I am not going to even think about such stuff, 21 to the Gallon is what I get and that is the extent of my calculations, Rick
Hi Rick, I have always kept an Excel Spreadsheet for each year on all our vehicles to track what I spend on each vehicle - this has become useful data now that I am retired to enable me to budget. When I was a Panda driver we had to do monthly fuel logs on Panda cars on the last Sunday of the month - copy submitted to Police Divisional Headquarters - I picked up this habit in 1971! I used to have a small hardback book in each vehicle - moving to computer records sometime around 1998.
Likewise I keep an annual spreadsheet on my fuel use. By incorporating a simple formula at the top of each annual fuel sheet this has enabled me to track my actual running cost. By taking into account the purchase cost, estimating depreciation I track when I will need to spend some savings for another vehicle. Once set up its pretty easy to update the data.
As a particular vehicle gets older my maintenance costs tend to increase until I reach a crossover point as we all do when things get beyond economic repair so it's time to get rid.
Many years ago we had a really nice Mercedes W124 260E Auto Saloon that the wife ran. We bought it with pretty high mileage on the clock -110k and ran it until it had 184k on the clock - then the power steering box failed. We loved the car so much we put a new steering box in her - the car was worth about £500 and the steering box was around £1200 fitted! To get some value out of the vehicle we were forced to run her for another two years.
When the WK failed to start a couple of weeks ago - it not only dented my confidence in it's reliability but also Wendy's. Quiet understandably she used our WK until it was sorted. I wrongly as it turned out got it into my head that the WJ was about to become a money pit. Now that I do almost none of my own repairs our vehicle running costs have naturally increased.
The MoT is due in January, the tyres are due for replacement ideally before the winter - I am reluctant to put new boots on if the MoT becomes an issue on something unknown like emissions!
In reality I think we all know without any spreadsheets when we need to part with a motor. Our problem is we tend to get attached to our 4x4's so a spreadsheet is just an inanimate tool to argue with.lol
