Over your lifetime, you will spend a small fortune on cars. I estimate that each owner will spend from about $130,000 ($217/month) to almost $300,000 ($500/month) over fifty years of driving. The cost of buying, financing, repairing, and maintaining an automobile is one of your major regular expenses. If you bought an older used car instead of new, you could save as much as $33,000 in ten years, $67,000 in twenty years, and $168,000 in fifty years! Now imagine how much MORE Money you could save going 100% Electric / GREEN. No more gas fill ups every 3-4 days, no more Oil changes, and smog/emission checks.

Gasoline:

Granted gas has decreased to date to a national average under $2.50 a gallon, but the average American still uses 500 to 600 gallons of gasoline every year. As the average fuel economy of new cars and light trucks declined from a high of about 26 miles per gallon in 1988 to less than 24.5 mpg in 1999 due to larger vehicles, more horsepower, and increased sales of sport utility vehicles (SUVs) and trucks, our consumption of gas has gone up with the price. Now almost 50% of the passenger vehicles on the road are SUVs and light trucks that do not have to meet the higher fuel economy standards of cars.
Depending on where in the country you live, and depending on the gas prices, as the average vehicle is driven more than 12,000 miles per year today that adds at least another $1,250.00 to the cost of owning a car. If we happen to see another rise in prices as we did in the early summer of 2008, then you can just about double that number. At 4.10 a gallon, which was the height of the summer 2008 gas price increases, that number goes up to $2,050.00 dollars a year spent on gas alone. We all know it hurts when $50.00 does not even fill up your gas tank.

Repair and Maintenance:

Then there is the regular scheduled maintenance for a car. This number is a bit harder to pin down since so many factors must go into keeping a car in safe running condition. Baring the kinds of repairs that we all dread, like your car’s drive shaft falling off the bottom of your car at the worst possible time; an oil change, fluid upkeep, and tires happen to all of us on a regular basis. Add in the somewhat semi-annual break change, mufflers and battery replacement and the cost of average car maintenance falls at about $540.00 to $1150.00 a year.

The grand total cost of owning a car in the US is…$19,799.00 per year.

Taking the midrange amounts of the above calculations and adding them all up, it truly is almost twenty thousand dollars a year to keep a new to almost new mid range vehicle on the road in a city in the United States. If you keep that car for 5 years, then you are spending almost 100 thousand dollars for a car, something that can hit a tree and be gone in an instance. For many people that’s a new house, or some really great vacations, or your child’s college education!

With a number like that staring you in the face, you can really take a good hard look at your emotional ties to your gasoline automobile and decided for yourself.