If you have questions about how these numbers came to be, check out my sources and calculations: 1drv.ms/x/s!AnEbV6tNc655iOxRCEGuJwAYd6SCEw?e=rQilM0 If you are looking for an e-bike, check out the Cowboy (affiliate link): www.tkqlhce.com/click-100602223-15255602 Corrections: - The 4144 EUR rail ticket apparently includes free city-wide transit as well. I didn't know this, but that would make the calculation at 6:18 even cheaper. Clarifications: - The Berlin public transport figures only include BVG, not S-Bahn & Regio (both cost and revenue side). This is done simply because BVG figures are more easily broken out, while the rail figures are harder to separate from the German Rail figures who runs them. Note that this means that there are actually more people taking public transportation because of this than I said, but for the sake of a cost calculation, the BVG figures should be accurate. - Note that I'm comparing total cost of car ownership (including non-financialized externalities, such as pollution) vs. public transport/bikes costs, which don't fully include externalized costs. This is because such numbers have not been accurately been made for a comparison as far as I know. This means this is not a perfect comparison. That said, keep in mind that public transport companies, unlike private car owners, do have to directly pay for the vast majority of their own infrastructure except bus lanes (rail infrastructure, parking, repair, accidents, etc.), and cause much less pollution (a tram here in Berlin does 1/7th per passenger vs. cars for example) and meanwhile bikes take up about 1/10th as much space for both parking and riding as cars + their roads don't need to be re-paved nearly as often. So keep in mind that these costs are not included, but they would hardly tip the scales.
There's another alternative to all of this - buy used car, then depreciation isn't anything close to your numbers. I'm driving 10 years old premium car and depreciation is around 1k/year. Maintenance costs are lower as well, because I don't have to go to the official dealer to change oil or fix something, I can go to any mechanic or even do it myself. If you buy used car you can save up the money to buy it straight away so you will also be saving on leasing expenses.
@@kj4derEchte Hey, that is an interesting System of Maths of yours that puts 9.4 Billion in Kfz-Tax per Year as 10 times the amount of the 12 Billion of just the Costs of the BAB-System (not even complete numbers of those) per year. Stick Fuel Tax where the sun doesn't shine, as it comes mainly from heating, so that would be B/S of yours. So direct Car specific Tax does not even cover Bundesautbahnen in our measly conventional Mathematics, not to mention Car Specific Expenditures for other Federal Expenditures on Cars and public expenditures on your car on State level, District and local Levels. If you just make up claims, you should remember all public incomes and expenditures are completely public for everyone to check your statements against the Reality of the Bundeshaushaltsplan, not just to public servants using those Haushaltplan publications, not even just to every Citizen, but to everyone! So, giving you a fair chance of not argueing in completely bad faith or ignorance wish-believes but you having come up with an entirely new Maths: Please elaborate your entirely new system of the Science of Mathematics behind the opening numbers, go ahead!
@@hopolapopola I'm all pro biking infrastructure, but you don't realize that even if majority of people would drop cars for public transport the need for car infrastructure wouldn't disappear, because we still need roads and parking spaces for so many things - deliveries, construction, natural resource extraction, transportation to farms, forests, wind farms etc. less people who own cars would mean that the cost of maintaining this infrastructure for person who doesn't own a vehicle would increase.
Great summary! I'm constantly amazed at how much regular drivers underestimate the cost of driving. They usually don't think past gas and maybe insurance. At the municipal level, the non-profit organization Strong Towns has done extensive calculations across dozens of cities to show that sprawling car-centric infrastructure is always a net-negative for cities, and it has many knock-on costs to other infrastructure (especially water and sewer costs) that are literally bankrupting cities. But because cars are expensive - horrendously expensive - people who pay for them think they've paid their way, and there's an entitlement from many drivers. Meanwhile, in the majority of cities, local roads are paid for by property tax or local sales taxes, which means that everyone in the city pays for local roads, regardless of whether they drive or not. If you want cyclists to "pay their way", then you should start calculating their refund cheques. On a personal note, my next video (coming out on Monday) talks about how our family has saved tens of thousands of dollars since we went car free. That has been so financially liberating for us, but it's only possible because the cities we live in were designed properly. Many people (and especially Americans) don't have that luxury, which is a major problem.
And there you hit the nail on it’s head, to live car free, society needs to be made for it to do so. And that will take time. Even in the Netherlands (where I live), going car free is not a economic option. Yes we all pay more due to that but public transport needs to be much better before it’s an alternative. (And I use it mainly for the longer trips when possible & not adding over 50% to my travel time…. Which exclude the trip to my Girlfriend. And to many of my Family. Sadly I believe that unless the VVD stops being behind the controls in our country this will not change.
>cities Yea, not living in those. Sorry if my net cost destroys society but... not my problem. Thanks for reading my feel good blog. Also stop watching youtube videos and other streaming heavy platforms since your contributing to the waste of fresh water. ;)
Glad I’m 17 with my 74’ ford ranchero, nothing but the road ahead, sucks that people nowadays are only focusing on the small things instead of bigger ones, like chinas and indias pollution and other corporations that pollute, cars are not the only problem.
I agree with everything, except one financial detail, people always take the new car cost in calculation, but most private people don't buy a brand new car, but a car that is a few years old. So I think it would be more fair to take a 4 year old Golf and let somebody use that for 10 years, and then they buy another 4 year old Golf etc... Richer people of course can buy new cars, but I think they are not the majority.
Not to mention the actual financial cost someone is willing to pay for your car (the value of the car in the market) is not directly correlated with how useful it is. You trust the car you bought 15 years ago, and are happy to keep using it, but wouldn't pay even 500€ to get the equivalent old car from someone you don't know. Someone that drives a good car that is easy and cheap to maintain and driving it til it dies, is a lot cheaper than systematically buying cars every 10/12 years whether new or second hand. Remember even the cheap Fiat or Hyundai sedans, well maintained, are being used as Taxis in Istanbul with odomoters at 800,000km+. Cars last a long time, or a lot of km, they just need to be well maintained.
I think this happens only in Europe where there is regulated 2nd market exists. In India & many other countries people mostly prefer to buy a new car instead of a used car even when it's out of their reach.
I think you made a massive oversight in this video. No sane person with a low income buys a new car every 4-6 years. Most people in that income class don't buy new cars ever. They buy used cars, which drastically reduces cost of ownership. Also, I'd argue that a VW Golf isn't exactly a bottom-shelf car, it's actually rather expensive. Something like a used Renault Clio or Renault Twingo would be a more likely candidate (New VW Golf starts at 30k€, new Renault Clio starts at 17k€, for reference). I'm not saying all your arguments are false, they are actually quite valid, I'm just saying the cost of car ownership might be quite overblown compared to the real world.
Yes, this assumption bothered me a lot. I like my cars mature. If it is not old enough to watch porn, it's not old enough for me. I currently own two cars, that I paid $1400 for. I spent a total of CA $400 on maintenance
Completely agree. This video is about stupid people who buy new cars every few years. Oversight is massive on comfort and convenience of cars (especially if you buy older reliable cars that had almost or all the depreciation done)
It does not make a big difference really. Used cars will be cheaper for you upfront but you will have higher maintenance costs and a shorter lifespan which means you will have to replace your car sooner so it will make only a small impact on the overall costs.
Depends on what kind of a used car are you getting. If you buy a couple years old car, that used to cost $15K and now costs $12K, the difference is not that big. If you get a car, that used to cost $15K and you get it for $500, its uncomparable.
I am from Delhi, India. The Delhi Metro has completely revolutionised the travelling habits of the people. Its high speed, clean and air conditioned transportation that charges you a fraction of what you would spend on fuel. It has evidently reduced the number of cars on the roads. Then came Uber and Ola, the ride share apps which has completely subsided the need for owning a car. My father is surprised how I have been earning since 5-6 years and refuse to buy a car. (I just take his if I need. 😂)
Delhi metro is very good in comparison to other metro systems in the country, but imo that city still needs greater investment in public transport especially buses and complete integration between all modes of public transit, like I doubt any Indian city has a unified transport authority and a unified pass for all public transit (there was an attempt in Chennai a decade ago but that got buried and never implemented). I have not been to Delhi for a decade by this point but from the data car sales seem to be still rising. Plus in the case of Delhi specifically the number of vehicles entering the city from outside Delhi through highways in a day equals the number of new vehicles registered in the city in a year, so there needs to be an effort to integrate the NCR region and surrounding states into rail and bus transit if traffic and pollution issues are to be resolved.
The Bahncard 100 actually includes local transportation! It is valid on the entire BVG and S-Bahn network too, you don't need to add the numbers. That is how it makes sense for a lot of people to own. If you are regularly in two cities, it quickly makes sense. I also know people who live a digital nomad lifestyle using it, where they will spend a lot of nights on the train.
Wait 4000 euro for basically full country wide public transport? That is less then the cost of gas for a modest commute here. Event without high gas prices. Wow. I knew cars are no good, but that it is this bad of a disconnect is amazing.
@@fulconandroadcone9488 4000 per person. And even 4000 € is about 2500 liters of Super at current price. It's about 2 times more than average german drive.
@@swgar maintenance costs, tires, taxes, insurance still exist tho.... In my case: insurance 1000, taxes 380, 450 per service, 650 for a set of tires (last about 3 years) , and then fuel. That's just the running costs. The initial cost of buying the cars is another animal.
My extended family of 4 living in the suburbs of Florida, USA has 5 vehicles: two SUV's- one of them a junker for carrying groceries/furniture/construction the other SUV for moving family/friends and roadtrips, one expensive BMW Sedan purely for one person to drive to work (merely as a status symbol haha), and another sedan and hatchback for two young adults in college. Even though they are constantly repairing them, and literally have no room in the driveway to park them (so much that one has to be reparked on the street when mailman is not there), there is 0 chance they would get rid of them. Their convenience and other perks just outweigh any other benefit in the United States, it is a starkly different world than here in Europe.
Brilliant stuff! Really enjoyed how you avoided the typical surface level argumentation and instead took us on a deep dive into the actual numbers of car dependency costs. Love it 👌
Fantastic video with the cost breakdowns. It is absolutely insane how much we spend and justify on car infrastructure when there are obviously more efficient ways to spend our time and money on transit.
Just throw in some TRAINS and call it a day. I am obviously half joking, but investment in public transit and well designed cities will go a long way. We really need to think about subsidizing car oriented infrastructure and it's effects on climate change.
@@swgar You're meant to pay attention to the road while driving. You can do other stuff while travelling on public transport, like watching TH-cam videos.
I read an article saying something like this before I bought my first car, so I decided to systematically write down every single expense I have with it into an Excel spreadsheet. So including all insurance, servicing, gasoline, tires, road taxes, depreciation, etc. And I came up with just under 20.000€ over 7 years and 90.000 km. So as I have suspected, owning a car is not terribly expensive at all if you buy a reasonable car.
In my experience cars are only expensive if you buy swanky gas guzzlers on finance. If you buy a BMW M3 on a finance deal, have to pay the insurance, the high fuel costs because it guzzles petrol at current prices, BMW's mafia service costs which you have to pay as part of the terms of the finance - of course it gets expensive. It can also get expensive if you keep buying ancient disposable shitboxes, like someone I knew who did. He was buying a "new" car every year or two because they broke down or fell apart, with expensive or impractical repairs even if you could get parts. Granted that was 20 years ago and he was buying cars from the mid-late 1980s. Today's ancient shitboxes are much better than the older ones. Just buy a respectable, recent used car for a sensible price and it's probably going to be absolutely fine.
@@mxbx307 if you however buy a daweoo matiz (funny car) that's about 10-15 years old now for about 5 grand, you pay 16€ in taxes a year and a full tank barely costs 60 euros in today's fuel prices and you get about 500km of range with it
@@Georgije2 cars body enormous amount for things like 4 to 5 plots of land for a single car in its lifetime, road maintenance, pollution subsidiaries and surveys and many many expenses which the gov has to undertake
A couple of issues in this video: 1. All calculations include 1-person households. A single car can be used by all people in a family, and that increases the alternative cost of public transport/bikes - the latter needs to be multiplied by the number of family members. Keep in mind that most discounts (e.g. for school kids) are subsidized by the government. 2. Car infrastructure in the cities - we need the infrastructure anyway for delivery and logistics. All businesses need to deal with transportation, and removing all public parking spaces (or charging the real-market value) would significantly increase the cost of all goods. 3. Lifetime cost of owning a car assumes that a household buys a brand new car. Value degradation/insurance/maintenance cost is not linear, the majority of the costs can be avoided when buying a used car (cheaper insurance, cheaper parts, smaller value degradation). 4. Alternatives presented are not viable at scale. For example, car sharing is amazing, except when everyone needs a shared car (bank holidays, vacation season). Rental car shortages is a real thing. 5. Alternatives presented are not viable for all people. For example, certain people with disabilities have significant problems with using bike / public transportation. Excluding them from owning a car could further result in isolation. 6. 60-year totals in the spreadsheet include costs of 50-year totals 😅 That being said, I still agree with the conclusion that majority of the people living in the cities does not need to own their car. But it won't be so easy to change - first we need to solve the problem of the end-point logistics being mostly based on cars.
Wait so you counted both car payment & depreciation in your calculations? That's a pretty big mistake that inflates your numbers A LOT. Especially since depreciation is not a fixed cost.
