So we're all paying roughly the same whether diesel or LPG.
Its also largely why i went electric with the daily. My commute is 80miles a day.
I had a 9 year old 330d, which was costing about 17p a mile. Round trip commute was about £13 a day. For a months commuting say 20 trips a month it was around £260 in diesel a month. It was also at the age where every month it was needing something fixing, often minor ofcourse, but still requiring time and effort.
Same commute in the EV costs about £2 a day in electricity, or 40quid a month. The first EV i leased was £260 a month, basically paid for itself by the time you'd taken fuel and tax into account, not to mention it was new, reliable and had a warranty.
The Skoda is a bit more expensive at £380 a month, but fuels also gone up (if i still had the 330d i'd be paying £15-16 a day now), and its a bigger, nicer car with more range, so i'm happy with the extra cost.
Clearly its not for everyone, but when the fuel savings mean its almost free it can really work in your favour. Theres no way i'd have paid those monthly payments for a new ICE car.
Aragorn wrote:
Its also largely why i went electric with the daily. My commute is 80miles a day.
I had a 9 year old 330d, which was costing about 17p a mile. Round trip commute was about £13 a day. For a months commuting say 20 trips a month it was around £260 in diesel a month. It was also at the age where every month it was needing something fixing, often minor ofcourse, but still requiring time and effort.
Same commute in the EV costs about £2 a day in electricity, or 40quid a month. The first EV i leased was £260 a month, basically paid for itself by the time you'd taken fuel and tax into account, not to mention it was new, reliable and had a warranty.
The Skoda is a bit more expensive at £380 a month, but fuels also gone up (if i still had the 330d i'd be paying £15-16 a day now), and its a bigger, nicer car with more range, so i'm happy with the extra cost.
Clearly its not for everyone, but when the fuel savings mean its almost free it can really work in your favour. Theres no way i'd have paid those monthly payments for a new ICE car.
There is no way that I would spend that sort of money on ANY car especially one that i will never own! Leasing a car is a mug's game I would rather pay off the mortgage with the money.
I am a fervent advocate of bangernomics. Buy 10-15 year old a quality car for £2-5K then run it until it fails emissions or there is some major fault. Rince & repeat.
I had an Audi A6 Quattro 2.7T for eight years that cost me £2K to buy & another £2K in servicing & repairs. It went like a rocket but only did 25mpg. I drove it for over 70K miles.
I have a 2007 Jaguar S-type 2.7D that cost me £2K about 18 months ago plus another £1.5K to get it mechanically reliable with new injectors etc . It's cosmetically immaculate & drives like a dream giving 34mpg cruising at 70+mph on my regular commute 90 miles each way. Even with the cost of fuel & even if the car died tomorrow I'm still quids in compared to leasing a car especially as I've now reduced my work so I'm only doing my 180 mile round trip 5-6 times a month. I'm not committed to paying the lease cost for the next 2.5 years either.
That was also my approach for a long time tbh, you'll note from my signature i've got a 22 year old Audi and a 28 year old Range Rover :P
However old vehicles are unreliable, and i got fed up with being stuck outside on the driveway in the rain, trying to fix some critical issue ready for work in the morning. With the young family arriving, time to work on things reduced, but things still broke and needing sorting, and wifey becomes less tolerant of breakdowns when theres kids in the car!
I ended up buying the 330d with a 6 grand loan, hoping to get something newer and less breaky. Unfortunately 9 year old cars also need fixing, albeit less often and generally less critical failures. The 6 grand loan also meant i was paying out a couple hundred pounds every month. It also needed various bits of the front suspension replacing, a new set of wheels (that era of BMW are prone to cracked alloys), brakes, and various other fixes including a new throttle body.
Leasing the B250 was a bit of an impulse. For the money i'm spending on fuel, i instead get a new car. Total monthly spend actually went down significantly as i sold the beemer and paid off the loan, so instead of paying loan + fuel + tax + repairs, i was paying the lease fee and a small amount of electricity. It didnt need fixing and just got driven for 25k.
The Skoda is rather expensive, i agree. That ones not a lease however, it was bought with an interest free government loan scheme, so it'll be mine once its paid off. and yea, 380quid a month is a lot of dough. However if i still had the beemer i'd be over 320quid a month in diesel alone, plus tax, MOT's, repairs etc, and i know from the person i sold it to that it cost him a bunch more money with various other bits needing sorted in the time hes had it.
End of the day you need to look at the total cost you put into the car over a period of time. Financing buying it, depreciation, repairs, fuel, insurance, tax etc etc. Add it all up, and produce a cost per mile. Bangernomics is mostly about luck, but it also relies on you having time to fix the car and do the repairs yourself. You might get lucky and you buy something nice for 2 grand and it just works for years with minimal issues. You also might buy something nice for 2 grand and literally everything explodes inside a year costing you thousands in repairs (or you skip the whole car and buy again) Your trading money for time at that point.
