What My Car Really Costs
“Forget the payment — with fuel, insurance and servicing, what's it a month?”
Fuel and insurance leave your bank account, so you know about them. The value the car quietly loses is normally the biggest cost of owning it and nothing ever tells you. This puts that line first, then checks your total against what AAA, the IRS and HMRC actually publish.
- Every cost including depreciation, split into a chart and a table
- Compared against AAA's 77.18¢ a mile and the IRS's 76¢ — or HMRC's 55p in the UK
- Three published depreciation figures that disagree by more than twenty points
- What one specific trip costs in fuel, and what it costs once everything is counted
- Dollars and gallons, or pounds and litres, with the right gallon for each
- This one is finished and tested — not on the build list
- It will be $9, same as every other tool
- One email when it goes up, no list, no spam
Three steps, then you're done
And what it's worth now, or take one of the three guesses.
Fuel, insurance, tax, servicing, finance.
Then compare it with what the official sources publish.
Questions
Do I need to install anything?
No. Each tool is a single file. Double-click it and it opens in Chrome, Edge, Safari or Firefox — whichever you already have. No account, no password, no software.
Does anything get uploaded?
No. Your numbers and files never leave your computer — the tools have no way to send them and no internet connection is needed to run them. You can switch your wi-fi off and they still work.
I'm not good with computers. Is this too hard?
The first thing every tool does is walk you through it in five short screens with pictures. Then there's a button that fills it with example numbers so you can watch it work before touching anything.
Will it work on my phone?
Yes. Email yourself the file and open the attachment, or drop the files in iCloud Drive, Dropbox or Google Drive and open them from there — then they're on every device you own.