The cost of driving, 2024

Dedicated readers of this blog will recall my groundbreaking 2019 article "The cost of driving," and its paradigm-shattering follow-up "The REAL cost of driving."

Now — buckle up your seatbelts — I'm updating this report for my new car, a 2024 Kia Sportage. How much does it cost to drive this car?

First, we start with the cost of gas. The last time I bought gas it was $4.95 a gallon. Since this car gets about 37 mile per gallon, that works out to 13.4 cents per mile for gas.

Then there's maintenance. This could be complicated, since the costs of oil changes, repairs, new tires and the like can vary widely and come at unpredictable times. Fortunately, there's a shortcut. AAA's 2023 "Your Driving Costs" publication shows the cost of maintenance of a small SUV (the Sportage's category) as 10.4 cents per mile.

Then there's depreciation. This, again, can be a tough one to figure. Each mile you drive brings you one step closer to the day when your car dies and you have to buy a new one. I'm going to estimate that car will last 160,000 miles and that my next car will cost $37,000 (don't like those assumptions? Fine. Do your own calculation).

Dividing $37,000 by 160,000 comes to 23.1 cents per mile.

All of that adds up to 46.9 cents per mile.

To be clear, I'm talking about the cost of driving, not the cost of ownership. For instance, as a car owner you have to pay car registration fees each year, but those do not change depending on how much you drive.

Then there's car insurance. In the past, I could make a pretty strong case that the cost of car insurance didn't vary depending on how much I drove. But now, my insurer, AAA, asks for my car mileage each year. They may indeed be using that information to set my rate, but to what degree?

Under my current policy, I'm paying $902 to insure the Sportage. I'm expecting to drive the car about 10,000 miles in the year. So insurance cost 9 cents per mile. Still, I don't believe there is such a direct connection that each extra mile I drive costs 9 cents. There's a basic cost of doing business — if I only drove, say, 10 miles in the year, do you think AAA would only charge me 90 cents? Of course not — there's going to be minimum charge at least.

With some arbitrariness, I'm going to say that driving each mile adds an extra 6 cents. So total cost of driving: 52.9 cents per mile.