In this instance, your comparing buying an expensive car with next to no running costs, with a cheap car with high running costs and a large input of time required. It all comes down to how many miles you do. If you dont do many miles, the fixed costs of buying the expensive car become a burden. But if you do lots of miles, the fuel is the primary cost, and being able to reduce that cost by 10x makes a huge difference to how the whole thing stacks up.
Even taking your example of your Jag, 180miles is costing you 40quid. As you say your mileage is reduced, but even 6 times a month its £240 a month in diesel. If you were doing double the trips your forking over £480 a month in diesel. Car costs are low, but fuel is huge. If you could instead reduce that fuel bill from £480 to £54, you've now got a bunch of cash you could use towards a car payment instead. Infact you could pay the £380 i'm paying for the Skoda and still have cash left over ;)
The way I do bangernomics is to have N+1 Bangers where N is the number of cars that absolutely have to work the next morning. The +1 is the one I fix over the weekend if it's not running. The cheapest car in the fleet is a Diseasal Golf GTDi which does help the average if not the planet.
Although, the original form of Bangernomics was to buy a car with an MOT for £500 and spend nothing on it and scrap it when it breaks. Clearly we're all a bit attached to our old cars for that :)
I haven’t been following this thread very closely as the lead topic doesn’t really affect me at all on this side of the pond, but I’m very close to Morat on his Bangernomics theory. Besides the LR’s, my wife has an 04 V6 Mustang, which is a terrible winter car for this area, hence 2 LR’s. We’ve had the Stang for 14 years. 2 weeks ago it had its first mechanical failure (other than power window switches). The ignition coil pack failed one cylinder. I wish I could say the same for the LR’s, but I really love them anyway.
Now with spring here, she’s driving her Stang again, and I’m driving the P38 while I sort out LR issues on the Disco.
Our other 2 vehicles are an 83 Goldwing and an 86 Westfalia Vanagon.
I realise that I am really referring to up market bangernomics. The only time I have really gone the true bangernomics route was when I went to work in France in 1997 & bought a used BMW 320 automatic for 8,000 francs (about £800) as a temporary measure as an alternative to renting a car. I ended up keeping the car for ten years until it died with some mysterious electrical fault that the garage couldn't diagnose. Apart from servicing & tyres the only work it ever needed was a replacement fuel tank that was leaking. I did about 100K km & drove it all over Europe & it never let me down until that final breakdown when it just died in a very inconvenient place near Nice airport.
I agree that it is helpful to have more than one car. I am currently running three. The Jaguar S-type for my 180 round trip on the A14. A Smart FourTwo for local-ish journeys as my wife is learning to drive. Finally my 2001 Vogue that I bought in 2011 for £4K. I must admit that I knew nothing about Range Rovers or EAS or V8s etc & only bought it because my ex-wife wanted one. I recognised at the time that I was buying cheaply a luxury car with original sale price of over £50K but would have to pay over the years with higher fuel consumption. I've loved it & had relatively few issues over the eleven years & >90K miles that I have put on it. I really lucked out with my purchase as it was in such great condition & hadn't been buggered up by previous owners. A couple of years ago we bought a cottage in Brittany & now spend just over 50% of our time there. The P38 has done sterling service back & forward dozens of times loaded up in both directions. It's now registered on French plates so I don't have to pay road tax any more. Best of all the high cost of fuel has been solved as it happily runs on E85 (85% bioethanol) widely available in France & currently around 75c/L versus €1.75 for E10. Fuel consumption is around 15mpg versus 18mpg but the cost is so much less it's the equivalent of getting about 35mpg. I am conscious that it is the only car I have in France so I am now paying particular attention to improving the reliability of the P38. The one time it was off the road waiting for parts after the water pump failed & took out the serpentine belt & fan I was able to hire a car from a local supermarket for just €7/day plus 15c/km or a fraction of the cost from Avis or Hertz.
yea i've also gone with N+1. Still managed to bite me a few times though.
A couple years ago the A4 steering rack failed in early December, removed it (in the awful weather) and sent for a rebuild, but took quite a few weeks due to the time of year. Around the same time, noticed a small leak from the radiator on the P38 but was managable with just top ups for local running. Until one morning it was no longer a small leak... I had the EV at work, and the wife managed to arrive at work (5 miles up the road) with the temperature needle jammed in the red. Took two kettle fulls of water to fill it back up again and she made it home again after. Literal stream of water pouring out of it when it was running! Except now we were down to N-1 cars! I was straight online to get a new rad, which arrived a few days later, went out in the evening and fitted it to discover water pissing out the end tank. It had got cracked in shipping. Refund applied for and another new rad sent out.
That lot had the wife somewhat pissed 😂
Even this year, the A4 failed its MOT in January and the weather was awful so i had been putting off fixing it. In the 2.5 months we were stuck with only the P38, it managed to kill its MAF and kill an ABS sensor. MAF was especially bad as while i could get it started with it unplugged, wifey couldnt resulting in her ending up stuck in the nursery car park. 💖