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Comment by chc | Hacker News Reader

> The IRS estimates that the average automobile cost about 55 cents per mile. At Atlantian levels of driving, that's almost $700 a month.

That doesn't really reflect my experience unless we're talking about really inefficient vehicles. I drive 45 miles a day. It costs me about $140 a month in gas.

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Your insurance costs are higher when you have a longer commute.

Your oil needs to be changed more frequently.

Wear-and-tear on your car is almost certainly correlated with miles driven, meaning maintenance, repairs, and replacement occur more frequently.

Cars ownership is about more than just the cost of fuel (which is cheap in the U.S. compared to the rest of the world). Sure, maybe the IRS rate is a bit high, but it seems the intention is to compensate for the average cost of ownership per mile, not the marginal cost to drive a mile. Don't trivialize it by pretending to be ignorant.

My insurance costs haven't changed much based on my commute. Oil changes can be amortized to about $12 a month. We're still not anywhere on the same planet as the $700 figure. If wear and tear are adding up to $600 a month when you're only driving 45 miles a day, it sounds like your car is effectively dead and needs to be replaced.

How much did your car cost, including financing? How long will you have it? What will you sell it or trade it in for? You can't forget those costs.

You can forget those costs, because I'm talking about the difference between my car sitting in the driveway except for weekend trips and my car driving 45 miles per day. That cost is the same in either case, so it doesn't matter to the comparison.

Do you think it is reasonable to ignore the other costs involved with owning a vehicle?

I figure gas is ~1/3 or less of my overall costs (and I've had good luck with maintenance on an older car that I don't carry collision insurance on)

In terms of costs that directly arise from miles driven, I can't think of any that add up to 200% of my gas expenses. Like, even if you're replacing a $200 part every single month (which should not be happening), that still doesn't work out to the numbers you're citing, and the numbers you're citing are still less than the numbers I was objecting to.

The IRS includes the amortization of the purchase price in their numbers.

You forgot to factor insurance, wear and tear on the car, and the cost of your own time that you spend in traffic - you are never getting those minutes back.

This is about the marginal cost of commuting farther versus differences in rent, so fixed costs like insurance and intangibles like time do not factor into the equation. I agree that long commutes suck, but that's not the question here.

Time is not a fixed cost in both cases. It exists in commuting but not in living closer.

I think you must have replied to the wrong comment.

Where I'm from, insurance cost goes up if you use it for commuting. Pleasure use means you use it less than 10 days a month and less than 6 for getting to work and back. So that's not fixed. Time is not intangible - you can count the difference in minutes. You don't need to convert minutes to dollar value because they have intrinsic value on their own.

> You don't need to convert minutes to dollar value

You do if you want to pay your rent with them, which is what we're talking about here.

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