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Joshua Brown
6 Things You Can Learn from My Car
A 2015 Honda Civic with over 100,000 miles on it.
Last year, I bought a car after being a non-owner for nearly 2 years. I took the bus, the train, my good ole two feet, my Nishiki road bike, my Cannondale Bad Boy 3, a Meepo Shuffle, a Meepo Voyager and even a few trips on a classic longboard.
I'm still obese but still need to get around so my variations in transportation are many. Especially because a previous car that I owned was a giant money pit and a great source of stress that I chose to keep. Now I've meticulously measured every penny and mile that I've driven, hopefully to be of some warning or guidance for those who also may be interested in making informed...
Below are several perspectives that I've tried to evaluate objectively with enormous spreadsheets and lots of map tracking to get as clear a picture I can of what being a true Time-Traveling Car-droid costs and looks like.
1. Very True Cost of Ownership
Online websites tout a metric called "TCOO" or "True Cost of Ownership" but I've taken it a small step further and calculated the lost income earning potential of the capital that I put into the car as a unit of "investment" in myself and my time. I call this even deeper dive into ownership costs "VTCOO" or "Very True Cost of Ownership"
So the basics included are insurance, gasoline, maintenance, parking, taxes, depreciation and that lost capital investment income.
My next goal is to start tracking the BTC to USD comparison as a "BTCOO" which would probably weigh heavily against car ownership over time but for now, we live in a car-centric society which built roads and street lights and doesn't calculate the negative effects of car noise and light pollution in a long term human evolution strategy but I digress.
Included in my calculations for VTCOO is Gasoline, Car Upkeep like car washes and details, Insurance, Depreciation, a Service Contract, Tire depreciation, Parking, Maintenance, Sales Tax and Purchase fees spread out over time, accessories and tools and claim costs related to insurance like Deductibles. And, of course, the cost of capital not generating income.
In my calculations, I used a simple 4.5% because that's the most guaranteed form of income that I could find. There are plenty of financial advisors that would be disappointed if that's all your money is making as an APY but, especially for lower caste members like myself, having access to REITs and owning income generating properties that Dave Ramsey enthusiasts salivate to "passively build wealth" is just out of reach for most people that I know.
Which leads to my second point:
2. Saving Time
Driving a car saves you a ridiculous amount of time.
Commute (one way)
8 minutes (27 MPH)- car
18 minutes (12 MPH) - electric skateboard
22 minutes (10 MPH) - analog bicycle
72 minutes (3 MPH) - walking
Time has some value, in Colorado at least, the minimum wage in 2024 is $14.42 and dips down to $11.40 for people who augment their wages with TIPS. Federal minimum wage just happens to still be at $7.25.
I've commuted 30 miles by train before but in my particular situation, taking the bus with RTD here in Aurora, Colorado is unnecessarily uncomfortable. The bus stop is about an 11 minute walk, from my house to the bus stop as well as from the bus stop to my work. The bus I ride is on a 30 minute round all day, EXCEPT for the morning commute when it is 45 minute departures which is perfectly off schedule for my shift meaning I would arrive to work about 22 minutes early for my shift.
I've never straight up walked to work, but if I did, it would take me 1 hour and 43 minutes both ways.
I have commuted plenty by bicycle as well as with my Meepo Voyager. Both of which are stressful, noisy, not well-lit and include crossing several major intersections. The BB3 (analog bicycle) is usually 19-28 minute commute and the Voyager (electric skateboard) is usually 17-28 minute commute. The reason for the variation is because taking the shortest route is often the most stressful due to the very fast traffic along my route and going the long way is much less anxiety and fewer intersections.
So I tracked 33 trips using OSMand+ while driving my car and, at least in my commute, I average about 27 mph.
My commute as a sedan driver is on average 10 minutes and 11 seconds.
One caveat is the extra time I spend working to afford the car.
3. Hours Required to Work to Afford
Probably the most meta that I've delved into this rabbit trail of transportation.
For me these are the current rankings for cost required to Work to Afford, obviously for everyone that has a different income this will be a little different, but based on my immense spreadsheet full of different statistics and measurements these are the basic hours that I would have to work to afford the VTCOO of each method of transportation.
28 hours each year to afford the shoes to walk to work
34 hours each year to afford a Meepo Voyager
50 hours each year to afford my local bus/train pass
454 hours each year to afford my 2015 Honda Civic
And a couple thoughts to add at this point, I could just work... less. For example, each of these items have a depreciation cost that dwarfs most of the cost that changes per mile driven/etc. And if I consider the fact that, at 8 hours of work a day, my Civic requires me to show up to work for 11 WEEKS to pay to have the opportunity to drive for 52 weeks of work, I could simply sell my Civic and take 11 weeks off work each year!
But let's be honest, the same thing could be said about my rent.
But then I'd be living under a cardboard box.
4. Ranking My Car's Expenses
Most people see a car's MPG (miles per gallon), including myself and think, wow, what a deal! But watching carefully, I've listed out my top expenses based off of total dollar amount and fuel ranks pretty low on the list all things considered, which really makes you wonder what is going on with electric vehicle marketing.