One thing I think people misjudged: expensive cars doesn't get more subsidy from the public than cheaper cars, heavier cars/trucks/busses do. If we only ran light cars and motorcycles our roads would last several years more than our practical use with heavy vehicles to transport our stuffs and people, the impact on road materials increases a lot with the high weight vehicles.
I think he equated “more expensive” to “bigger/heavier”. While not the full story it is a simplified and generalized way to look at it. A higher end trim of the same vehicle model is almost always heavier.
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Trucks are ~3-10x heavier than heavy cars. But it's true most SUVs are pointless and as usefull as any (lifted) wagon like A4/6 allroad, Outback...
To my knowledge, most damage to roads is done by weather mostly freeze/thaw cycles, so I’m not very sure that roads for bikes would be cheaper from that perspective. Though they could be much smaller and that should generate a significant cost reduction.
It’s so dumb how big cars have gotten. Everyone wants a bigger car to feel “more safe” on the road. It wastes space on parking, roads, damages roads, creates blind spots, causes more damage when crashed, uses more fuel, are more expensive. There are no benefits.
Most people (I know) do take cost of ownership into account. It's just that currently the alternatives aren't good enough. Biggest reasons to resist this is something you don't talk about: "Time to travel", "public transport availability (or lack thereof)", and safety on/during the trip (if you're working irregular hours or work in shifts). And that's something I sadly enough notice in your video. Your pov is a work-from-home single person with no kids. That's not the home/work life of the average person. A lot of people have kids (which can require you to travel a lot an can require you to take more luggage with you than bikes would allow), and most people still need to go back-and-forth to their workplace. And these workplaces often lie in areas that are not easily reached by public transport. Or if they have a good public transport available, they only run (well) during 7-19h, which then handicaps people who work in shifts (which is the case with a majority of blue collar workers). People who start at 4-5 AM and/or work until 9-10 PM (not even mentioning night shifts) often can't access this type of public transport, or have to travel in less safe circumstances. For me personally it's time-to-travel & road safety that is holding me back. But luckily that's changing. The Belgian government is slowly rolling out bike highways (fietssnelweg) pathways, and one is scheduled to come on my road to work in the future, which would provide me with a safe road to work that's a lot shorter than the current alternatives.
You see, the problems you name are mostly because the system is forced towards cars. If cars and parking would be made more expensive and public transport better half of the people gad mad, always taxing the cars etc. Sadly most societies see cars as the way to move when you do well, you're poor if you don't. Luckily you also name the changes happening.
@Andreas Becker no it isn't. I want to see you doing 40KM every day in 32C with 70% humidity. Do all people have showers at work? Or/and if you are an average person that physically can't do that. Or if you have couple of kids that you have to take to school/kindergarten in the morning, get to work, get the kids from where you put them in the morning, take them to whatever activity they are doing afternoon, do the shopping get and all of that within 12 hours. Before you start talking about kids on their own, in some countries it's illegal to leave kids unsupervised until certain age - even at home. So while you can and do, many others simply can't for very long list of reasons.
I own a 2012 Subaru Legacy. That just doesn’t break. I live in Switzerland and my yearly costs are (converted to euros): - 2000 euro fo fuel (about 150 a month) - 700 euro for insurance - 300 for road tax - 1000 for parking But seeing that I live in a place that would take me 1.5hrs to commute to the office by public transport, and only 30 min with the car, I do enjoy the freedom of owning one and going on trips. I guess maintenance of a car is costly depending on how reliable it is or not.
Small correction for 6:24: You most likely would not even need the 978€ ticket for Berlin as the BahnCard 100 that lets you travel by train in Germany actually includes CityTickets for local public transportation in 130 cities including Berlin (Zones A+B)
@Egalitarian917 but the people that drives are the onces keeping socity working public transport is a pipe dream it wont work before the day people say cant wait to get rid of the car what an upgrade public transport is and that will never happen becuse public transport is broken by design
@Egalitarian917 doesnt work in denmark and in any of the countries you said can public transport take you to a random field anywhere in the country at any time of day and year in any weather conduction is it as fast as car no do you control the temperature no does you have to wait for it yes can you bring any tools no can you have weapson for hunting on bord no can i drink while on there no can my dog sit on the seat no can i drive the thing no do i have to listen to babys crying yes do you get there in time depens is there any kind of weather no tell me one thing that works with publc transport becuse right now i see none there is a reason a country can exist without public transport but no country exist without private transport becuse the public dosnt work due to limitations that is deal breaking well that sounds like a broken ass design to me
You messed up the Excel formulae in the 60 year total and the figure made it into the video. You've summed B98:B137 and C98:C137 but these include the 50 year subtotals (and miss out the first 21 years of usage) which massively distorts the figure. If you're going to use subtotals like this I'd recommend you use the subtotal formula. The correct 60 year figures (based on the numbers you've decided to use) are 223,298 for the bike and 1,041,288 for the car. This sets the tone for the rest of my comment because if you were viewing any of this with a critical eye you might have noticed that the 60 year figure is more than double the 50 year figure. Suffice to say I think the approach you've taken is biased and overly simplistic. I'd also take issue with the approach to some of the figures you've used from studies (in particular the Gössling one) - the 'blame' for arising social problems caused by cars is being placed on car users ('selfish, stupid, ignorant drivers') with no critical analysis of the social factors affecting why people might *have to* use cars, and this whole video comes off as a sales pitch to get people to stop using cars which oversimplifies the complexities of the issues surrounding car use. I don't have the time to separate out which factors that have been added to the 'cost of car ownership' are fair to apportion to drivers themselves (I can think of several other interest groups that could bear responsibility for cars being necessary in the first place); that was supposed to be your job: to view the study with a critical eye rather than using it as a tool to sell bikes. This line from the Gössling study is interesting: "For example, many businesses provide vehicle parking facilities to employees and customers that are unpriced or priced below their full production costs (including land, construction and operating expenses), while providing no comparable benefit to those who travel by other modes." (And you make many similar arguments in the video.) I wouldn't consider taking less time to commute to be an employee benefit just because I live closer to work, that's time I'm saving because of where I live which isn't really either my choice (entirely) or my employer's; if an employee *needed* a car to get to work, it is surely appropriate that the employer provides a parking space, otherwise presumably the cost of parking would fall on the employee - why do both you and the study believe workers should be further penalised for driving to work if there is no other practical mode of transport? There are different ways of approaching this issue and this video gives no critical analysis. I'm disappointed to see the figures presented in the way they have been in this video. For example, you've given no explanation of why it would be appropriate to compare the cost of a car *including social costs* with the cost of public transport *without social costs* (did you think it was fair to assume that there were no social costs to public transport?), and then comparing just BVG subsidies with the full social cost of a car - what useful information is this actually giving us? I think the problem you have in tackling an issue like this is that making a simplistic comparison like this is never going to work - it's not providing information that can accurately assess the unique factors that motivate each driver to own and drive cars and whether or not it's possible or reasonable to ask them to ditch the car. I agree we need to reduce car usage but this video takes the wrong approach imo. What are the factors holding people back from shifting away from cars? I don't think you've adequately covered them in this video.
The "All of Germany" annual train pass costs about the same as an annual season ticket from London to Chelmsford in Essex (a 31 mile journey). You can't use this ticket for ANY other journeys and if you need to travel onwards in London to anywhere else you'll need another £500-£1200 for a tube pass. You don't even get a guaranteed seat for that money either. Cars are a pain but UK trains are horrendously expensive.
@@g4egk The publicly owned and run TFL (transport for London) is also expensive (an adult going between zones 1-9 is capped at £20 a day on payg, more on a day travelcard). Its the same for LNER services, publicly owned and expensive to ride (a trip both ways between London and Edinburgh can easily cost over £100 booked weeks in advance).
@@foryou6888 It's not completely true to say TFL is publicly run - they are required to contract out the running of underground trains, bus routes etc. to private companies like Abellio, Arriva and MTR. We also have a government who are convinced that public transport has to turn a profit and pay dividends to its shareholders 😒. I suspect that LNER being required to operate as a publicly owned business in the framework of the previous franchise model also increases its cost. (I have to use it a lot and wish it was cheaper too!)
@@matthewwatt2295 From what I gather the only part of tfl that was profitable pre-pandemic was the underground? Also I have no idea about LNER and how it is run, I just know its currently publicly owned (maybe not run I don't know), and charges quite a bit.
I think the cost of a car is greatly overestimated is this video. The depreciation of more than 3000€ a year is in the case of a brand new car but for a used cheaper car it's actually a lot less. I'm not even considering the fact that 75% of the people in France (that's probably the case in Europe too) don't own their cars but rent it. So you can probably divide the budget by a third or more. The insurance cost is above the roof. Nearly 1200€ for tax and insurance a year is probably the most expensive you can get in my country (France). As an exemple, i pay 300€/year for a car bigger than a Golf. What is other ? 1320€ is a lot so it might be interesting to precise what it is. To counter my own arguments, it seems that all the cost in this video are wildly overestimated (public transport, train, bike maintenance) or maybe Germany is ten time more expensive than France but i doubt it. To conclude, yes, owning a car is probably a lot cheaper than what you argue but so is the case for public transportation and bike. Overall your video makes total sense and the work behind it is impressive !
Yes, the costs are counted for Berlin, which is obviously more expensive than most parts of France. Also the Germans love cars and change them often, have high insurance costs and have infrastructural priority for them. I still think the costs are a bit exaggerated. In Poland I pay for my mid tier SUV 7000 EUR yearly which includes lease, insurance, service, tires and depreciation. On top of that you have to add fuel, parking, maintenance which sums up to about 1700 EUR as I do drive very short distances mostly and go about without the car in the city. This means my cost totals at 8700 EUR yearly in Poland. Of course for a much nicer car than - A new Hyundai Tucson with nice specs. But the numbers fit. And in Poland that amount is much more to bear than in FR or DE
I thought same about depreciation, but in 50 years you need at average 6 new cars, and the cost of 6 cars adds up almost exactly to the depreciation put in video. Also, if you are renting (long term), you for sure will pay for it more than depreciation, the renter would loose money if you didn't. Edit: the only thing is that most people buy second hand cars, so they pay way less for a car. But for those who buy brand new, it is right.
i think it is just really generalised. i live in the netherlands and i got the cheapest insurance i could get for my 2003 volkswagen bora and it is 155 per month and taxes are 55 per month so i already pay €210 a month for the car if i don’t drive it. so i think the numbers could be somewhere near what they are telling us in this video but every country and specefic case differents from each other ofcourse
In Germany as well as the whole of Europe by far most of the people own a car rather than renting it. To be honest I'm shocked to hear and can't really believe that around 75% of France are renting cars instead of buying them. It would interest me if you have statistics for that.
His calculation is the actual price of the car when you buy it + upkeep. upkeep alone is about 3k in germany. but you have to buy the car too, thats another 2k/year, depending on how long you keep the car.
1:40 I feel this is a bit manipulative, since apart from private cars, roads are also used by healthcare, fire deps, police, supply, public transit and maybe more. So I wouldn't say that society is paying for the drivers, since roads are useful also for people without a car
At the same time, roads are twice the size to accommodate parking *only* for cars. Imagine the cost of streets that have no parking at all, only two lanes instead of four where public transport and trams can still drive.
@@Pragmatic_Optimist_MCR I guess not every road is a 4 lane one, and not all of them has parking on it. In my city it's a majority of roads that are 2 lanes only without any parking on it's side. Strange, it seems like the world isn't only USA...
@@_r4x4 If there is almost no parking space and no public parking lots that are for free, so that you always have to pay a ticket, except on your own property, that's great! I am from Berlin and every street has at least one lane for parking, even at the outskirts. Which is horrendous. Where do you live? Sounds great, if there is this little public parking space and more room for pedestrians/cyclists
@@Pragmatic_Optimist_MCR just normal, not so big city in Poland (about 90k people). Parking is mostly dealt by your destination, so if you live in flat then there would be some parking spots nearby, work places or other destinations also tries to give some parking spaces. There isn't much of public parking spaces, I guess it's mostly because majority of people would say that using it when not needed would be unreasonable due to it's cost.k It's not that big city, so if you aren't going that far it won't be bad, dedicated biking infrastructure is almost non existent, but there are roads and pedestrian paths (or "dedicated" mixed use bike/pedestrian paths... Yeah you wouldn't even notice them if not sign putted there), but still enough for most people.
True. I work for my city and I fix/maintain its infrastructure. It would be impossible to do that without my work truck. And how would city even work without roads for truck that bring goods?
These numbers feel incredibly inflated, a standard 2018 golf in my country costs an average of 13k euros, maintenance 3-400e, fuel driving an average 20k a year @ 6l/100km @1.8euros/liter is 2.1k, insurance - 100e. The most it can depreciate is sub 1k a year as it starts off as not an expensive car. The absolute maximum being around 3.5k and even that is really pushing it. How do you even come up with 7.5k is beyond me.
That 2018 Golf is not new. You were subsidized by the first owner. Don't forget, one disadvantage of public transport (including sharing) is that "it is old and dirty". Buying an old & dirty personal transport from the start is not much of an advantage.
I second this. I even live in Germany, so this video is very applicable to me, but the costs don't add up. Insurance for a Golf isn't 1100€, it's 250€ if you just buy mandatory liability insurance. 480€ if you take the full insurance. Also 1300€ for "other" costs. Which other costs, maintenance was already accounted for with 600€, so this could be 85€ für TÜV, a bit for car washes etc., but how would you ever get to 1300€?
