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Comment by rdm_blackhole | Hacker News Reader

I am not surprised honestly. Cars are a money pit. They cost a lot to run and a lot to buy and depreciate in value.

Take for example our car: - we bought a used 2007 Yaris 3 years ago for AUD$ 6K. - every year we have to pay a registration fee in Australia which is AUD$ 650. - insurance is $AUD 200 per year - car service every 6 months is AUD$ 330. - random repairs in the last 3 years: AUD$ 700 - Petrol cost is AUD $60 every second month on average.

We only use the car on the weekend to go to the beach 1h30 hours away, to buy groceries and visit my wife's family 600 km from where we live twice a year.

The total cost of ownership: AUD$ 12310 The car is probably worth AUD$ 4.5k now and we only drove 35k km in the last 3 years as we use public transports a lot.

The only reason that we have kept it around is for the what ifs.

I am starting to think that this is probably the last car that we will own.

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That insurance of $200/year (AUD, let alone USD) sounds super cheap. Also $1.5k deprivation for 3 years of use sounds super good as well. Is car ownership in Australia really that cheap?

I drive even less than you do (6k for around 3 years), and bought new as well, but find the car super useful because of our toddler, Uber simply doesn’t do car seats well and the bus doesn’t go to the pediatrician.

His car is a Yaris, one of the smallest Toyotas (comparatively) that have ever been made, and Australia scales registration to size/purpose of the vehicle.

Larger SUV's or 4WD's have anything in the $300-$600 yearly registration fee, ~1500-2k for yearly insurance, and a LOT more on fuel.

More specifically, Australian vehicle registration fees, in the three states I've owned vehicles, are based on the number of cylinders and whether the vehicle is used for commercial or private use.

It's not only cylinders. A 2.5L 4cyl diesel 4WD is more than a 2.5L 4cyl petrol sedan.

Oh, I wasn’t aware of that. Are you taking about the registration component only, or does this include the compulsory third party bodily insurance? I guess the two are wedded, so it’s sort of an academic distinction.

I live in Tasmania, and this page[1] seems to support my claim. Most of my previous vehicle registrations have been in South Australia where the fee schedule is structured similarly to Tasmania, last time I checked.

Of course the voluntary insurance component, ie. fire / theft / third-party property / comprehensive, is going to depend on a few factors, predominantly vehicle type and age, garaging address, driver age and gender, driver history, insurance-claim history.

1. https://www.transport.tas.gov.au/fees_forms/registration_lic...

My vehicles have all been in WA. I haven't looked into it to closely, but I imagine they'd be the same. You're right, it's probably the insurance side of things that increases it.

That still seems quite reasonable vs where I live in the Seattle area. Well, put gasoline costs are much cheaper, and we probably do t pay for parking as often, but otherwise I was expecting Australia to be a lot more expensive like Europe is.

So you spent $2500 per year on having a car. How much would those 6x 600km trips cost you? Then add in the beach trips, each of those is going to cost a fortune with Uber or over $100 if you hire a car.

12,000km per year in Uber’s or hire cars will cost you far more than $2500. Sounds like you’re the perfectly rational car owner. As are a lot of people, this isn’t isolated to US only.

Not sure about Australia but the situation of living without a car in the US is dismal. We spent decades making sprawling suburbs and exhurbs that cannot be lived in without a car and there is much apathy and even antagonism in the US to change that.

I regularly go weeks without driving anywhere and don’t live in a city just reasonably close to mass transit. So, while I do live in the US I treat a car as an affordable luxury not a requirement

I think generally mass transit is pretty bad in the US compared to most other cities in the world, but it does vary quite a bit depending on where you live since the US is such a large place and diverse place, so it always makes talking about this stuff difficult. A better qualification of my above comment is to say a significant enough fraction of people in the US live in situations that require them to have a car. If anything, having access to mass transit that enables a decent enough quality of life is the exception (which says something given how large the US is).

While the US has an incredible amount of land, most people live on a tiny fraction of it.

