Hi all - I know electric cars have been discussed quite a bit here, so if this question has been asked, I'll gladly take down this post (or link to the original thread).
I'm considering selling my gas car and buying an electric. I work from home and do my errands with my bike, so I hardly use my car at all, which makes me skeptical that I even need to own a car.
About a year ago, I made a spreadsheet to compare the cost of owning my current car vs. changing to a Zipcar membership. Since comparing ownership vs. rental/subscription costs is an apples/oranges comparison, my goal was to get a rough estimate on a monthly/annual cost of ownership. Part of the challenge was sorting out time-based costs, such as insurance and registration, with milage-based costs, such as maintenance and gas. I came up with the following points:
- Time-based costs:
- Milage-based costs:
I my annual mileage and the expected remaining miles on the car to estimate the remaining lifetime of this car in years, allowing me to calculate both the time- and miles-based costs. This gave me a rough idea of what this car should cost per month. Comparing to Zipcar, keeping the car ended up being better.
However, I've recently been learning about electric cars and how they're better at everything. I'm sold on the idea that whenever I'm in the market for a new* car, I'll be getting an EV.
Where I'm getting tripped up at this point is deciding between selling my car now, or keeping it until it breaks down and getting a new* EV at that point.I love making spreadsheets. I want to be able to break this down in terms of costs, rather than make this decision on emotion. But I'm not sure what factors I should be considering to make this call.
What are your thoughts?
*new to me. I want a brand-new Tesla real bad but that's going to have to wait until I'm FIREd.