birdwing@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    My bike cost me €800 in 10 years.

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  • danielquinn@lemmy.ca ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Your math is waaaaay off. Let me help you.:

    Let’s assume that you commute a rather conservative distance of just 25mi to work. That’s 50mi/day, 5 days/wk, plus let’s say half that over the weekend. Assuming an (again, generous) fuel efficiency for your truck at 25mpg, given a ballpark 300mi/week, that’s 12 gallons of fuel/week. The current average price of gas in the US is a remarkably low $3.071, and that adds up to $36.85/week.

    Now consider the costs of maintenance. If you’ve really had zero problems in the last 20 years on a pickup truck (honestly this is far from average), you likely did an oil change every 3 months at the very least. These days it’ll run you about $100.

    In terms of insurance, I asked this site for the average cost of insuring a Toyota pickup truck for one year: $1937. Let’s be grossly optimistic and pretend that those rates will never go up.

    Initial cost: (Provided)                    = 11000.00
    Fuel costs: (50 × 6 ÷ 25 × 3.071 × 52 × 20) = 38326.08
    Oil changes: ($100 × 4 × 20)                =  8000.00
    Insurance: (1937 × 20)                      = 38740.00
    Parking:                                    = ?
    ------------------------------------------------------
    Total                                         96066.08
    

    Excluding the cost of parking, the purchase of your miracle never-needs-repair truck if purchased today would be roughly $100,000. Note also how very conservative these values are. It’s entirely possible that your real costs are well above what I’ve stated here.

    The total cost of the rental was $1000 plus fuel costs, so using our above figures, that’s a grand total of $1042.99 assuming you drove it roughly 50mi/day for all 7 days of the week. That’s assuming that you don’t opt for the much lower rates that appear to be available to you in the area of $250 - $350/week.

    So, if you didn’t own a car and instead only rented on when you needed to “move a couch”, you would save just over $95,000. In other words, your insistence that you absolutely must own your own vehicle has cost you the equivalent of a downpayment on a house.

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