The (Not Very Well) Hidden Cost of Operating an Automobile

by Chris McGinty of AccordingToWhim.com

Most cars are reliable as long as you maintain them. There are lemons, mostly made by Kia, but the odds are in your favor that you won’t buy a lemon. When I say lemon, I mean a car that for some reason can’t function for large sums of mileage without stranding you somewhere. I’m talking about a car that has the same issue over and over, and the fix won’t keep. I’m not talking about a car that has to go to the mechanic sometimes.

Most of my adult life, I’ve been a pizza delivery driver. This means that I’m largely unaffected by taking my vehicle in to be repaired. I put more miles on my vehicles in three months than a lot of people put on the entire year. It’s a cost of doing business. It only really matters if the repairs start trying to outpace my necessary income.

No one likes paying for a car repair. The downtime is inconvenient. It’s likely that there were other plans for that money. Life would just be good if things didn’t break as much. I’m just used to it. Back in the 1990s, I read an interesting fact. Based on tax returns, the IRS estimated that maintaining a vehicle while delivering pizza costs around 32 cents a mile. In order to adjust for inflation, and to make the math easier, I use 50 cents a mile as a guideline. When I can look back and see that I’ve driven enough miles to be below that average, it softens the blow of needing a repair.

This is the hidden cost of owning a vehicle, and it’s really not that well hidden. It’s like the kid in the hide and seek game who can’t stop giggling. We all know it exists, but we try to ignore it. The reason that the cost is seemingly hidden is because we can’t truly predict how much repairs are going to cost. Before reading that IRS figure, my hypothesis was that you should save somewhere around what you would be paying for a car payment to go toward repairs. If you didn’t end up having that many repairs, you would have money to buy a nice car after a while.

Now, I realize that it’s pretty easy to estimate an overall repair amount over the course of a few years by averaging the number of miles you drive in a given month and saving 50 cents per mile for repairs. If you have a sustained problem for over a year of running out of saved money then you maybe have a lemon, or you’re driving more miles than you estimated.

Car owners must figure these expenses as part of the cost of the vehicle, so that they don’t spend all of their available funds buying the car and then not having repair money. Having $2,000 set aside for unexpected problems during the first 4,000 miles that you drive a recently purchased car is a good idea anyway. You might be able to get away with not saving for repairs if you have a warranty and full coverage insurance, but even then I would suggest saving for problems. Car insurance companies have been known to not honor their agreements on loopholes, and Kia screwed me over on the bumper to bumper warranty I paid for by not fixing an engine that broke after only 35,000 miles. They blamed it on me, because I hadn’t kept all of my oil change receipts. The two mechanics that I talked to said that the engine shouldn’t have died that soon anyway.

When I first started delivering, I never did anything preventative. It made more sense to me to top off my oil than to get a small leak repaired. I drive a lot of miles though, and small leaks become big leaks fast with big sums of miles. Once I prioritized keeping my cars as close to optimal as I could, my cars have become more reliable overall. Find a trustworthy mechanic and keep your vehicles in good running condition as a budget item, so that your emergency fund isn’t nicknamed “the unforeseen car repair fund.”

Chris McGinty is a blogger who isn’t going to know what to do with himself when he quits delivering and drives like a normal person.