The IRS numbers assume a newish car (more expensive) that gets poor fuel mileage. It is probably correct for the average car, but there is no reason you need to be average - unless you want to.
You have to account everything, not just fuel, from car depreciation, servicing (oil changes,...), normal wear (brakes, tires,...), occasional replacements (batteries, wipers, ...), etc. If you drive 20.000kms per year, and a yearly service (oil, filters,...) costs 200eur, just that adds aditional 0.01eur/km. Two sets of tires (winter/summer) are ~2300eur + 8 changes (8~40eur) adds an additional (almost) ~1k eur in four years, 1 more cent. Insurance, registration.. 3, 4 cents. etc.
*that's the untaxed amount you get reimbursed for if you use your own car for a business trip.
The other is, given I'm going to own a car already, what's the difference between a shorter commute and a longer one? That's going to be a lower number per mile. A big chunk of the vehicle's depreciation is a result of years rather than miles, insurance doesn't generally track how many miles you drive and charge extra if you drive more, the registration and tax isn't any different etc.
The second one is how a lot of people end up all the way out in the suburbs. They can't afford to live in the part of the city that makes it viable to not have a car at all, but once you have a car as a sunk cost, another ten or twenty (or thirty or ...) miles in exchange for saving hundreds of thousands of dollars on housing starts to look like a good deal.
Though the huge factor people commonly forget is their own time. If your time is worth $25/hour then a half hour each way on your commute is $6500/year. And that's assuming you're only further away from work and not also further away from whatever you do on weekends.
Ehhhh, I'd say that it's not that skewed towards age of the vechile beyond common correlations:
- usually more years = more miles
- cars < 5 years are usually in warranty and fetch a premium
Mine does: in 5000km increments. (Australia)
But the warranty period is a huge amount of value, and there are others, e.g. newer cars are safer and have whatever other improvements so older cars aren't worth as much regardless of milage. Then many repairs are age related rather than mileage related, e.g. a car exposed to the elements will rust or experience day/night thermal stress even if you don't drive it.
> Mine does: in 5000km increments. (Australia)
Let me rephrase this. The insurance cost does not scale linearly with miles driven.
Insurance has interesting edge cases, like 3rd party can be more expensive than comprehensive, as risky drivers go for the former.
I've had insurance before, where putting in a higher mileage lowers the premium. I assume there's a lower bound where you start getting into Sunday driver territory where risks start increasing?
On a marginal basis ("what does it cost me to drive one extra mile?"), I think my cost is about 7-9 US cents on my electric and about 12-15 US cents on my wife's CR-V. On an overall basis ("what does it cost me in total for the cars divided by how many miles I drove?"), the figures are more like $1/mile for the electric (still have a car payment, full insurance, and only drive 4500 miles/year) and $0.30-$0.40/mile for the Honda (paid off, so just carrying insurance, registration, taxes, and some timed maintenance items)
If we moved farther away, our fixed costs stay about the same, and it's only the variable costs that go up.
Note that I do my own maintenance on Saturdays, so I don't put a monetary value on my time. However before you say I should account for my time, do you account for your time taking the car to the shop - I started doing that a few years ago and stopped because I realized that for most things I could get it done faster myself than take it in. (taking it in accounting for all time getting the car to the shop, arranging rides (sometimes a loaner car, sometimes my wife's time), and paperwork. When doing the work myself I can stop at the auto parts store next to the grocery store and so much less time needs to be accounted for there.
My estimation is that a large portion of public transport users only use it for part of their transport needs thus making the fixed costs of car ownership a sunk cost.
Therefore, the variables costs; gas (or electricity) and maintenance make the most sense to use in living cost estimations. Even at the extreme end where you can live in the middle of a city and use public transport for mostly everything, you'd still need a car or a friend with one to go skiing.
I'd be curious how many miles the grandparent has on the car though. My per-mile costs are also sky-high (because it's 10 years old and only has about 40k miles on it - I think it works out to $0.75/mile or so), but the flip side is that if this drives like a normal Honda it should be good for another 150k miles and, if I don't get into an accident or change my driving habits, I will never need to purchase another car.
We could have a debate about including it in a per mile rate, rather than splitting it out, but ultimately they are costs car owners have to pay, and non car owners don't.
A sunk cost is still a cost. A cost you have to pay is still a cost.
I think we could say it switches from a necessity to a leisure expense, and that city dwelling households can get most of what they want from a single car vs. several.
Clearly if a household moves from several cars to one car, fixed costs will decrease, which seems like an argument to measure fixed costs.
I'd agree with your point about vehicles potentially being leisure expenses, you could perhaps go further and start dividing up those fixed costs between leisure use, and business use. I'd even accept the argument that if you need a car, your leisure transport should be free from the fixed costs, as they have to be borne anyway, but they do have to be accounted for somewhere.
I've bought $500 cars before. Didn't last too long (it was a nice car, but it was an interference engine and broke the timing chain), but averaged 10 cents per mile.
People who spend 45 cents per mile are the type who lease their cars or buy new cars regularly. Lots of us out here make do happily with far less.
https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/the-true-cost-of-...
Now, I will admit that it is possible to bring your cost per mile down somewhat. That’s one of my own specialties, which is why I still keep a car of my own around for affordable family roadtrips. If you buy the right car for $5,000, you might be able to squeeze 100,000 miles out of it with no major repairs. In this case the car depreciation is 5 cents per mile.
Gas, at $3.50 per 35 miles (assuming 35MPG), is 10 cents/mile Tires, at $300 per 50,000 miles are 0.6 cents Oil, at $25 per 5,000 miles is 0.5 cents Miscellaneous things like wipers and occasional maintenance visits: $200 per 20,000 miles = 1 cent
So the ultimate cheap driving in a paid-off economy car still costs at least 17 cents per mile.
Newer vehicles are a lot better, but cars age quite a lot faster with salted roads.