Re: price per mile

I'm moving house soon and in anticipation of a much longer journey of 64
miles round trip, I am currently trying to guage the average cost per mile
at the moment (20 mile round trip) to try to guess how much more it's
going to cost me and whether I should shop my car in for a diesel.

I've got 1.6 Rover Coupe P reg with 56K on the clock.

Currently I've estimated that it's costing me 12 pence / mile. I
calculated this simply by checking how many miles I had covered since last
fill-up (111.8 miles )and then dividing the cost of filling up by the
miles (£13.36).

Well for a start, consider all the other costs - annual costs are obviously
depreciation, insurance, MOT test and tax, which won't vary much. On
something that age, extra mileage won't make a hideous amount of difference
to the annual depreciation.

And then your wear + tear costs - exhaust/clutch/brake/cambelt replacements,
and general servicing, all add up. I did a spread*** of these for my van,
and based on very rough costings, it worked out at around 4-5p/mile - that
included a £500/year contingency fund for unexpected extras on top of normal
servicing/wear+tear items. Not allowing for these is a big contributory
factor towards people moaning about their cars costing loads to run, which
if they'd just planned for things a bit better, they'd have realised that
these costs are just to be expected really.

Now I know that there are probably quite a few other factors to figure out
yet like the fact that pump prices vary (this was at 90 pence / litre) but
was wondering how this compares to others?

Also, would a diesel get me far better economy or isn't there much in it?
At the moment the 20 mile round trip is right across town so pretty much
stop / start kind of journey. The new drive will be mostly on dual
carriageway which i'm told is pretty clear.

Well, take into account that the extra fuel economy of a petrol car in
longer distance driving compared to stop-start driving is much greater than
the same difference for a diesel car, i.e. your car might be doing around
25-28mpg around town, but on a long run it'll do nearer 40mpg. Compare that
to a similarly powered diesel in a similar size car and you'll probably see
35-40mpg around town and around 50mpg on a run. Ok, so the difference is
similar actually, but in actual cost per mile terms it's probably less.
Basically, your existing car will be much better on fuel on the longer runs
and it might not be worth changing. When working these things out I
normally reckon on diesel costing 98.9p/litre and petrol costing 92.9. Ok.
they're less than that at the moment, but at least it won't leave you short
if you base things on those prices.

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