I spend a lot of money taking care of my car and even with higher gas prices and inflation I don't spend over 4000$ a year on my car and I drive 20,000 miles a year. I agree. These prices make no sense.
I don't know how it's possible but my yearly cost of owning a 2017 Skoda Octavia (bought second hand for 12k euros) is nowhere near the estimated 7600 euros mentioned in the video. I summed up all my costs and I am well below 3000 euros per year (including depreciation).
well from watching half of it now it seems like he's trying to prove a point that cars are bad or something. It's biased but I get the point he's trying to make. he does sound like a communist slash marxist, which is no surprise seeing that he lives in Berlin
I bought a Opel Astra (second hand, 1 year old, for 15k) and It's even lower for me, i barely spend 2k a year for everything. I don't get how people pay 600 euro for maintenance. I pay around 200 euro every year for maintenance. Also taxes and insurance are very low since it's a small eco-friendly car compared to the overpriced 2L engine Golf they showed in the video.
Yep. I have a 6 year old (2016 model) Skoda Fabia in the UK and it's costing me about £1600 (about €1900) a year to keep on the road. It's not been getting as much use since COVID, but it cost me £7300 back in late 2019. The car is setting me back about 3-4% of my annual income at most in terms of cash costs. The UK estimates per-mile costs at 23p, so that's about £1150 in annual wear and tear although the car is exceptionally reliable and hasn't had any major issues. That £1150 is also hypothetical and not coming out of my pocket. In any case the convenience and freedom is definitely worth it, plus in my area you can expect to pay the same for a season ticket on crappy public transport that takes you nowhere and at times of their whim. You are also pre-paying for journeys you will never make and routes you will never use. Car wins. My personal opinion is that people are grossly exaggerating vehicular running costs and it saves me having to buy expensive train tickets, or pay delivery charges or suchlike.
I've owned the same car for 15 years, so not overly concerned about depreciation. Insurance, tax and maintenance on the other hand are massive expenses
I think depreciation is highly overestimated in these calculations. If you use the new car more than 7 years or so, or count with second-hand car market figures you get a much lower number than €3100. My example is a 10 years old Suzuki Swift that depreciated £1700 in three years!
He has the typical attitudes of a young, physically fit city dweller with no children and high disposable income, with little idea what it is like to live in the countryside, particularly in the UK, with non-existent public transport.
He also forgets to mention anything about me, who owns a 32 year old Volvo that's literally appreciating in value... Just doesn't seem accurate to talk about "the cost of owning a car" and not mention some of the people that own cars... lol
you are using a uncommon exception to argue against the rule (i.e. that folks buy millions of new cars every year). It's like saying the price of vegetables is of no interest because you have a garden where you plant carrots.
@@martian9999 Buying a brand-new car is far more uncommon than buying second hand. Most drivers buy cars that are a few years old at least. New car sales in Germany were 2.6 million last year. 2019 was 3.6 million, which is a typical year. This is in a country with 84 million people. There's no way buying a brand-new car every 2-3 years is very common in Germany.
@@FuelPoverty You didn't watch the video, but that's okay. No one is saying to ban all cars or that cars never have a use. But building cities around using cars for personal transport is as silly as building subways out in the rural countryside. It just isn't the right tool for the job. And either way, you the premise of the video is still true. Cars are expensive. Some people need them, and conveniently they are most needed where cost-of-living is usually low. Doesn't make sense for people who don't use cars to pay so much to subsidize car drivers.
Good video, however, I would say it applies for countries where most of cars are bought brand new, i.e. Germany. Where I live (Bulgaria) probably upwards of 90% of cars are bought second hand. It comes as no surprise then that the average age of a car here is somewhere around 17 years. Even in larger cities, most "newer" cars are still around the 6-8 year mark. Most people I know do not change their cars in the 3-7 years span, irregardless if they are well off. Even if you see some high-end car brands like Mercedes, BMW, Porsche and such (talking about newer models or specifications), probably still 90% or more are not bought here brand new, but are imported after they have been driven abroad for around 5 years and their respective lease in that country has ended. As for what the costs are to actually own and run that car - this is actually one of the prime concerns here when buying a car. People really stress on whether the spare parts/repairs are cheap / fuel economy / reliability / actual cost to buy the vehicle. Probably that is the reason there are so many cars from the VAG Group here - virtually similar cars with a high degree of interchangeable parts. And bear in mind that Volkswagen isn't exactly a low-end car. At least here this segment is occupied by the likes of Dacia, Great Wall, Renault, Fiat. Volkswagen and the brands that comprise the group are actually middle to high end segment. Also - I wouldn't call a Golf tiny. It is actually a good representation of the average European's car - hatchback so that you can more easily find a parking space in a densely congested city, enough room for a family of 4 plus luggage, good fuel economy. Think the C-segment actually comprises about 1/5 of sales in Europe, could be wrong though. As for the Corsa - probably could call it tiny, but most people would call it a small city car. Cars like Smart, VW Up and such can be called tiny.
@@RajPatel-vq6if it still means that on a systemic level cars are not being replaced every 3 years. Someone is still buying them on that regular basis, but presenting that regular basis as the basis for average calculations across the whole population is not valid.
I concur with you on a level of personal costs. However, the (on average) 4600 - 5200 euros that every person subsidises car ownership in Germany still stands (I'm sure the number is different in Bulgaria). The thing is, spending in the order of 5 to 10 times as much on car subsidies compared to public transportation subsidies as a country is a little strange. If we transition to for instance sharing a car with a neighbourhood (e.g. th-cam.com/video/OObwqreAJ48/w-d-xo.html), you can still use it whenever you need to take your family somewhere, while not feeling the personal cost of ownership, or having all those individual owned cars drive and damage roads, necessitating maintenance costs, expansion of road costs, environmental costs etc. We could save a lot as a society this way.
Sadly the statement 90% of the cars being bought are used is just wrong the ratio can never be more than about 50 50 otherwise there wouldn’t be enough cars to go around
Yep, even i as a german who lives in the suburban area of a big city can´t imagine that. I gave public transport a lot of tries and always was running late, took forever to get to my destination and so on. Nevertheless, i get the point, of Techaltar, that if we would´ve spend money more on public transport instead of car infrastructure, maybe public transport wouldn´t be as shitty. I really don´t know how to fix this but i think that on street parking should be terminated and that there should be more underground car parking garages below already existing infrastructure. Then of course, you pay for parking, cars are kept out of parts of the town. But personally, i like my car, i am able to afford it and will continue to drive on my own.
True bru, its not like we have other dependable forms of transport either like rail in other countries and the cities here are built for cars first, so cycling and walking are a definite hassle and unreliable. It would be great to see south africa gradually shift to other forms of transport and develop the infrastructure needed like railway lines and bicycle lanes and keep amenities in walking distance, it would help the country in an unimaginable way imo. Build the city for the people, not the cars kinda mentality.
Man, I love cars, I’m a car guy, but I absolutely agree with your points. Cities are for people, not for cars. Also car prices are ridiculous for average human or even a city (I mean road maintenance and parking spaces losses for city budget). If you don't absolutely need a car or just want car as a hobby don’t buy one.
Or do like a lot of us are doing right now and get out of overpopulated cities. If you have the means and can work from home, do yourself a favor and get out while you can.
@@smoguli I like living in cities with alot of people. As long as they are walkable... A city doesn't feel as crowded when you can get places without a car. I'm living in Tokyo so it's pretty much the definition.
Big cities are too problematic too. We need to create medium size cities, not huge mega cities. At some point is just ridiculous the amount of people we have in just a few parts of the world while most of the other part doesn't any people.
This video is just climate change propaganda, nothing more. Where I live, there are zero trains and nobody wants to ride a bike 30 miles to work every day in the snow. You are delusional if you believe that they do.
"3000€ of depreciation every year" wow I didn't know that my car lost 300% of its value during the three years of me owning it, plus now there are a lot of solutions that avoid this "cost".
@@lukasausen the thing is that he tried to pass the depreciation of a car as an hidden cost of owning one, that's an incorrect statement because if someone bought a car then he was already aware of this cost so it's not hidden. His theory also didn't consider the possibility of leasing instead of buying. I own a car and I will use it to return home from university every weekend spending around 30/40€ in fuel and 3 hours driving, making the same trip with a train will cost me double both in price and time, in the 2 years that I will spend there attending my master degree that amounts around 2800€ and 280 hours more. I paid my car 3k 3 years ago and I used it to attend my bachelor so I already recovered some of its cost thanks to the fact that using the public transportation service is more costly than driving, using it for the next two years will allow me to "recover" the entire price without considering the fact that during this time I already avoided a lot of costs thanks to sharing my car with my friends and family (it's impossible to share the same train ticket 🤣)
My only problem with this is calling the VW Golf a "small car" :D Idk maybe my standards are different but a small car is a Fiat Panda or even better a Smart. I would consider a VW Golf to be a normal sized car and the Mercedes you showed at the beginning to be a huge car. Sadly there is a trend to bigger cars even here in Germany and thats probably why you said a VW Golf is a small car. Cars are already incredibly inefficient and we keep making them even more inefficient. As a German myself, I hope all of Germany will finally wake up and realize how incredibly unsustainable cars are. Thank you for contributing to that and making this really well made video!
I just moved to Germany and I am amazed at how much the car lobying is slowing down Germany. Lacking infrastructure for people and bikes and the pushing for "work in the office is healthy" narrative is what I'm seeing here, guess who'll benefit from that? :) I've lived in the Netherlands, rural Spain, Italy and a very poor Eastern European country and let me tell you, you have a mix of everything, you just need to improve on the "people before cars" and the quality of life will improve exponentially.
@@RaduVlad92 Yep its sad. We had a lot of transportation ministers in the past that seemed to be really close to the car lobby. Doesnt seem to change that much right now but lets hope itll get better especially if more and more citizens put pressure on them
I live in the US in a major city and used to own a MK7 GTI. Much of the reason I traded it for a 3 Series was due to the claustrophobic feeling I felt while constantly getting boxed in by larger vehicles. In the US you gain very little by having a tiny car like a Golf, even in a city.
Since half of car owners don't understand the costs of car ownership (including myself), can you explain the costs more fully at 2:48? What is included in "other?" You may also want to include a time factor for comparing different modes of transport. There is a cost for the amount of time it takes to get from door to door. Let's say walking is the cheapest form of transportation but it takes 1 hour to walk versus driving 15 minutes with a 5 minute walk from the parking to final destination. Taking the train might take 35 minutes plus a 10 minute walk, etc. There is a cost associated with these various times.
2 possible counter counter arguments. First, are you willing to work during the saved time? If not and it's just for leasure, can you really convert the saved time into hard cash and compare it to the hard cash in the subsidies? If not, why not just make the subsidies even for private vs public (it states in the video that it's private leaning) and see which people pick? Being more market-ish rate? 2nd, how much more time would be wasted in traffic jams if people drove more due to more drivers from reducing the subsidies for public transport or more subsides for private transport. Probably more relevant to cities already with traffic problems or in a city where there are people demanding more private transport subsidies. In the city that I live in with a relatively small population (1.5m), I've been in traffic jams during off peak hours that doubled the time for my trips. (Yes, I'm a car owner)
yeah, of course it takes so much less by car, everyone is speeding. I have recently gotten my licence and I am constantly overtaken despite running at the speed limit - sometimes I speed and STILL I am overtaken by everyone.
As a student I've owned a Toyota Corolla (Austria), paid 6.200€ and sold after 5 years for 3.000€ - 640€ per year. I've driven 30.000 km with it, which cost about 4.000€ (high estimate) - so 800€ per year. Taxes came in at 600€ per year and repairs and service (new brakes, oil, etc.) make up for 500€ per year. Makes 2540€ per year. Let's be generous and say 3000€. It saved me at least a full day per year in time on planing, walking, waiting, scheduling my time to fit the public trans. schedule and ultimately gave me more time to spend with my family. It also eneabled me to opt for higher paying summer jobs, which would've never been reachable by public transportation (otherwise I would have needed to rent an expensive apartment somewhere near while still paying for my other one). I had the option to buy stuff in bulk, which I could have never carried home otherwise, thus saving me additional money. It gave me flexibility, freedom and spontaneity. I've learned a lot on the way. Absolute win, keep breathing fart air in your crowded hot & stinky bus. In the meantime, I will be driving full speed on the highway.
yeah i'm a car enthusiast. and yeah, i like this video. we exist XD seriously tho, make cars a pleasure vehicle again. they should be a hobby, not a burden. i don't want to need a car. i want to love my car. i don't want to use it everyday, i prefer public transport.
Damn right ! I'm an auto engineer myself and can't stand dailying a car in suburb area ! It is the biggest hobby killer ! (I'm biking to work which makes me happy to take my car on WE for longer distances)
You are not alone, 90% agree except that there are many people who need a car as a work tool, but they also suffer from this system. It would simply be rather difficult for me to transport all the tools I need to work on the construction site.
@@deathtrvcker666pl2 you need a car for the value of a car, not just for transportation. thats the difference. you actually suffer from everyone else using their cars as simply transportation because of the wear it inflicts on the road and the traffic you have to get through. if everyone used their car for utility only and not for transit then you would be better off.
