PeachParts Mercedes-Benz Forum - View Single Post

Angel · #8 09-11-2008, 10:23 AM

Better way ? no, you are on the right track. You simply have to estimate what maintenance your car needs (what kind of car do you have ? W123 diesels need valve adjustments, lots of W126's eat up front suspension parts every 100k, timing chains, cleaning, new tires, oil/filter changes...)
and average it out like that. If my old 240D requried a new fuel filter at $10/set every 50K miles, then filters would cost .02 cents per mile, add that to your 25c/mi and the cost of all other parts/labor and you'll start getting good numbers.

I make money travelling at $.50/mile driving my 1997 Jetta - it sips gas and I make no payments on it, so lots of costs are cheap. I have not amortized that over 10 years, but it will work until I find something I can afford and like better =)

One thing that I we at msshop discount a lot is time. Professional mechanic time is on the order of $80-100 per hour of labor. My old company charged me (as an engineer ) to projects at mroe thant $70/hour. (I surely didnt make that much, but with insurance, travel, 401K, administria, it was probably close...) You can claim that working on your car is a hobby, and therefore requires zero time and you wouldnt be wrong
For me, that changed when I started having kids- its easy for me to justify paying someone $60 for an alignment when I could pull favors and do it myself, but it'd take me an entire evening away from my family. I can't quite put a number on my time, but since my time is limited, it does have a monetary value.
You could even argue that, if you get paid by the hour; every hour spent working on the car is time that you could be working (work some overtime?) and making money - so if you make $35/hr on overtime then you are actually losing $35/hr by working on your car.... Thats a stretch, but not so much to the people I know that require OT to survive (not a good way to live IMHO). This $35/h would be money 'spent' against money saved by not paying someone else to do it, my point is that our time on this earth is limited, and should be valuable.
this presumes that your car needs X hours per year for maintenance (call a dealer- they have a book that tells them how long it takes to do each and every type of maintenance and component replacement) and doesn't break down unexpectedly. If it does, then you need to put a cost on the inconvenience that it has caused. Will it cost to tow the car home ? time spent getting a tow/friend to help, any cost to missing the appointment you were driving to in the first place ? many salesmen wont drive an older car, because statistically, that older car is more likely to break and cause them to miss a meeting, and possibly lose a client.

Another cost of driving is insurance - easy to add that up on a per mile basis (cost of insurance per year / miles driven per year. This presumes that you can live without driving. In addition in insurance, add taxes, registration fees (some states tax you on the value of your car every year- I'd move if OH did this =)
If you could forgo a car and take a bus, you'd have to subtract the bus costs from the driving costs to see how much extra a car costs you (if thats what you wanted to see)

On the very long view, you could price out the cost of replacing your car. Its possible to make your car last 20 years, but costs will change a lot if you do this (I'd budget for a new transmission if I planned on keeping a car 20 years....) I think that most people calculate these costs over 5 or 7 years- the average life of a new car these days. Planning the cost of car replacement should definitely be included if you are trying to calculate the cost of "driving"

Just add up the cost of repair/maintenance parts, fuel and oil, for 5 years, and call it a day =)

-John