We just replaced my car in December, and I thought it would be a good idea to see how much my car was really costing me. I included every expense - purchase price spread out over 170K miles, gas, maintenance, insurance, repairs (which there aren't any yet), and even car washes. I figured if the spreadsheet is doing the hard work I'd check a bunch of calculations like cost/mile, miles/$, $/day, $/month, and of course gas mileage.
Wow, what an eye opener! I bought a basic car, stick shift, base model Kia Soul, new. I know that people around here say not to buy a new car, but buying a used Soul doesn't save that much, they are so inexpensive new that they just don't go down in value all that fast. Buying used I would have had about the same cost per mile, but for a shorter length of time, and I want this car to last me until ER!
Anyways, I can see that my car is costing me about $0.29 per mile, and the amount I drive this is about $10 a day! My goodness. I don't see a way of changing this quickly, but in the long run I'd sure like to drive less! At least DH and I carpool, I'd hate to pay double this just to get to and from work! Though, we do have a second car with expenses, so we do pay more than $10/day to have cars, even though it isn't driven all that much.
Just thought this could be helpful to others about their car costs. Once I have a year in with this car I'm going to add it all up to get an annual total, that will be sobering I'm sure.