@@m.ahussain4005 what do you enjoy about driving to work? driving around can be something you enjoy, sure, but getting to work is just transit is it not? why not just take the cheapest option?
as a bike only person since 6 years, the social costs really drive me crazy. (tho I would say I am a pretty big car enthusiast) Especially in Berlin, bike paths are in super bad condition and it is so frustrating to drive a bike through the city. Funny that you picked Linienstraße for the A-Roll in the beginning - the only street I enjoy driving at! Great video, please bring more of these less tech related videos. Update: As an EV-owner you even get yearly money (something up to 300€) for your carbon credits... Who is paying me to drive a bike?
@@Entertainment- are you actually serious? :D 60-70% percent of people actually need to eat less than they currently eat, and can still drive bicycle with no need for extra energy. You are oblivious at how much we eat for no reason at all :D and on top of that use cars to move around.
@@sell2012 The only Roads in germany even partially covered in expenses by Vehicle Specific Taxes are the Autobahnen, which are not open to non-motorised traffic. Even those need to be subsidised partially by all other taxes. *Every* other Road, Bundesstraßen, roads and streets of State, District and Local Levels are fully paid for by *every* tax payer. You are not paying for your own Expenses, the inconsiderate Parasite in this Calculation is not the Cyclist Adrian, it is you.
Using the cost of maintenance of roads and other infrastructure and tallying it as the cost of cars to the government makes no sense, any country literally needs roads for its logistics and therefore for the country as a whole to function
Have to call this out, your figures include depreciation. While this is relevant for new and newer cars, a person has the option of buying a pre-owned car that may have less value in total than your annual depreciation cost. If you look at this from the perspective of someone who buys a 10 year old car (e.g. a reliable Toyota) the figures become dramatically smaller.
Sorry, but what depreciation isn't, is maintenance. Older cars just need more maintenance. The cheaper the car, the higher maintenance costs they have. By a certain age and mileage nearly everything needs replacing.
Unless you live and work in a city center where you can bike to work and everywhere else you need to go, the time saved using a car instead of public transport easily makes up for any financial loss if your time is at all valuable. Add to that the convenience factor and the fact that most people don’t have effective public transport where they live and you’ll see why cars are worth it to people who own them.
Depends how you value my time, unless driving is your hobby it is wasted time, while on public transport you can generally do stuff you would otherwise have to do at home/work etc. Like watch this video...
@Nemam Ime I guess that is a good point. I am probably biased because I only really use public transport for long distance train journeys (8hrs 4 times a month) I guess 30 mins every day on a bus could be a different situation
@@joehuttich If you already understand that you're biased, and that you barely use public transport, why do you act as if what you're saying on the matter is factual? @Alexei Exactly. It takes me more than 4 hours (2-way) to get to work and back. I can only do this because I'm young, and I have no other responsibilities. Imagine if only I had a partner? A kid? A parent to care for? An illness? A car is for better or worse a necessary evil for many people.
@@IM-qy7mf @IM I don't think you can claim a comment that starts with "It depends how you value time.." can be claimed to be making any attempt to be a pure universal fact. It's obviously subjective as is your 4h work commute which is definitely above average and an equally biased starting point. Regardless I may have a disproportionately good experience with public transport but that is in part because I a) use it frequently and b) embrace it Of course getting a bus sucks for someone whose only experience of catching a bus is when there car breaks down, only a regular user will be able to truly find alternative uses of the time once they are fluent in the routes, times etc. Finally I do have a lot of past experience using public transport daily in different contexts. I've had a commute that had me spending 3hrs on buses in rural Scotland each day and I have spent many years commuting on the Berlin Underground too, I have always found ways to use the time well sometimes I wouldn't want to get off the bus at work/ uni/ etc.
16:32 this number is not just wrong, but you sweep people who live in our area where they would have to carry their groceries for 15 minutes from the public transportation to their house, or would be completely reliant to organize their private life around times when they can still catch public transport, together with the ones in real dense city areas like Berlin, that only make up a small percentage of the overall population
Really loved the video. What we are seeing right now, is the result of Car Companies Lobbying for years and years all over the world. Here in the US, on a Residential Area of Sacramento, CA, I have to walk 2 Km for a crosswalk... Basically, if you don't have a car, you can't go anywhere, since the public transportation is no existent (I have never seen a Bus around my neighborhood for example).
Here’s what’s interesting for me. I live in the U.S, for the last couple years I’ve been thinkin that a well designed and built public system would be more beneficial to citizens than having a car, and I’m the type of person that legit loves to drive. And I’ll admit, I live in a city that has, what I’d consider, a poor public transportation system. So having a car is pretty much necessary. But if my city and other cities across the country would agree to develop one mass or several mass transit infrastructures. The benefits I feel would out way the expenses us citizens would have to pay and we’d be saving money in the long run.
And, for the people like you who love to drive, a good transit system means the people who still drive are the ones who either need or want to drive. They're more likely to be good drivers, and having fewer idiots on the roads is good for everyone.
@@lejoshmont2093 Alternative modes are a lot more common than they were ten years ago. Problematically, because the country is so huge, and so many systemic factors feed into the problem, it will take a lot of effort and probably some years to correct the situation, unfortunately.
You’ll never convince Americans to give up the freedom of their own cars and roads. We have a giant country that’s near impossible to cover with public transportation and rely on trucks for much more than you may think.
It is just a miscalculation. The author forgets that the infrastructure for cars not only benefits private car owners, but also the business world, from which cyclists and pedestrians also benefit, as it is used to transport their goods for a living, etc. Life is more complicated!
I have a 1993 MX5. It doesnt depreciate anymore, its appreciating since 2020. Service is done by myself, parts and maintanence is very cheap. Its cheaper to run than public transport and saves me a lot of commuting time. Only an electric bike would be cheaper. Never buy a car on bank loan, buy used, pay in full.
You are not average. And 1993 mx5 is pushing 30 years old, not many everyday driver would know how to take care the old lady. Btw, good on you keeping her alive.
Well... when many cities (at least in Europe) don't allow older vehicle (in Brussels: 2012 or earlier I think), and will entirely ban petrol vehicles in 2030-35, it'll be tough...
@@G91YS The ban is on selling ICE vehicles but if you mean access to the city I don't see it as that much of an issue since P+R spots seem to be wildly available. At least in the west. Of course if you like old cars and live in a city you'd have a problem but I don't see that working out well even now due to lack of space.
The one thing I feel like pointing out is that depreciation on used cars is way less than in new cars, which is what I understood you used for your calculations. My car depreciates less than €1000 euros per year, and maintenance is about the same. This are generous estimates. Insurance is about €500 per year. After this, only petrol remains of the direct costs.
Yeah, when my car only cost ~1400 euros to begin with and I kept it for 6 years before selling it for ~600 euros... The depreciation costs just aren't a big factor, I'm glad new car buyers exist but I'll never be one myself.
Yeah I'm not some car mad guy but this video is completely flawed since it doesn't take used cars into account and just uses averages. You can get really solid 10 year old cars for £1500 and the depreciation would be like £200 a year and the maintenance wouldn't be too costly either if you know what you are doing.
Used cars don't magically pop into existence. Someone has to buy the car new. So if we talk about averages for society in total then it is realistic to use new cars. Because someone in society bears these costs so in the end the averages will be alright
@@trulyUnAssuming Well most new cars are bought by company for their employees and after 5 years sold cheaply. The company does get a better price because they buy in bulk and can write the cost off to pay less taxes. So at least here in Germany most people who don't get a company car buy a used car...
@@Till113 they pay less taxes which means that the tax payer is paying for the car which is everyone. So tell me how we are not paying for brand new cars again? If it weren't for these tax incentives, the companies might give you the money directly instead...
Yes. However I have dug deeper. If you examine fleet vehicles you notice they are very new. There's a fine line to draw between increasing repair costs versus paying for massive depreciation and fewer repair bills. I'm sure if old cars were more affordable, profit motivated capitalists would maximize earnings by keeping fleet vehicles for longer than a few years
If you look at the calculations for cars, the biggest single expense in that calculation is depreciation. If you buy a new car and keep it for 10-15 years, it shouldn't really matter very much, as it's been a useful asset in that time period. If you buy a 10 year old car and sell it when it's 15, it wouldn't have lost much value, as cars loose most value in the first 4 years. If you buy a new car and sell it after 4 years, then you are an idiot. I bought my car when it was 9 years old. Now it's 13 years old, and I could sell it for almost as much as I bought it for, because used car prices have increased.
Also you can often share trips in your car with your family for basically no extra costs. In public transport, everyone needs their own ticket. Public transport is also heavily subsidized which is something not mentioned here at all. Just the cars social costs have been taken into consideration. Most ÖPNV operates at a hefty loss in Germany.
useful? how is a 4000lb motorized wheelchair useful? i can ride my unicycle everywhere just as fast, go indoors with it, is less expensive quieter easier to use and so on/
@@CastaneaMa he did actually cover the subsidies. The social cost is complete BS though. A bus driving on the same road also incurs same social costs. It's not like the roads disappear because there is less cars on it - you need deliveries, ambulances, police, whatever, so the road would be built anyway.
@@BigFx There's a big difference between a street used primarily by cars and one used primarily by buses and service vehicles, in terms of noise and air pollution, maintenance, walkability, accessibility, and so on - simply because there are fewer motor vehicles going by. Obviously, some maintenance is always going to be required, and some roads or streets are never going to be pleasant, but as it stands, far too many of them could be if they weren't blighted by car traffic instead.
My gas costs a year are about 1000€ a year in Germany, insurance is below 1000€. Didn't have to repair anything in last five years. Golf 5. Did I forget some calculations? TÜV and Tax isn't more than 500€ I would prefer to not use a car, like in Amsterdam. But getting to work and around is at the moment 3x faster than by rail for me.
TÜV HU/AU? Maybe washing your car a few times a year. Depreciation is a weird point. I bought my car for 2000€, the money is gone, I am the last driver. Why would depreciation matter? I don't want so sell it. So that wouldn't count for me right?🤔
@@android-user ah yes I forgot thanks, but still I'm overestimating my costs, I bet my fuel cost a year is still below 1000€ and insurance is just 800€ to be precise. Maybe it's just because I do not own a newer car? Even if I add a 1000€ a year for maintainance and stuff it's still much lower.
It's obviously an estimate and will vary from person to person. Fun fact these calculations are based on numbers from the ADAC so I think they are fairly accurate.
I did a calculation for me here in Sweden, and my total cost/year for a large Jeep plugin hybrid, is about to €8000. I'm also including (several types of) road taxes & parking in that, estimated rather safely. Our public transportation is essentially garbage. It's also all different systems everywhere, so getting one of those "travel wherever you'd like", just doesn't exist. Hell, just going to the _next town over_ means a new company to buy a ticket from. UGH. Also, you should make a collab with Economics Explained on this ;)
@@kapoioBCS Oh really? Let's ask the public what they think of SJ for example. Or Västtrafik, or one of the other companies operating. And we would have to ask about them all separately, because none of them work well together. Instead of having a state-owned entity responsible for ALL of our public transportation, every person needs to deal with a multitude of companies just to get from one area to another. Nah, it's shit mate. Especially when you start comparing to Germany or Japan.
The idea is that the video motivates improving public transport. A video for voters and governments, not changing individual lifestyle. Imagine a city like Baghdad with absolutely no buses. Yeah, this video wouldn't be good advice for them.
Sweden is quite a large country. If you're not living and working in the same city, then a car is almost mandatory. It works the same in the Netherlands, although public transport will work if you're lucky enough to live nearby train stations, which IS the case for a large enough majority of people. But if you live in a village far away from direct access to a city train station, then you have to jump over to bus stations, etc etc. And that suck. It suck even more if you have to switch trains between different train oprators. Didn't know it's like that in Sweden, but at some trajects in the Netherlands it's the same, but these other operators are only active in small(and rather remote) parts of the country. Majority of the people in Netherlands do not have to deal with that. But I can imagine that it would put ANOTHER drempel to going with public transport.
Time. Time is the biggest reason why public Transport in Canada kinda sucks. A 20 Min car ride is a 1h 15min bus/train ride where I live. The difference is terrible if you need to get somewhere fast and on short notice.
Small question about the calculations for 50 years cost of ownership, did you keep the depreciation in the calculations? Because the depreciation has a curve and cars usually depreciate up to a point then stagnate for a while. Was that taken into consideration?
Yeah, this number seems way off and I believe that might be the reason. I have only ever owned used cars, the first one, which lasted me for many years, was not even worth what he assumes to be the yearly depreciation. According to my observations, an average car loses about 50-60% of its value every 5 years on a logarithmic curve. So buying used cars that are 5 to maybe 8 years old should take a huge chunk out of the total cost of ownership. Sure, there might be more maintenance and repairs to deal with, but owning a used car also makes it possible to go to off-brand shops to get the work done or to even do stuff yourself.
@@dh510 Yes i agree, i have owned 7 - 8 cars till this point, bought them all used and i made sure i get a good enough deal that when i resell i either don't lose money at all or even win a little ( it's important to mention i only keep the car for 1 to 2 years tops since I'm an enthusiast), and that helped me avoid tbe depreciation all together since cars i buy have already lost a good chunk of their value already and getting a good deal helps a lot.