NYC for example is ~1/38th the US population on (including parks and office space for commuters) ~1/12,000 the the land area of the US. It’s hard to do these kind of comparisons across the US, but the car culture has a lot more to do with how rich the US is than absolute need. Consider the school buss system is a form of mass transit available across most of the US. It’s inexpensive and something similar would work if most people could not afford cars.

> just reasonably close to mass transit

The problem is not that people live outside of cities, it's that many people do not live near viable mass-transit options.

Yeah, I think most of the people killing off the personal car live in bubbles.

>Mass transit will replace car ownership

Mass transit sucks in a lot of places. Where I'm from, the bus came every hour, stopped running before evening and covered only some of the town.

>Self-driving cars are here in a few years

I'm still waiting for the self-driving tech companies to start doing tests in the Finnish Lapland during winter.

Living with a car in the US, OTOH, is pretty awesome. Roads are usually pretty great, and you can go on hikes and road trips without it being a logistical nightmare.

I grew up in the U.S. suburbs without a car — I only got a car when I was 21. This was because my office moved to a completely transit and pedestrian-hostile location. I’m now living and working downtown and am again car free. Unless you’re at the suburban-rural edge, it’s quite possible to live car free.

Yep. I wouldn't be surprised if part of the US decrease in ownership has to do with people moving closer and closer to major cities. In a good number of them, if you're truly centrally-located (not in the suburbs) you can make do with the bus system.

Do you live in a city?

We've been able to get by on GoGet and Car Next Door for the occasional trip to the shops (although we mostly get groceries delivered; it saves time and allows you to pre-plan what you need easier) or for a weekend away. Works out much much cheaper than owning a car.

Some people have pointed out that some numbers are probably off, they may be right. I don't have the exact numbers in my head as the last time I used the car was a few weeks ago actually as my wife usually drives it more than me.

The petrol cost is averaged and when I say AUD$60 every 2 months, it really depends on the trips we make and if we go see my in-laws.

I guess what's important is the trend, the first year we owned the car, we drove everywhere because we were living in the outer suburbs but then we moved closer to the city. So we barely touch the car these days.

We use it even less in winter as its too cold to go to the beach, so I can safely say that for the next 3 months we are probably going to be using the car once a week to go buy groceries at the supermarket that is located about 5km from where we live. So we will average 10km per week for the next 12 to 15 weeks. That would translate in maybe a full tank of gas if that.

All in all, if I average the cost of petrol over the last 3 years, it's probably close to the numbers I gave, plus or minus a few hundred dollars.

As for the insurance, we both have a clean driving record(no tickets ever), we don't drive a lot and we live in a very safe suburb and keep the car in a closed/locked garage overnight. We also have the lowest tier in terms of insurance and we wouldn't get much back if we were to total the car.

Finally, as for the current value of the car, I just had a quick look on google and those were the first numbers I could find. I presume that if we were to sell it we probably would get less maybe $AUD 3.5k.

You bought a cheap throw away car, of course it's losing money. How is that worth making broad arguments about an entire industry?

Any car will depreciate (except for collectors items). Cars don't make money, they aren't an investment, unless you're using them to run a business.

How can petrol cost $30 a month if you only travel 35 km in 3 years?

Don't be so pedantic, he obviously meant 35km per month as he already explained he only uses it on weekends or grocery shopping.

He says 35k km over 3 years so nearly 12,000km per year. He claims gas is $360 per year. That would get you about 5,000km in a small car like he describes. He’s obviously understated the gas cost, probably by leaving out the larger than normal costs when taking the longer trips to the beach/wife’s family. $30 (400km) of usage a month driving to the shops/short trips sounds about right.

Its an average, sometimes we go months without touching the car, some months we use it every day.

As for the 35000km in the last 3 years, that's an estimate.

It may very well be 30k or 40k and as for petrol, we used to drive a lot the first year we got the car but since we moved closer to the city, we started using less and less so, for example, during the last 12 months, we only filled the tank maybe 7 or 8 times and its a small tank, probably worth 60 dollars each time.

Again all the numbers I gave are estimates and in the end, the total ownership cost may be off by plus or minus $AUD 1k.

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