2 years of car ownership data

I drive a lot.

I have the typical North American mindset about car ownership: I never really think about how much it costs, I approach driving as a "necessity" and that "it costs what it costs". But a recent post by Chad Kohalyk on his 2 years of OGO Carshare data made me stop and think: "wait, what DOES driving cost me? I've always heard that car ownership costs Canadians $9000+ a year. Thats a lot of money. There's no way I'm spending that, am I? I drive a small economical car but it can't cost that much, can it? Can it!?"

Well lets ask the data.

Before going into that, I need to explain what a majority of my driving is. Very little of my driving is work-related since I work remotely. Most of my driving aside from the basics like grocery shopping, etc would be considered "recreational". I drive to things like running clinics and community events in the evenings. I spend a lot of my weekends at places like the ski hill or on hiking trails. Its not unusual for me to drive 5 hours round-trip on a Saturday for a backcountry ski day or epic hike in the rockies. I drive to visit my family in Edmonton a couple of times a year, a round-trip trip of 2000km. In short, I log a lot of recreational highway distance.  I also live ~20km out of town so even going to a coffee shop is a round trip of 40km.  Also: I just like to drive. I like the freedom. If there's a group of us going somewhere, I'm usually the one to drive.

So back to the data.

Luckily I track all of my fuel-ups in Fuelly so it's pretty easy to extract cost data. In 2014 I drove 30,821km for a total spend of $6462. In 2015 I upped the distance to almost 39,000km for a cost of $7443. Holy crap, that's a lot of money! However, its still within the range that Canadians spend on a car of similar size.

 

 

*Routine maintenance is oil changes, batteries, tires. Unexpected maintenance is the sudden failure of a part or anything outside of the expected life of a part. Depreciation is an estimate based on Kelly Black book and CanadaTrader values.

Going forward

I need to drive less. It's that simple. Thats pretty much the only cost left for me top optimize. I'm pretty diligent about my driving technique to keep fuel mileage as high as possible. I do a lot of the car maintenance myself. My car is paid off and is one of the most economical AWD small cars on the road There's not much to optimize aside from distance

On that note, I hope to move into the city within the next year and that should cut down a lot on the distance to the grocery store, errands and coffee shops. Being within walking/biking distance will be huge. I hope this will reduce my mileage by 5-10,000km per year. Aside from that, I do find a lot of joy in weekend trips,  but maybe I could optimize by having others drive or taking advantage of closer options. And one day I hope to become a member of a service like OGO Carshare to eliminate the need for a car for the "20km radius from home" trips.