I have concerns about the reliability of the lifetime income data on the table for lifetime car costs as a percentage of net income/wealth. I realize you didn't put that table together so I went looking for the source. The study in question says they used data from the German Federal Statistical Office and that their full calculations are in the supplement, but the lifetime income calculations are missing in the supplement. My concern is that they may not have inflation-adjusted the income data. The correlation between increases in inflation and income is complex, but that data needs to be adjusted somehow to account for the fact that ownership costs have been inflation adjusted, otherwise those figures are not comparable. Since the paper doesn't provide their calculations, I don't see a way to verify the reliability of their lifetime income data (short of recalculating their figures from the same income data they used and I don't have the energy to do that) It's a minor point since the video and that study are mostly about car ownership costs and those seem rock solid, it just bothers me. Otherwise great video!
Assuming the source data is not inflation adjusted, you can apply a correction: b = a/N * (1- (r^N+1))/(1-r) N= numbers of years a = lifetime income without inflation r = mean rate of inflation over next N years b = lifetime income with inflation
From what I can see in the DE Statis and Credit Suisse reports cited as sources, that table might have been derived by bodging together German wealthy distribution figures with average income figures. If that is the case (and I may have misunderstood) then I wouldn't rely upon it at all.
Just what I was thinking. I'm not sure why you want to look at lifetime figures here anyway, simply comparing the annual costs of car ownership with annual income should give you a good figure. I tried this and it comes out similar for the lowest income group, at least.
@@jbaidley yeah, and it wants contextualising against typical food, energy and housing costs as proportions of income for those demographics. Doing really good, meaningful stats analysis and presentation is A LOT of work
Man without a car, in a city with good transport alternatives, complains about cars for 20m Cars are the result of poor transport options. My trip to work literally takes twice the time, and costs more on public transport in Sydney. Transport stops late at night, and makes visiting friends difficult. And even if that was all fixed, my bad back makes public transport impractical for most trips, as it hurts to sit on most transport seats, and makes it impossible to carry heavy/bulky items (which I’m often carrying).
I also noticed that people vastly underestimate their TCO, since they often only look at gas prices. But you can significantly reduce your yearly costs by buying used and smart. My Ford Focus '15 Diesel has cost per km of around 0,19-0,22ct/km and in 5,5 years of ownership it cost me around 15.000€ (not including the purchase price but the depreciation). Another point I want to mention is the city argument @ 16:22. By definition I live in a small city in Germany, but that doesn't make the ÖPNV at all comparable to big cities like Berlin. We don't nearly enough have the same amount of train/bus connections and even that what we have really dies down at evening/night. A recent example would be from visiting a friend in Stuttgart. On my way back home I actually took 3 hours to get back home (normal is 1.5 hours). Due to full and late trains I took substantially more time. This is not acceptable when in contrast Google Maps shows me under 40min for the same route via car.
To buy used and smart, someone must have paid a good chunk of the new and expensive price though. The Deutche Bahn being unreliable kinda falls under point 5 of the video. The not just bike video on Switzerland trains shows that city size does not matter that much when it comes to rail infrastructure. Low density urban sprawl is a nightmare to service, but villages and small urban centers can be efficiently connected by regional rail.
You have assumed that people live on their own, but if you calculate a family of 4, it is impossible for a person earning an average income to pay for these expenses. Also, public transportation in Germany is not at all convenient for people living in small towns. In the city where I used to live there was a bus every hour and it took 1.5 hours to reach the nearest big city by train. By car, the journey takes only 40 minutes. Not to mention the difficulties for a family traveling with a baby and children. A car is the most economical means of transportation in Germany if you are not driving alone (please don't give the example of a 9 euro ticket, it is temporary and will expire this month) At the same time, the costs of a used car are never as high as you say, if they were, young people who just started a new job would not be able to afford a car :) Unfortunately, none of your theoretical calculations are valid in practice. I should also mention that in Germany the trains are never on time. I leave much earlier when I travel because you can be surprised every time: 30 minutes delay, train cancellation, cancellation of all trains on the line, etc.
Here in Switzerland we have a public transportation card for about 3800$ a year. With this card you can take almost all trains, busses, trams and even some boats for one year. And the infrastructure is very good. Compared to a car it's actually very cheap
The thing is, I don't choose to go by car to save money, I use it to save time. There are some places in my city that by using public transport It takes twice as much time. Moreover at nightime where there are less buses
Unfortunately I think a lot of public transportation is badly designed and horribly underfunded. Where I live in the US, buses are the most common short distance thing other than cars, but since they’re always stuck in traffic they’re consistently arriving and leaving early or late everywhere. (Also, for some reason the bus system really likes redoing their arrival times every couple months and not telling anybody? I don’t know why they do this, but it makes the bus system a headache.)
@@DementedMK In my city (Buenos Aires) some avenues have bus only lanes so they can avoid traffic and sometimes they end up beeing faster than cars. But yeah, arrival schedule isnt even a thing. The best solution is to have buses have good gps tracking. Some buses in buenos aires have it but not the majority
You count depreciation as a cost, you do not need to pay extra money for it if you have a 60 year old golf. Let's say you bought it for 30k 60 years ago, yes you won't be able to sell it for 30k now but you can still sell it for like 3k
I'm not proud of it, but I recently bought a car - last time I had one was 18 years ago. I just got sick of trains being late all the time or often being canceled without any replacement. At peak hours a train car can be filled to the brim with people. Since Germans don't believe in air conditioning, the heat can get insane in the summer - a friend literally got heat stroke last weekend because of this. And then there's the anti-maskers. I just couldn't bear it anymore. I'd definitely ride bikes more often though if I was living in a city that did that well. And I agree with all the points in the video.
Oh ya, I heard about the trains in Germany during the summer getting way too hot. I'm not a big fan of over using AC, but I think it makes sense in areas where a lot of people are at constantly. Maybe if enough people complain and quit taking the train, they'll put AC on them. It's a negative externality, but the alternative is more people driving their own clothing clearance climate controlled cars using much more AC collectively than if they had just put AC on the train.
@@ex0stasis72 Overusing ACs is absolutely stupid. Uncomfortabely cold, massive waste of money and energy. *Using* ACs ain't, tough. Especially in trains... I mean in theory our trains are supposed to have AC. However, as explained in the video, the goverment spent all our Tax money on cars for the last 70 or so years. Therefore, the train system is absolutely f***ed up. The trains are constantly broken, there isn't enough maintainance personal (or funds to hire more); so staff will focus on the most important things first, because they simply can't fix all. I mean I suppose a working engine and breaks are more important then AC; but in summer they should be required to work (seriously, heatstrokes!). And more importantly, there should be enough fundings to keep all trains in 100% working condition constantly, god damn!
@@midwestnagyfa It's only mandatory in public transport and doctor's offices (and hospitals of course)... I don't know about exception, but it's not split 50/50
Additional argument: not everything is about cost. Consider time. Time is money. Let's consider travels. With car i can go anywhere directly. With public transportation your trip time can take twice as much time. Public transport is often late in Poland. If you have to wait for 3 hours because it is just late is really terrible. Another thing: consider travelling with kids. It is much more time efficient since you can pick multiple relatives in the city in multiple places.
He did mention that cars may be useful for some people. However, the delays of public transportation can be a consequence of lack of investment, which could be remedied if all the money that both government and citizens directly spend on cars went to public transportation instead. Of course you will never have door-to-door trips, but at least you can be sure there won't be traffic jams. Also, cars cause many more deaths than public transportation, both directly (in car accidents) and indirectly (pollution). Not everything is about money, indeed, and human lives should be at the top of the priority list.
That really sounds incredible. It would mean that I am after say 30 years of not owning a car (and few transit costs and the bike I maintain myself) I would be easily a half-millionaire. Which I am not. Still car numbers are always mind-boggling.
I have no idea how "Depreciation" is calculated and the language barrier with specific terms is a bit annoying, as I can't understand everything perfectly, but that number for the Golf doesn't seem to fit. If you purchase a new Golf for 33'000€ and you replace it at the "average" replacement cycle every 12 years, that gives you a loss in value of 2750€. Provided that you throw it away for 0€ which usually isn't the case as some people sell their old cars instead of throwing them out.
@@swgar I wish, Im looking for a car for my mother and 2010 golf is around 5k euro in Poland. That's around 15% of the original price but almost a one year of ownership as per sums presented in this video.
2:51 Why is depreciation categorized as a cost here? When you buy a car for a certain amount of money(let's say 20.000 euros), and it depreciates 2000 euros in a year, this is not money out of your pocket because you have already paid it. Adding it a second time(after the cost of purchase) does not seem to make sense.
I own an electric kick scooter, Segway mini pro, motor scooter, motorcycle, cars, bicycles, an e-bike, and with the exception of cars, none of them are safe or practical during the winter, or on my route in general, take too long at the lower speeds, and just not a practical alternative. I would love an enclosure for the E-bike so that it could be re-geared to go 70 mph with pedal assist, but such systems are more expensive than motorcycle. Its hard to beat the utility value of a used Toyota Corolla or Prius, in terms of a heavy Costco run or junket grocery trip piking up 150kg of foods // moving furniture or if Meg & I ride together on Sunday to our Church which is 30 miles away up a very rugged highway mountain pass route where anything other than an automobile would be very unsafe or impractical. We had a Nissan LEAF SV that could barely make it one way with a full charge, but traded that in on the Corolla Hybrid.
So..how does that work out if you buy a 20 year old car (corsa) park it on your own property, do the maintenance yourself and sell/wreck it at 25 years old? Only pensioners and companies can afford new cars around here, unless it's an "up".
Another very interesting video by Marton, I really enjoy his insights and videos. However, although I generally agree with him that owning cars is much more expensive that the users may perceive. However, I believe that this video, or the presented calculations at the very least, are simply wrong and untrue: 1. A product can depreciate a 100% of its value, after which it's considered to be fully depreciated. Therefore, it's incorrect to count absolute currency values of yearly depreciation, and even more incorrect to accumulate them over a reasonable expected product lifetime. Even if we were to consider the currency amounts of the face value, the cumulative depreciation should never go beyond the cumulative price paid for the car, adjusted for the inflation of course. 2. If you look into the expense of buying a car (or paying a monthly car installment to the bank, or whatever) as an investment - and not every expense, by any means, should be looked at as an investment - than you should also consider every other expense mentioned in the video (buying a bike or purchasing a train pass) also as an investment, and see how much of it's value has depreciated over time, just by the inflation if nothing else. The math would then have showed a different outlook, but that doesn't change the main flaw with this argument - that not every expense should be treated as an investment, since the mass majority of people would not even begin to know how to invest successfully - in terms of adding value with their cash over time. Again, I generally agree with his bottom-line opinion that the true cost of owning a car is usually hidden, but the estimates given in this video, as well as numerous other sources on the Web are essentially flawed and plain incorrect. Nonetheless, I will continue to the TechAltar as it's one of the most insightful and entertaining channels out there.
LOL none of that makes sense. Cars are just expensive to own and maintain. Period. You could argue in favor of EVs being more practical and economical but it still doesn't take away from the fact that we should move away from a car-centric city design and push more towards public transport, biking and walking means. It's criminal that we have such flawed infrastructure, especially in NA cities and would be even more criminal to not do anything about it. Cars are not an investment
I'm loving the Not Just Bikes revolution, where suddenly, even tech TH-camrs are starting to get involved with communicating the costs and problems of cars. Thank you for doing your part!
@@boroborosu2410 Very original, only seen this line posted 50 times before. No clue where you're from but if it's the U.S like me your rights are simply a suggestion. We literally have a constitutional amendment that says you can be enslaved if you're imprisoned. Not to mention Civil Asset Forfeiture in case of a crime, it doesn't take much for a cop to plant a bag of drugs in your car, then for them to seize it as "Evidence." People shouldn't have to own massive, deadly machines to get to work. We don't own them, they own us and our streets.
I know RIGHT, after having joined r/fuckcars a year ago, just a month ago I found NotJustBikes and I couldn't get enough of it. So glad that more and more people realize the severeness of the cars' disadventages.
I own a VW up! And i do the maintenance my self (oil change, filter change, brake change (including discs and fluid), which makes the car very cheap to run. It only costs me around €60 a year for the oil and filters change and €25 extra for brake pads (€75 in total including the brake discs). Monthly i pay €22 for tax and €19 for insurance. Which makes it cheaper to run an up! than an electric bike.
If you paid for your car upfront, you parked your money in something that loses value every year. You need to calculate the opportunity cost (investing that money in something that generates income) and the depreciation cost. Or you may keep the car in the best shape and make your depreciation zero. That means updating every single part of the car over years. That is maintenance cost plus your own labor. And this video is about averages. I am sure not everybody can fix their own car.
Interestingly, the 2012 Prius I purchased 5-years ago appears to be worth about the same as I paid for it, $11,000. Gas is well under $100 a month at today's prices for 1000 miles (average) and full insurance runs $220. Over that time, new Michelin tires cost me $600 (Costco), a water pump $95 (Amazon), 2 gallons of Toyota antifreeze $55 (dealership), brake pads and rotors on all 4 $150 (eBay), 2.5 oil changes a year $125 (Groupon and dealer coupons), catalytic converter $0 (manufacturer's warranty), non-OEM air filter once a year $10 (Amazon), and OEM spark plugs every 50,000 miles $35 (dealership). Taking those numbers, my cost of ownership of a Toyota Prius III is approximately $4200 a year. Granted I do all my own maintenance other than oil changes (too messy) whenever possible and luckily my car held its value.
