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€6k/year is a crazy price for a car. For me insurance, tax, servicing and depreciation are about £1k/year. And also that's an extremely cheap train ticket. In the UK it would be 10x that easily.


That depreciation number is extremely suspicious, unless your car is very old/cheap in which case your service number is suspicious (or you value your time at close to 0 GBP per hour).

Also, your car has to park somewhere presumably, which uses land, and I assume your car uses fuel (or electricity, but unlikely if your car is that cheap)


I bought it for £12k when it was 3 years old (Skoda Octavia) and I'm hoping it will last 20 years at least. Service is like £200, insurance £230, MOT £50, tax £130 or something. Ok maybe more like £1.3k. Still waaaay less than €6k.

Park it on the drive. Yeah I wasn't including fuel costs because they depend on how much you drive. I'm probably about at about £500/year at most (I work from home).

When I commuted by car it would have been maybe £1k/year (£10/day but I lift shared).


Ah, okay, so the deprecation is more "this is what I imagine the deprecation to be" than anything else. You may expect maintenance costs to... increase as it gets older.


Yeah that is true, but even extremely pessimistically there's no way I'd get near €6k/year. My last car only cost £4.2k (in today's money) and that lasted for 10 years.


… Do you get free petrol?


Fuel, mandatory insurance, yearly service (also mandatory here), highway tolls, parking fees, usually even the parking space at home, in apartments,...

Just goes on and on


It's absolutely not crazy, and I don't know how a car could only cost you 1k/year. This is just an example but has the average cost of motoring in Ireland in 2019 at almost 11k€/year : https://www.theaa.ie/motoring-advice/cost-of-motoring/.

One of the issues with trains is that people often severely underestimate the true total cost of car trips.


£5k/yr would be fairly typical for lease of an average family car in the UK I think. Quite low, even.

Maybe you can get it down to £1k/year by driving an old car that you’ve fully paid off (in which case you’re ignoring the amorted cost), never needs maintenance, has a low value to minimise depreciation and insurance etc., but even then 2-3x that wouldn’t be uncommon.


But what about fuel?




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