That sounds more expensive than just owning a car.
> Also, many companies subsidize Waymo rides for employees as part of their commuter benefits.
Offering Waymo and taxis as "commuter" benefits (meaning, to/from the employee's home) to the employee is considered taxable income to the employee unless it's used so rarely that it is considered a nontaxable fringe benefit.
As this creates payroll headaches, most companies outside of perhaps a few in the Bay Area do not offer Waymo or taxis or black car services or Uber/Lyft as "benefits" to the employee.
This is different from the kind of travel costs that can be expensed by employees (i.e., for business trips, client meetings, etc.).
400/mo or 5000/yr for not having to worry about all that plus never playing the "wait let's circle the block, maybe a spot has opened up" game... sounds tempting.
They 100% saw the fee as solely a means to tax residents, and didn't even consider that the primary purpose could be to change behavior.
I have a friend that often parks in 30 minutes zone, for her hour-long yoga, sometimes she gets a ticket, but that's a gamble she is willing to make. You don't magically get tickets in big city, you get tickets because you ignored the rules willingly. Couldn't find parking because you were in a rush? Who decided to not account for "time to find parking time"?
Glad it works for you but it’s not unreasonable to consider it a partial cost of living in a city. It’s easy to pick out the folks that have not owned cars in dense cities.
It'll probably make it another decade. Or two.
So, we towed it up to my house with my mate's Suzuki Jeep, and I set about removing the head. Sure enough, belt snapped, wrapped round the cam pulley, all eight valves bent.
It turns out, my mum's neighbour used to use K10s as her driving school cars, and when one had been written off in an accident her husband had pulled the engine. But, now he wanted his shed cleared to get his boat in, and would I mind giving him a hand? Yes of course I'd give him a hand, and he gave me the engine.
So 25 quid or so of my hard-earned dole money and I bought a Haynes manual for the Micra (which I still have, the manual not the car), a head gasket set, a timing belt set, and six tins of beer, and set about reassembling the engine with the good head off the engine from the shed. It took a few hours of a nice Sunday afternoon and by early evening it was back together and would start and run, come up to temperature, no bubbles in the coolant, no funny noises, smooth as silk.
I put another 85,000 miles on that in the next four years before it eventually got to the point where it was just too rotten to consider welding any more.
I kind of wish I'd just chucked it into a nice dry shed and left it until I could properly strip the shell and weld it up. It would be tax and MOT exempt by now, a historic vehicle! Can you imagine, a historic D-reg Micra?
In $job-2 we had a small fleet of Toyota pickups that were leased brand new, returned to the leasing company at three years old just before they were due their first MOT. They were picked up from our workshop, and driven straight to the scrapyard and crushed. There wasn't a hope in hell of them passing even their first MOT.
Insurance: $134
Car payment: $330
Charging: $50
All-in for me is around $850 a month. Though I use it far fewer times per month than GP implies, i.e. I don't commute every day via car.
EDIT: I left out that this is a lease, so of course not including any potential depreciation, wear and tear, repairs etc, just the hard costs.
Worst case this is an option I don't take, best case is that this would give me more time (shorter commute) with the benefits of being able to read or create.
Lease or loan: $350
Parking in city: $300
Car insurance: $180
Gas: $120
License/Registration: $42 (~$500 per year)
Maintenance: $17 (~$200 per year)
If you live in the city and you can afford not driving, please put that extra $1000/month into your brokerage or HYSA
Good deal, but not available to most.
Gone are the days of $500 dollar drivable shitboxes, although you can easily get cars in the US for under a few grand. Why you'd be penny pinching and taking a loan out is beyond me. You ideally don't want a loan for anything, but some may excuse a home loan...
They cost pennies to tax and insure. They're a bit expensive to run, but they do stuff I can't easily do with something cheap to run like pull 3500kg trailers up mountains.
Assuming normal costs, you are looking $21-$22k not including taxes.
There is no way you are finding a car for $28k for just $400. Trust me.
i have a sports car and two motorcycles, and consequently, i did not buy a condo in the mission. instead, i bought a house by 19th street bart and my commute to the city is shorter than some of my coworkers who live half as far as me (by distance).
Cabin air filter is twice a year at $18 a filter (I replace them as soon as it smells weird)
Home electricity is cheap at least. (7¢/kw)
Source: https://www.pge.com/assets/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/resid...
But let's use your "worst case" scenario.
Worst case 300 mile EV charge (100%, during peak hours): about $50
Filling up a highly fuel efficient ICE vehicle: about $40
Of course, if you only charge the EV to 80% (as is recommended, and more efficient), and only set it to charge it off-peak (as is normal), then the numbers are much better. There are, of course, worst case scenarios, but it's actually hard to make an EV more expensive than an ICE vehicle.
I would say that to charge an EV with a 350 mile range to 300 miles would be about $25 here in California. Right now, a 300 mile range tank of gas is easily $60 or $70.
You have to lose the old mindset of a gas vehicle, ie, you "fill it up" once. EVs are much more convenient: it takes 10 seconds to plug it in when you get home and then the next day it's fully charged - and they're almost all grid pricing aware.
Like, on my BMW PHEV, if I try to fast charge during peak times, the charger actually makes me confirm i want to spend more, instead of trickle charging until 8PM.
>for the EV plan
Alright, I have to know what in the cali hell is going on here.
Plus how fun it is to get going in an EV leads to a lot of extra tire wear.
I've found that rotating my tires more often helps spread the wear out from having a single motor EV.
It sounds like you pay much more. Any idea why?
Another reason might be that insurance costs vary widely in the US. I recently had a reason to get an insurance quote in Utah, and it was literally one third the price that I currently pay in California.
All that said, you do seem to enjoy remarkably cheap insurance over there from my perspective. I hardly think those two factors are enough to cover such a large difference.
Maybe also lower average value of cars and less accidents here plays some part. But not sure how large that difference actually is.
Could also be some difference in the insurance premium systems: The amount of accidents changes one's cost for next year based on fixed rules - the ~$20/mo is with the highest discount (no liability insurance covered accidents in many years). The maximum it can grow to (for me, with my modern car) is ~US$100/mo, by having 4 consecutive covered accidents without accident-free years. Not really sure how wildly this varies in other countries or if the systems are similar...
The optional car insurance is more expensive, my full coverage (including damage, theft, parking, glass, fire, towing, substitute car etc.) is in the ~US$100/mo range, with ~$230 deductible on most coverage, and towing, substitute, glass repair at $0.
Who cares? Liability coverage is only there to satisfy the state and little more IMO. If you do need it the counterparty will exhaust the limits of your liability coverage and call it quits. It is not worth it for the other guy's insurance to sue you unless you're a million bucks in the red.
In general, you're almost certainly no longer on the path to calculating anything that should be called TCO once you've started removing costs associated with using the item. Apart from that, you're probably not on your way to a very meaningful cost comparison either.
Registration: $600/year
Insurance: $1,500/year
Gas: ~$2,700/year (15,000 miles @ 30mpg @ $5.50/gal)
Loan: ~$3,500/year if I had borrowed the entire price of the car on a 60 month loan and then kept the car for 15 years as the GP stated
Maintenance: Certainly less than $1,000/year, much less in most years.
And in some states registration and insurance could literally be a third of what I pay. Gas could easily be half. I can't imagine anyone is paying $12,000/year for any non-luxury vehicle.