@@k4piii So far after 6 years of ownership, I am very happy with my investment. Further, living in South Florida, I would not for a second consider not having a car. Maybe if I lived in Manhattan but I don't.
Yes, especially in dense parrts it is often hard to find a spot with a delivery van. Just having 10% of the spots saved for deliveries between 10am an 7pm would be a blessing. Afterwards you could just park there.
I'm too lazy to dig through that chart, but it seems like you're implying that every car is scrapped after a maximum lifespan of 12 years. If that's the case, I strongly disagree. Even though the original buyers of most cars usually don't keep them for a long time, the lifespan of cars on average far exceeds 12 years. Also, the amount spent on subsidizing cars seems unrealistic. Does a subsidy in this context only include tax money that has actually been spent? Or is a part of this the tax return lump sum for work trips and tax returns for submitted parking tickets? (Edit): Please don't take this as hate towards you or the numbers you compiled. I'm genuinely interested.
The biggest "subsidies" the driver never sees in its bank account. It is the streets and the land they occupy that is expensive. E.g. a parking spot with 10 m^2 of land (probably to small) could be worth up to 6 figures in German cities. With a "reasonable" profit expectation that common investors use of 7% p.a. this parking spot should cost 1000 or more € per year. Up till last year any German city could only ask for 30 € for onstreet Parking. So there is already a 1000 € or more the driver never sees
@@matthiasmayer7328 Do you have any examples for this 30 € onstreet parking fee? As far as I'm aware, onstreet parking is 6€/hour at best in all of the larger cities. And even if you only pay for 2 hours per day that would come down to 4320€/year.
@@matthiasmayer7328 , those investor expectations are way too high, as most mature branches operate with profit margins of 1-4%. Also consider how the existence of those parking lots does to the value of the surrounding properties, or rather, how the lack of roads and parking spaces would influence the value. Point isn't that you are right or wrong, but that it is much more complex when taking a closer look at it. What would for instance be the net result of value if the parking spaces between road lane and pavement was replaced with some other means of transportation, like a conveyer pavement or low-speed mini-trams like in amusement parks?
Cost of car ownership is looked at through the microeconomics lens by us, or “how much do I pay for it”. This varies a lot, so it’s not very important. The much more important problem is related to cost of car ownership in cities. People owning motor vehicle in the countryside should not be a concern, the problem is the subsidies given to car commuting that encourages people to drive. The cost here seems high because it is calculated using city related figures. Bigger, more populous cities have gigantic car subsidies just by accommodating them and not charging drivers adequately. It might seem like a classist, dystopian nightmare to burden personal motor vehicle owners so much in city that only the needy and the rich can afford personal vehicle in cities, but that’s reality. We skewed the market by subsidising cars so much that we incur other cost to our health and time. Only by pricing it appropriately and combining with investment in dense mass transit and alternative transport can cities transportation be priced appropriately. It’s unfortunate but city transportation space and time are luxury and if you use it you should pay for it. In the countryside, this shouldn’t be an issue as large roads are subsidised by goods transportation. It works because there are not enough vehicles to be subsidised by goods volume. However, the moment there are enough cars using the same transport roads to cause traffic jam, the subsidy is used up and we enter deficit territory. That’s why only in and near cities are personal transport a big problem.
I think the Bahncard100(which I assume you meant by "all inclusive ticket") also allows you to take local transport. If so, at 6:16 you shouldn't add the 978€ on top.
I think inflation and depreciation were used in accurately in this video. You can't add dollars from today with dollars from a year from now, from two years from now, etc. Therefore inflation shouldn't scale because everything scales. Depreciation also looks too high. My calculations Owning a car for 60 years and calculating everything in terms of PRESENT dollars Buying new $30000 car every 5 years. You lose 60% of value after 5 years so you're spending $18000 every 5 years for a new car after trade in. Round to $20000 for other fees/inflation in car prices (probably overestimate). 12 five year periods * $20000/ five year period = *$240,000* insurance+maintenance+gas+registration/year = $5868 insurance+maintenance+gas+registration for 60 years = *$352080* total cost after 60 years: *$592080 in PRESENT dollars* MUCH less than ≈$1500000 Inflation shouldn't be used against you because you will likely keep up with inflation through wages increases and investments. Moral of the story: Be careful when adding money from different years. A promise for a dollar a year from now is not the same as a dollar in your hands right now. Time value of money!
yes 500K from today, but you will be spending more and more on insurance+maintenance+gas+registration every year because of inflation+car buy, youre actually lowering the amount you WOULD spend, bringing for a present value wich is false, youre keeping depretiation a fixed value as if a 2060 car that would cost say 40K instead of 30K would depreciate less than a car today, makes no sence, and youre not acounting for the car changing value, and i agree with you that bringing for a present value will bring more of a "true" understanding of your expenses but in actuallity no investment is calculated in present value, so bringing to present value brings no benefit other than a better visualization of expenditure. because in order to understand if youre going to save money by not using a car you have to use future value, from your income to investments that you could make with the money, to the depretiation and expenses. also its much better for people that have a unreliable source of money, like third party artists or small shop owners to understand how much they would have to """"""increase"""""" sales/prices in order to keep up with the car( i know you dont actually need i guess you understand my point)
One of your best videos. Very thorough and thoughtful. Now that I am retired, I am giving serious consideration to getting rid of my car. I do love my new e-bike; it's just a pity the painted bicycle lanes don't really connect or go anywhere!
I live in a city that is at least on paper great at public transport - Stockholm. I've lived there for many years without a car just using busses and the metro. I've also recently moved to a less central part where I need to rely on busses and commuting trains. I got a cheap new car (a Dacia for about 14k euro) couple of years ago and having lived now both with and without I can say that it is a great increase in quality of life having your own car. I live with my girlfriend and we are now able to, with ease and at free will travel to more remote parts of the city very comfortably. We can also travel the rest of Sweden very easy and comfortably. We can visit friends in the city late at night without feeling unsafe riding at night time in the metro. Grocery shopping is so much easier now that we got the car as well. I pay a lot of tax for "things I dont use", but in the end those things attract skilled and passionate people who will want and demand these things. Estimating the true added benefit of services and things is usually highly complicated (which this video sort of to me highlights un-attentionaly by talking about the "insane cost" of cars and trying to pit people against each other because one group dosent wanna pay for that thing they happen to not be personally using). What is the value of an all-night open grocery store, a café that serves special tea only or a popular night club? Dont be so quick to be the one who demands that something you happen to not like being banned - you just might get it and the city you loved might turn into a place you no longer like being in when those people you were so keen on denying their needs up and left
This is exactly what I was thinking. The video does seem to want to pit people with opposing views against each other. In addition, it is presented from a very monolithic perspective. People have other circumstances apart from those mentioned in the video, which to me, are idyllic. First-world country, great public infrastructure, less corrupt governments, relatively low levels of crime....Yet, even in a place like Stockholm, crime is something that would deter someone from taking public transit. The convenience of a car is undeniable. Why does it have to be so black and white? Why not promote a combination of cars that are better for the environment and better public transportation?
Exactly. Basically, what you're summarising refers to the social benefits of car ownership, which are much greater than the social benefits of bicycle ownership or public transport, simply because bikes don't get you very far and public transport will not get you to many destinations and is much less versatile than a car. These social benefits of the various transportation modes were completely ignored in this video.
Considering that people in rural places cant do without a car and have no access to Carsharing this only applys to people from at least Medium sized Citys. If you Account for the higher cost of living in citys I guess that should cancel that out financialy. On the other side pretty much everybody in rural places have some Kind of a bike anyways for recreational purposes but because of the far distances it is not suitable for grocery shopping.
The rural population is always used as an argument, but few people live there. There must be ways to compensate them in stead of subsidising car ownership and driving in metropplitan areas.
@@frida507 yeah, people who live in suburbs often think they live in rural areas cause they have a forest closeby. Car dependency there can be easily fixed with buses, trams, or a metro running from there to the city centre.
@@frida507 I live there and with all the artificially added costs like expensive taxes on oil nobody is subsidised here. 46% of the world Population lived in a rural Area in 2015. In Germany it's about a quarter of the Total Population.
@@RoGi797 I think cars in general need to carry their cost and then you could have a special tax reduction for rural areas (and/or a transfer so for example retired citzens and low income earners don't suffer.)
This is my favorite video of yours by far. I really hope that urbanist ideas keep spreading quickly like they seem they have over the past couple years.
I came here after watching on nebula just to say that I love this video! As someone who recently sold his car (I live in Darmstadt so it was an obvious decision for me) I’m constantly confronted with people who just don’t understand that their calculation of car ownership is simply wrong. This video is a tremendous help in arguing with these people.
I recently went through similar calculations when trying to get my wife onboard for buying a Tesla Model Y. In the end, turns out our current Kia Sportage 2007 costs us 3500 EUR/year, including fuel, to operate (incl. fuel) and we can only resell it for 4000 EUR right now, with that falling in the future. For the Tesla, our costs are 1500 EUR/year, including electricity, and at its circa 60 000 EUR purchase price we're getting it for, adjusted for inflation, we'll be able to resell it for roughly 30 000 EUR 2022 money, judging by the current 8-9 year old Tesla prices and a very generous 7% annual inflation (ha-ha, I was optimistic back then). P.S. Here in Bulgaria, public transport isn't really an option - it's half-decent in the capital, nonexistent elsewhere, and intercity busses and trains are a slow and dirty nightmare. Apart from that, we often travel to visit relatives in a city 100 km from us, and we also like to travel abroad by car sometimes. Despite all that, I'd be perfectly fine with cars being banned in the city and on-street parking removed (it's very much the same here as you showed in Berlin). We can always, as a society, spend money once to build several multi-story parking lots and ban street parking altogether, and utilize the freed up space for the actual inhabitants of the city - the people :)
Tesla, or any electric car will have problem with decreasing range as the battery age. I'd say the cost is about 15000 euro, after 8 years I believe. Max 12 years it could last.
Fellow bulgarian here aswell. Feel like Tech Altars examples are radical and not considering all the different realities. We are family with 2 kids 5 and 1 years old - car is more of necessity just because we often travel all of us.. If I was single would have not owned a car. But I agree with the sentiment that aiming cities to be not so car-centric would be nice
@@WolfySnowy Then why do 8 year old teslas cost 35000 EUR and above now? Your batteries will have retained around 90% of their original capacity in that time, so battery degradation isn't a big factor in value retention, unless you're driving 100 000 km /year or something. I tend to drive a lot and I've only put 75 000 km on my car in 5 years.
@@r_rumenov there were already news about a man being asked to pay 22 thousand dollars for battery replacement on Tesla car. It is likely i don't have enough info. Tesla itself covers only 8 years or 100 thousand miles. Whichever comes first
The 30.000 you're expecting to get after driving it around for 8-9 years is unlikely considering the uptick of NEW cars in the 30.000 - 40.000 euro range, and the technology being dated. Electric cars are new, and improvements move fast. Look at how dated and desirable a Nissan Leaf is now...
My Skoda Fabia, which is smaller than a VW Golf, cost 13.500 Euros (EU-reimport). Tax: 36 Euros, insurance (for 15.000 km/year): 320 Euros, Fuel: 1300 Euros. It is now five years old and apart from regular servicing (less than 300 Euros per year so far) there were no repairs at all necessary. I want to use the car for another five years. After ten years the car will be worth about 3.000 Euros (very conservative estimate), so depreciation is about 1000 Euros per year. Of course the maintenance costs will increase (new sets of winter tires, summer tires and brakes at least). But I don't see how the yearly costs could be any higher than about 3500-4000 Euros. Public transport is only a good alternative if you live in a big city - at least in Germany. The car saves me more than an hour on my daily commute so it's worth it.
I don't know if I'd lump the entire _continent_ into the "pedestrians aren't even considered" bin.. New York, Montreal, and many others are pedestrian and/or cyclist friendly. But yes some of the worst places I've experienced for pedestrians are in NA (I'm looking at you, Los Angeles).
One thing that you also need to consider is that the cost of the car is massively amplified by the lost opportunity on investing the money spent on a car. For example, you buy a 50 000 dollar car and the moment you have it, it will start losing value rapidly. Not only is it losing value, it is also costing you in terms of maintenance/taxes etc, as shown in the video. Now, someone who doesn't buy a car can invest that 50 000 dollars in some index fund and just let it grow + they can add to that fund, the 2000 dollars they save by not having a car. This will earn you 200 000 dollars by the time you retire.
Hey long time viewer of the channel here that also lives in Berlin. I think some of the personal car costs are a bit extreme. I share a used 3500 euro VW Up with my partner and our yearly costs are under 1500 euros, as we try to take transit and bike as much as possible. I'm also in favor of less cars clogging our city, and parking costs need to be increased dramatically. I think taking the most extreme scenario and extrapolating it to be the average takes the teeth out of the argument a bit. But let's keep that anti-car sentiment flowing! I'm happy to pay considerably more than I do to use our roads, and let's bring public transit costs down for everyone.
