Your number seems very you-specific. Back-of-the-envelope math, seems like you drive <7K miles per year, which is less than half of what an average driver does. You are also accounting for $0 in tolls, parking, insurance, repairs or maintenance, registration, inspection, an occasional ticket, etc.
I totally believe that it is possible that these are indeed your costs but I'll give you a counter-example.
My Highlander was about $50K all in. Let's say I keep it for 10 years, that's $5 per year right there. Insurance is about $1.5K so we're at $6.5K and that's a good deal for around here. If we drive into Manhattan on a weekday, it's about $50 to leave the car in a lot somewhere in Midtown. If I do that just once a month, that's another $600, so we're at $7.1K already. We actually don't put a ton of mileage on and it's a hybrid so our gas costs are about the same as yours. That's $8k. I am leaving out a bunch of other stuff (registration, inspection, tolls - can easily be around $10 to cross into or out of Manhattan, an occasional ticket, parking meters, etc.)
I think my car usage scenario is pretty light (wife and I both WFH) compares to most people but I can easily get to $10K for one car based on where we live. Some of this can be avoided (eg sit longer in traffic to avoid a toll road, go slow to avoid tickets, only go into NYC on Sunday when you can get a free spot more easily, could have bought a used car, etc.) - just making it obvious that you can EASILY get to $10K.
> My Highlander was about $50K all in. Let's say I keep it for 10 years, that's $5 per year right there.
Not really, the car doesn't evaporate on year 10. On a quick search I see 2013 Highlanders (you didn't mention a year but those are 10 years old now) selling from ~14K to ~20K. So looks like you'd get about a third of the purchase cost back when you sell it.
That's a 50K car though. If you like to spend on that, great. But it doesn't mean that owning a car has to cost that much. People who like to minimize car costs (like me) will buy a 5-8K used car and drive it forever, bringing the annualized cost down to just a few hundred dollars.
> I can easily get to $10K for one car
Certainly. Or 100K, or even more. I know someone who spends well over a million dollars a year in cars! The sky is the limit. But nobody needs to do that. If all one needs is a car for transportation, it can be had for under 1K a year.
Half of your cost is your $50k car choice, though, and doesn't include resale value of around $15k (I'm looking at 2013 highlander prices. It's probably more because you chose a bunch of upgrades, see below). Drops your yearly costs by $1.5k right there.
Get a reasonable car for $25k-35k and your costs drop significantly. Hell, your $50k number means you chose to have a bunch of upgrades. The base MSRP is $36k, and I'm seeing dealer advertised prices of $37k near me. I have to go all the way up to the "Platinum" tier to find $50k prices.
Thank you. I am extremely happy with my purchase and it's well worth the cost.
My point to the GP was that it's trivially doable to get to 10k a year ballpark car cost without doing anything too crazy.
If you are curious, it's a hybrid XLE with AWD. I wanted the hybrid, AWD is standard here in the north east and XLE is the lowest model that comes with (fake) leather seats which we wanted due to having small kids.
Yeah maybe so. I wfh and only do a couple of road trips a year - tolls are inapplicable, I barely ever need to pay for parking, and of course there’s occasional maintenance costs but I just cannot imagine those adding up to anywhere near $10k, that’s off by an order of magnitude in my experience. If I spent more than a grand on my car per year, I’d be doing it wrong, in my book.
Maybe if you buy a really expensive car, and you drive it all the time, and it’s really expensive to maintain / repair - I guess. But like - aren’t you choosing an expensive route, in that case? The person I was replying to made it sound like doing away with cars altogether was the reasonable option, rather than what seems like a no-brainer to me: just keep a less expensive car. I suppose that’s a luxury (ha) I can afford?
I totally believe that it is possible that these are indeed your costs but I'll give you a counter-example.
My Highlander was about $50K all in. Let's say I keep it for 10 years, that's $5 per year right there. Insurance is about $1.5K so we're at $6.5K and that's a good deal for around here. If we drive into Manhattan on a weekday, it's about $50 to leave the car in a lot somewhere in Midtown. If I do that just once a month, that's another $600, so we're at $7.1K already. We actually don't put a ton of mileage on and it's a hybrid so our gas costs are about the same as yours. That's $8k. I am leaving out a bunch of other stuff (registration, inspection, tolls - can easily be around $10 to cross into or out of Manhattan, an occasional ticket, parking meters, etc.)
I think my car usage scenario is pretty light (wife and I both WFH) compares to most people but I can easily get to $10K for one car based on where we live. Some of this can be avoided (eg sit longer in traffic to avoid a toll road, go slow to avoid tickets, only go into NYC on Sunday when you can get a free spot more easily, could have bought a used car, etc.) - just making it obvious that you can EASILY get to $10K.