Car rentals are exceptionally cheap compared to paying to own and drive a car capable of hauling a couch for that one time 4 years ago when you needed that.
Car rentals are exceptionally cheap compared to paying to own and drive a car capable of hauling a couch for that one time 4 years ago when you needed that.
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.
birdwing@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 hours ago
My bike cost me €800 in 10 years.
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.
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
$1000plus fuel costs, so using our above figures, that’s a grand total of$1042.99assuming 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.