Colorado has pretty "high taxes" so for this exercise I'm going to go off of a non-amortization ranking.
$14,396 - Capital (money spent on car itself)
$2,203 - 3 year Service Contract for powertrain
$2,151 - Insurance
$1,602 - Depreciation (estimated)
$1,244 - Interest
$1,161 - Sales tax
$953 - Gasoline
$950 - Hail damage deductible
$595 - Dealership fee
$590 - Car washes / details
$531 - Lost income because money is spent not invested
$399 - Total taxes (including sales tax amortized and fuel taxes double counted above)
Which makes me wonder, if I drive 9,500 miles each year, but the city, county, state and federal taxes only add up to a total of $400, that's less than 5 cents a mile or 24 miles driven per dollar of taxes paid. Actually doesn't seem like that much considering how much money it takes to build and maintain a road.
5. The Price of Bitcoin
One year ago the price of Bitcoin was $34,242.19: the day that I bought my car.
Fast forward, today the price is $66,738, and I've spent a grand total of $25,203 on the Civic. Some of that would have inevitably been spent on other forms of transportation if I didn't purchase the car so it's not a apples to apples comparison to say that I could have invested $25,203 into Bitcoin but even if I went all out and bought a new bicycle and eskate and longboard and monthly RTD (bus/train) passes and new shoes every 3 months, it would have been less than half of what I spent on the car.
I mean the easy calculation would be to say that I could have bought two cars by saving the money and investing it in bitcoin for the year, but that wasn't exactly how my expenditures played out over time, probably the biggest mistake of this whole situation was not having a garage to park my car in and then plummeting the value of my car by not protecting it from hail properly. I'm guessing that I burnt out about $2,000 to $4,000 in car's value from the big hail storm that came through this year and absolutely blasted the car. I knew I wanted to do this follow up which is why I didn't just turn the car in, also... taxes.
6. The Option for Distance
ONE DAY DISTANCE (16 hours)
48 miles - walking (my house in Aurora/Denver Colorado to Longmont Colorado)
70 miles - RTD (Longmont, Boulder, Castle Rock, Parker or just in the bounds of RTD)
82 miles - Meepo Voyager (my house in Aurora/Denver Colorado to Limon Colorado)
170 miles - bicycle (my house in Aurora/Denver to the Kansas/Nebraska/Colorado border)
1,100 miles - Honda Civic (my house in Aurora/Denver Colorado to Chicago)
The Meepo is great but it has a pretty substantial charging time, which is longer than the amount of time that you can ride it. I have ridden it to its limit but I would be hesitant to charge it immediately after running it out of battery and riding it immediately after finishing charging it. The pure power of the gasoline vehicle to drive large distances and needing very little time to refuel is still so far beyond any of the other forms of transportation that I've tried in terms of flexibility and opportunity. Obviously, commuting back and forth, getting about 26 MPH in the city is something you can replace with a bus or a bicycle, but getting out and seeing the world, especially here in Colorado where the highways have tremendous space to see so the speed limit is often up to 75 MPH is just no comparison except maybe airplanes but that's another conversation.
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Being a car owner is a pretty substantial responsibility and there is a large social pressure for people to own a car without considering the implications of what that car can do or how it effects the world. Someday I might do an evaluation of the noise pollution that this car produces, or light pollution. I've already started documenting the number of barrels of oil required to produce the gasoline that I've consumed since driving (17 barrels so far)
and where that crude is generally sourced from (Colorado has over 30,000 oil wells that produce crude) but there are so many other ways to evaluate car ownership, I'm curious what deep dives you may have done on your car. How much more does it cost to drive a car when you are obese than when you are a healthy weight? What about the cost of asphalt? Are you a civil engineer? Let me know, I'd love to hear your interesting data and what it implies about why we drive cars and why we seem to have an insatiable appetite for complaining about the taxes that "pay for our roads"!
Thanks for reading and let me know what you think.
If you find this content valuable, please consider giving value back to this blog. Comments, ideas, feedback, or even donating. This blog is entirely funded by donations right now (donations by me to the blog!) and in the future, I hope that the value that we bring by practicing critical thinking around social constructs (especially ones that are just assumed across nearly every social circle) brings rationality and empiricism to front of mind, and hopefully leaves the world better for the next generations.
#car #automobile #review #dream #freeverse #poetry #streamofconscious #waroncars
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📅 Published October 27, 2024
📍 Written in Aurora, Colorado at Joshua's home along Sand Creek
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Where does money come from? How does money flow? I owe a lot of my thinking to people like Robert Kiyosaki and Grant Cardone who paved the way for understanding the procedural aspect of money. I'm sure plenty of brilliant academics went before but just the raw doggedness of figuring out how things work to improve the self economy I owe to them. But to understand myself, I found Stefan Molyneux to be an incredibly challenging figure that questioned the basic morality that I claimed to have. And to challenge my assumptions about capital and the dollar, I owe a great deal of thought to David Graeber.
Not everything has to be a puzzle, but the more puzzle pieces you find, the more you realize that other people will rely on you to share those pieces to make sense of their parts of the puzzle.
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