Yes, I agree that people who stick with buying older used cars can cut the cost quite significantly. The cost of the last half of a car's lifetime is far, far lower (to the consumer) than the first half. Maybe 1/10th the total cost? Back in the day, here in the U.S., you could buy an older used car for $1000 or so, count on spending $1000/year in repair and maintenance, and then of course you have the regular fuel costs. That's one way people on the lower end of the economic spectrum get along. Since 2008 or so, with the used car buy-back program, and now with Covid disruption, the days of the $1000 used car are gone. You might have to buy more a $5000 or even $10,000 car instead of $1000. But then it will definitely last you 5-10 years with some care. So the economics might be a little worse now, but the same basic plan still works. (Of course this doesn't help with the social, environmental, and other costs of car ownership - in fact it worsens them, to a degree, because older cars pollute more, burn more fuel, etc.)
as a student in Den Haag in the Netherlands, I pay about 60€ per month for tram travel every month, plus a few trips to Amsterdam and back over the year set me back about 100€, double that for some other misc train travel. For 55€/month I could get anywhere in and around the centre of Den Haag for free, which is a great option for winters to reduce being in the cold. That's already a lot of money to me given that I don't have a reliable income yet. I can't even imagine how expensive it'd be to own a car, with all the fees, maintenance, insurance, not to mention the price of buying one in the first place. Not to mention I could probably cut my travel in half just by getting a bike which I still haven't done, which would've been smart if only I were smart. To be honest, I have no clue how people can afford to study in places where they have to have a car.
Can you imagine how expensive it would be if users of the Dutch public transport system would pay the actual cost of their ticket? Public transport users only pay 30 to 50% of what a ticket actualy costs. The rest is subsidized by the government.
@@Twiggy163 not unlike cars, which, as explained in the video, can cost a state upwards of 10k € per car per year through various subsidies, on top of the ridiculous costs a person bears themselves. If all the people in the netherlands had to bear the full cost of their cars to society, perhaps enough people would drop cars for the dutch government to save enough on car infrastructure to make all of the transit free like it is in Luxembourg and still be better off for it! Matching a 1-2k euro cost is not the same as matching a 10k euro cost.
@@nuloom Quite the opposite. With the taxes put on the purchase and ownership of cars, the tax income is vastly greater than the expenditure. You should have a look at the national budget (Rijksbegroting). If car owners only had to pay for what it actualy costs to maintain the roads and compensate healthcare for the emissions, car drivers would have a massive tax break.
@@Twiggy163 the 2 things you listed are hardly the only costs of car ownership. What about insurance and fuel and car maintenance? what about hearing loss associated with noise pollution, land underpriced used for parking spaces (since there must always be more parking spaces than cars), medical costs associated with cars being one of the most dangerous modes of transportation, not just in terms of pollution but actual accidents, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Not to mention you’re insinuating compensating healthcare for the emissions, rather than the emissions themselves. What about the rising need of costly water infrastructure and plenty of other problems, some of which can be priced, others cannot; the decrease of property value in depressed areas due to air congestion, destruction of natural ecosystems, and complete destruction of some land areas near sea level? This video gives you figures for how much an average car costs the state in Germany. Now, it’d be weird if the statistics didn’t include the tax from those cars collected by the said exact state, but even if it didn’t, according to the other provided figures, the tax would have to be several hundred percent of the car’s actual cost to compensate for the expenses. One other thing is that public transit, when free, actually reduces its maintenance costs due to having no need for ticket systems. Luxembourg gained money by making their transit entirely free for everyone and ticketless because the amount collected from tickets was smaller than actual maintenance costs of the ticket system. Frankly, it’s not a surprise cars are so expensive. Almost 2 tonnes on average in weight to only transport an average of 1.3 people. The average bus weighs 12-16 tonnes, and has an average of 1500-2500 pppvpd (people per vehicle per day). Even if we assume the bus journey to be 100 times longer than the car’s (which is very generous for the car, and likely a more realistic figure would be 10-30), it still is better at worst and almost twice as efficient at best at transporting people per kg of mass. This does not include any external costs like much more maintenance needed for a corresponding amount of cars, and the whole rest of stuff I mentioned already. So forgive me for not seeing those tax breaks you’re talking about. At least not in context of public transit, which clearly costs way less per person in developed areas that also don’t have a system of transportation that sucks.
@@nuloom what are you talking about? If you want to list ALL those costs, you may also want to add the economic benefits the car has brought society. Otherwise you're just blindly painting yourself a 1 sided story. In conclusion, this video only holds half truths and your beloved public transport is subsidized by car drivers. Also, what makes you think making public transport free 'greatly' reduces maintenance cost? By far most of the cost is in the trains and the railway, not in the ticket system. If you're not seeing the tax breaks, it means you havent looked at the national budget. Which makes your entire comment... rather pointless and at some points its way beyond the scope of cars.
I loved the video. So did my own calculation for our car (family of three). I couldn't paste the excel sheet here (formatting reasons). But roughly, we spend about 410 euro per month for our car (or 4880 euro per year). We have bought a used Ford Fiesta Ecodrive from 2013 which had run around 30K prior. and have been using it for two years now. We roughly drive 12 to 13K Kms per year. I have assumed that we would use the car only for another 6 years (which is very conservative and I hope we use it for longer). At the end of those 6 years I have assumed I will get to zero euro from the car (so purchase price divided by 6 for each year.
but how do you spend that much? I own a 14k car, got it 10 months ago (new was 36k), since then, insurance was 400, fuel about 820 this for 8k kms, on average with this expensive fuel prices I can get about 600kms for 100euro, I had to get new winter tires for about 600 and car service was 400 so in total about 2200 euros. I live in Romania, here cars make about 10-15k kms every year. I did not count in for the depreciation but I assume, my, 2015 car, could be worth about 7k euros when it is ~12 years old, that will mean I can add up about 1000euro depreciation
Like others mention, I think you should have added the used car option in the calculations. It's a lot cheaper than new cars. Also, as NJB mentions in his comment, most North American cities aren't designed for public transport, so owning a car is pretty much required.
My car cost $2500 in 2019 and I've spent just under $200 in 3 years for maintenance. It's not that hard to cheap the fuck out with a little mechanical skill and save a ton of money. And yeah, I walk to work and take public transportation, hell I literally work for a public transportation system. Cars are only expensive when you make them expensive.
@@robierahg17 I agree about the inflation part, but he does account for getting rid of the car, since he counts the depreciation (initial - depreciation = resell)
@@gondolagripes1674 depending on where you live, insurance is mandatory, and that insurance goes up if you dont get it serviced at reputable places very often. also the video was about new cars. I dont know any new car going for 2.5k. most people dont cheap out on their cars either. if youre buying it because its mandatory, then sure, get the best deal and work on it yourself. but most people dont do that and some even see their car as a status symbol and a lot care about how it looks to others. in that situation, theyre paying a hell of a lot more. we arent talking minimums here, were talking averages. you being lower than the average doesnt change what that average is.
Great overall video. However I do have to say you've made one presumption which is mostly untrue, you've taken sums as cars bought new, however most people buy cars second hand when depreciation has already largely taken place. E.g Golf 2020 new would have depreciated 15k in 2 years, but people buying second hand, buy it for 15k instead of 30 and depreciation is much slower after the 2 year period. In my opinion unless you're filthy rich you should never buy a car new. Im certain most buy second hand cars. Great overall video though!
@@andresaliba No because you're assuming cars and people are 1:1. There are cars being manufactured every single year, the cars that are used don't go anywhere unless they're scrapped. Just more new are generated. Ask yourself how many relatives bought a car new vs old. I'm sure many many more buy used.
@@akbartoryalae279 I think you're not seeing your fallacy here. A car can't be manufactured used, so by definition, someone has to buy it NEW before another person buys it used. It doesn't matter how many more people buy used vs new, the sum of costs are all still there, divided among all of the car buyers. Money doesn't disappear.
@@andresaliba I understand what you're saying, but the video claims that the the cost of ownership per vehicle is X amount. This X amount is only for those who buy cars new. That X amount is in itself correct to those who buys cars new, yes I understand that cars being manufactured are new and people buy them. But a city with 5 million working population only a very small X amount by new. Other amount buy used or don't buy at all. The number that buy used every year is much higher than the X amount. Also the X amount people spend maintaining a car isn't averaged out so its per new vehicle. Not average including used vehicles.
@@akbartoryalae279 I still don't see the point you're trying to make here. Do you agree with me that it doesn't matter about the numbers for each person, but rather how much total money was spent by individuals for that one object? Regardless if it had 1 or 10 owners, the costs are all still there as a burden to society. In his example, he obviously exaggerated both for the car numbers and for the public transit numbers, it's much easier to calculate. If he starts taking into account used car numbers, than all kinds of variables start to appear, which ultimately are all useless, as the costs for the vehicle are all the same, regardless of how many people bought it.
As a Berliner and a guy with two jobs. I mainly conmute on my cycle for the most part. It has given me a sense of freedom that I absolutely love. Although we have kindda good bike lanes here (compared to India, my home country) there is a lot of work to be done.
sold my car few weeks ago and i am so happy! the car was just standing weeks long in the middle of berlin (s bahn nordbahnhof 10115) and was just sucking money for parking, taxes, insurance, future tüv ... now im back to carsharing when necessary or just bicycle!
Nice video, however most people I know buy second hand cars (3 to 5 years old) and let someone else take most of the depreciation. The car costs would be way lower if you calculated it like this.
you must be more naive to be convinced of such by this video OR you live in an city with no need for cars witch is NOT the majority of the world even in citys with good public transport
We live in an Major Australian city which to be fair has quite good public transport and bicycle infrastructure. A lot of the associated operating costs are actually a lot higher than the video for our specific situation. We already only use our car maybe once a month so it makes sense got our situation. So yes, definitely the exception but this video pushed us to actually kick into motion what we should have already done.
@@RavenL1337 The automobile industry is one of the biggest destructive forces on the planet, depleting resources, stoking conflicts, polluting the planet and so on. It’s a common sense idea to desire public transport which can drastically reduce pollution and resource extraction. I have lived in a few countries which are wildly different in development, and you can manage everywhere if you live in urban areas with public transport and also save a ton of money.
@ohsocooll12342 Urban areas are not desirable nor affordable for lots of folks. I would never be able to own anything. Not have a garden. Not have room for my bikes, kayaks, etc. Not have space for the dogs either. Renting forever is a sustainable way. After covid and the price hikes I'm even more convinced. Renting in a city while young or temporary is fine. But living in a city for decades is absolutely unaffordable. At least in my circumstances.
I actually agree with you on most of your points, except for one: weather. The country I live in is a mid-income tropical one meaning hot and humid weather. This completely negates cycling and walking to work if you have an office job, well unless you are lucky enough to have an employer that installed showers at your workplace. A couple of years ago, our capital city had a mayor who was into cycling so he went all out to installimg bike lanes all over the place that now it is possible to cycle anywhere in our city safely. He set up tax incentives for employers and workers, organised promotional rides and went as far as giving out free bikes. Several years on, aside from a few foreign labourers and the odd westerner, the bike lanes are mostly unused. I'm not arguing for car use mind you, I fully believe public transportation is the way to go, especially for my city. Personally, I'm lucky enough to live next to a metro station and use that whenever I need to commute.
People think bikes are so much more important than transit. No, the metro is best. In some Muslim countries, women can't cycle. So they ride trains to protect their hijab because cycling reveals the shape of the body.
@@naydsoe27 Yes to all.. Lol.. My home city has both and LRT and MRT systems. Problem is that we don't have enough stops though but I realise it costs quite a bit of scratch to set up a new line or add more stops. I love trams, one the cheapest forms of public transportation but sadly they don't seem to be too popular in the developing world. We have on BRT line (bus rapid transit) but for whatever reason we didn't build any more.
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Corrections:
- The 4144 EUR rail ticket apparently includes free city-wide transit as well. I didn't know this, but that would make the calculation at 6:18 even cheaper.
Clarifications:
- The Berlin public transport figures only include BVG, not S-Bahn & Regio (both cost and revenue side). This is done simply because BVG figures are more easily broken out, while the rail figures are harder to separate from the German Rail figures who runs them. Note that this means that there are actually more people taking public transportation because of this than I said, but for the sake of a cost calculation, the BVG figures should be accurate.
- Note that I'm comparing total cost of car ownership (including non-financialized externalities, such as pollution) vs. public transport/bikes costs, which don't fully include externalized costs. This is because such numbers have not been accurately been made for a comparison as far as I know. This means this is not a perfect comparison. That said, keep in mind that public transport companies, unlike private car owners, do have to directly pay for the vast majority of their own infrastructure except bus lanes (rail infrastructure, parking, repair, accidents, etc.), and cause much less pollution (a tram here in Berlin does 1/7th per passenger vs. cars for example) and meanwhile bikes take up about 1/10th as much space for both parking and riding as cars + their roads don't need to be re-paved nearly as often. So keep in mind that these costs are not included, but they would hardly tip the scales.
There's another alternative to all of this - buy used car, then depreciation isn't anything close to your numbers. I'm driving 10 years old premium car and depreciation is around 1k/year. Maintenance costs are lower as well, because I don't have to go to the official dealer to change oil or fix something, I can go to any mechanic or even do it myself. If you buy used car you can save up the money to buy it straight away so you will also be saving on leasing expenses.
@@toms8812 yeah but does that cut the costs as much as just, having better public transport and biking infrastructure? i highly doubt that
@@kj4derEchte Hey, that is an interesting System of Maths of yours that puts 9.4 Billion in Kfz-Tax per Year as 10 times the amount of the 12 Billion of just the Costs of the BAB-System (not even complete numbers of those) per year. Stick Fuel Tax where the sun doesn't shine, as it comes mainly from heating, so that would be B/S of yours.
So direct Car specific Tax does not even cover Bundesautbahnen in our measly conventional Mathematics, not to mention Car Specific Expenditures for other Federal Expenditures on Cars and public expenditures on your car on State level, District and local Levels. If you just make up claims, you should remember all public incomes and expenditures are completely public for everyone to check your statements against the Reality of the Bundeshaushaltsplan, not just to public servants using those Haushaltplan publications, not even just to every Citizen, but to everyone!
So, giving you a fair chance of not argueing in completely bad faith or ignorance wish-believes but you having come up with an entirely new Maths:
Please elaborate your entirely new system of the Science of Mathematics behind the opening numbers, go ahead!
@@hopolapopola I'm all pro biking infrastructure, but you don't realize that even if majority of people would drop cars for public transport the need for car infrastructure wouldn't disappear, because we still need roads and parking spaces for so many things - deliveries, construction, natural resource extraction, transportation to farms, forests, wind farms etc. less people who own cars would mean that the cost of maintaining this infrastructure for person who doesn't own a vehicle would increase.
Why do these stats include 250 a year for car washing and 200 a year for 'navigation'? The stats seem really absurd tbh.
Great summary! I'm constantly amazed at how much regular drivers underestimate the cost of driving. They usually don't think past gas and maybe insurance.
At the municipal level, the non-profit organization Strong Towns has done extensive calculations across dozens of cities to show that sprawling car-centric infrastructure is always a net-negative for cities, and it has many knock-on costs to other infrastructure (especially water and sewer costs) that are literally bankrupting cities.
But because cars are expensive - horrendously expensive - people who pay for them think they've paid their way, and there's an entitlement from many drivers. Meanwhile, in the majority of cities, local roads are paid for by property tax or local sales taxes, which means that everyone in the city pays for local roads, regardless of whether they drive or not. If you want cyclists to "pay their way", then you should start calculating their refund cheques.
On a personal note, my next video (coming out on Monday) talks about how our family has saved tens of thousands of dollars since we went car free. That has been so financially liberating for us, but it's only possible because the cities we live in were designed properly. Many people (and especially Americans) don't have that luxury, which is a major problem.
Ahah so great to have a teasing of your next video through a related one
And there you hit the nail on it’s head, to live car free, society needs to be made for it to do so. And that will take time. Even in the Netherlands (where I live), going car free is not a economic option. Yes we all pay more due to that but public transport needs to be much better before it’s an alternative. (And I use it mainly for the longer trips when possible & not adding over 50% to my travel time…. Which exclude the trip to my Girlfriend. And to many of my Family.
Sadly I believe that unless the VVD stops being behind the controls in our country this will not change.
>cities
Yea, not living in those. Sorry if my net cost destroys society but... not my problem. Thanks for reading my feel good blog. Also stop watching youtube videos and other streaming heavy platforms since your contributing to the waste of fresh water. ;)
Glad I’m 17 with my 74’ ford ranchero, nothing but the road ahead, sucks that people nowadays are only focusing on the small things instead of bigger ones, like chinas and indias pollution and other corporations that pollute, cars are not the only problem.
@@battokizu how is destroying society (of which you are a member) not your problem though?
I agree with everything, except one financial detail, people always take the new car cost in calculation, but most private people don't buy a brand new car, but a car that is a few years old. So I think it would be more fair to take a 4 year old Golf and let somebody use that for 10 years, and then they buy another 4 year old Golf etc... Richer people of course can buy new cars, but I think they are not the majority.
Not to mention the actual financial cost someone is willing to pay for your car (the value of the car in the market) is not directly correlated with how useful it is. You trust the car you bought 15 years ago, and are happy to keep using it, but wouldn't pay even 500€ to get the equivalent old car from someone you don't know. Someone that drives a good car that is easy and cheap to maintain and driving it til it dies, is a lot cheaper than systematically buying cars every 10/12 years whether new or second hand.
Remember even the cheap Fiat or Hyundai sedans, well maintained, are being used as Taxis in Istanbul with odomoters at 800,000km+. Cars last a long time, or a lot of km, they just need to be well maintained.
My latest car was 16 years old and didn't cost much it won't take to long for insurance to overcome how much I paid.
@@jlspma yes you have to maintain your car and maintain it well and a lot will last you a long time / many miles.
I've never bought a new car. Never will.
I think this happens only in Europe where there is regulated 2nd market exists. In India & many other countries people mostly prefer to buy a new car instead of a used car even when it's out of their reach.
I think you made a massive oversight in this video. No sane person with a low income buys a new car every 4-6 years. Most people in that income class don't buy new cars ever. They buy used cars, which drastically reduces cost of ownership. Also, I'd argue that a VW Golf isn't exactly a bottom-shelf car, it's actually rather expensive. Something like a used Renault Clio or Renault Twingo would be a more likely candidate (New VW Golf starts at 30k€, new Renault Clio starts at 17k€, for reference).
I'm not saying all your arguments are false, they are actually quite valid, I'm just saying the cost of car ownership might be quite overblown compared to the real world.
Yes, this assumption bothered me a lot. I like my cars mature. If it is not old enough to watch porn, it's not old enough for me. I currently own two cars, that I paid $1400 for. I spent a total of CA $400 on maintenance
Completely agree. This video is about stupid people who buy new cars every few years. Oversight is massive on comfort and convenience of cars (especially if you buy older reliable cars that had almost or all the depreciation done)
It does not make a big difference really. Used cars will be cheaper for you upfront but you will have higher maintenance costs and a shorter lifespan which means you will have to replace your car sooner so it will make only a small impact on the overall costs.
@@b0kix953 you do realize that new cars lose most of their value in the first 3-4 years? It does make a big difference.
Depends on what kind of a used car are you getting. If you buy a couple years old car, that used to cost $15K and now costs $12K, the difference is not that big. If you get a car, that used to cost $15K and you get it for $500, its uncomparable.
I am from Delhi, India. The Delhi Metro has completely revolutionised the travelling habits of the people. Its high speed, clean and air conditioned transportation that charges you a fraction of what you would spend on fuel. It has evidently reduced the number of cars on the roads. Then came Uber and Ola, the ride share apps which has completely subsided the need for owning a car. My father is surprised how I have been earning since 5-6 years and refuse to buy a car. (I just take his if I need. 😂)
Delhi metro were amazing!
Resonate 100%
Delhi metro is very good in comparison to other metro systems in the country, but imo that city still needs greater investment in public transport especially buses and complete integration between all modes of public transit, like I doubt any Indian city has a unified transport authority and a unified pass for all public transit (there was an attempt in Chennai a decade ago but that got buried and never implemented). I have not been to Delhi for a decade by this point but from the data car sales seem to be still rising. Plus in the case of Delhi specifically the number of vehicles entering the city from outside Delhi through highways in a day equals the number of new vehicles registered in the city in a year, so there needs to be an effort to integrate the NCR region and surrounding states into rail and bus transit if traffic and pollution issues are to be resolved.
In India, a car is more than just a transportation unit. It's a status symbol for most people. Bigger the car, higher the status.
@@shaileshbhat6131 honestly i feel like that is a global thing, true for any country.
The Bahncard 100 actually includes local transportation! It is valid on the entire BVG and S-Bahn network too, you don't need to add the numbers.
That is how it makes sense for a lot of people to own. If you are regularly in two cities, it quickly makes sense. I also know people who live a digital nomad lifestyle using it, where they will spend a lot of nights on the train.
Wait 4000 euro for basically full country wide public transport? That is less then the cost of gas for a modest commute here. Event without high gas prices. Wow. I knew cars are no good, but that it is this bad of a disconnect is amazing.
@@fulconandroadcone9488 including ice s
@@fulconandroadcone9488 4000 per person. And even 4000 € is about 2500 liters of Super at current price. It's about 2 times more than average german drive.
@@swgar maintenance costs, tires, taxes, insurance still exist tho....
In my case: insurance 1000, taxes 380, 450 per service, 650 for a set of tires (last about 3 years) , and then fuel. That's just the running costs. The initial cost of buying the cars is another animal.
@@swgar you didn't watch the video, did you? :P
The whole point is that just the gas isn't even close to the total cost of owning car.
My extended family of 4 living in the suburbs of Florida, USA has 5 vehicles: two SUV's- one of them a junker for carrying groceries/furniture/construction the other SUV for moving family/friends and roadtrips, one expensive BMW Sedan purely for one person to drive to work (merely as a status symbol haha), and another sedan and hatchback for two young adults in college. Even though they are constantly repairing them, and literally have no room in the driveway to park them (so much that one has to be reparked on the street when mailman is not there), there is 0 chance they would get rid of them. Their convenience and other perks just outweigh any other benefit in the United States, it is a starkly different world than here in Europe.
That is amazingly expensive
Only because US cities are designed like crap and force you to shell out for a car
Brilliant stuff! Really enjoyed how you avoided the typical surface level argumentation and instead took us on a deep dive into the actual numbers of car dependency costs. Love it 👌
Very true , i havent seen these talking points anywhere else .
Real Tapakapa wow!
Mochst sowas für Wean a? Warat ur supa!
I have a feeling you will make a video about this topic too in like a few months
Numbers would be even more interesting for Vienna, since they paint themselves as a green city. But atleast we have 365 euro public transport.
Fantastic video with the cost breakdowns. It is absolutely insane how much we spend and justify on car infrastructure when there are obviously more efficient ways to spend our time and money on transit.
Just throw in some TRAINS and call it a day.
I am obviously half joking, but investment in public transit and well designed cities will go a long way.
We really need to think about subsidizing car oriented infrastructure and it's effects on climate change.
About time spending: for me it is common situation in Berlin to choose between 20 minutes by car or over an hour by public transport. Each way.
Go F*ck yourself, Alan Fisher. Cars >>>>> Trains, and suburbs are better than your f*cking ass. Leave this planet now you b+tch.
I love it, all the transit community is here in the comments.
@@swgar You're meant to pay attention to the road while driving. You can do other stuff while travelling on public transport, like watching TH-cam videos.
I read an article saying something like this before I bought my first car, so I decided to systematically write down every single expense I have with it into an Excel spreadsheet. So including all insurance, servicing, gasoline, tires, road taxes, depreciation, etc. And I came up with just under 20.000€ over 7 years and 90.000 km. So as I have suspected, owning a car is not terribly expensive at all if you buy a reasonable car.
In my experience cars are only expensive if you buy swanky gas guzzlers on finance. If you buy a BMW M3 on a finance deal, have to pay the insurance, the high fuel costs because it guzzles petrol at current prices, BMW's mafia service costs which you have to pay as part of the terms of the finance - of course it gets expensive.
It can also get expensive if you keep buying ancient disposable shitboxes, like someone I knew who did. He was buying a "new" car every year or two because they broke down or fell apart, with expensive or impractical repairs even if you could get parts.
Granted that was 20 years ago and he was buying cars from the mid-late 1980s. Today's ancient shitboxes are much better than the older ones.
Just buy a respectable, recent used car for a sensible price and it's probably going to be absolutely fine.
@@mxbx307 if you however buy a daweoo matiz (funny car) that's about 10-15 years old now for about 5 grand, you pay 16€ in taxes a year and a full tank barely costs 60 euros in today's fuel prices and you get about 500km of range with it
you just forgot the part of being heavy subsidized by everybody taxes.
@@luizprestes6795 What do you mean?
@@Georgije2 cars body enormous amount for things like 4 to 5 plots of land for a single car in its lifetime, road maintenance, pollution subsidiaries and surveys and many many expenses which the gov has to undertake
Techaltar is going full orange pill and I’m here for it!
What does that mean
Orange pil?
@@TheCatLoverLord it’s a reference to the TH-cam channel NotJustBikes :)
Hard to keep track of all pill colors...
@@ergergzbhzefer if you're going to make quirky references to other channels at least make them actually recognisable at a glance
A couple of issues in this video:
1. All calculations include 1-person households. A single car can be used by all people in a family, and that increases the alternative cost of public transport/bikes - the latter needs to be multiplied by the number of family members. Keep in mind that most discounts (e.g. for school kids) are subsidized by the government.
2. Car infrastructure in the cities - we need the infrastructure anyway for delivery and logistics. All businesses need to deal with transportation, and removing all public parking spaces (or charging the real-market value) would significantly increase the cost of all goods.
3. Lifetime cost of owning a car assumes that a household buys a brand new car. Value degradation/insurance/maintenance cost is not linear, the majority of the costs can be avoided when buying a used car (cheaper insurance, cheaper parts, smaller value degradation).
4. Alternatives presented are not viable at scale. For example, car sharing is amazing, except when everyone needs a shared car (bank holidays, vacation season). Rental car shortages is a real thing.
5. Alternatives presented are not viable for all people. For example, certain people with disabilities have significant problems with using bike / public transportation. Excluding them from owning a car could further result in isolation.
6. 60-year totals in the spreadsheet include costs of 50-year totals 😅
That being said, I still agree with the conclusion that majority of the people living in the cities does not need to own their car. But it won't be so easy to change - first we need to solve the problem of the end-point logistics being mostly based on cars.
Wait so you counted both car payment & depreciation in your calculations? That's a pretty big mistake that inflates your numbers A LOT.
Especially since depreciation is not a fixed cost.
One thing I think people misjudged: expensive cars doesn't get more subsidy from the public than cheaper cars, heavier cars/trucks/busses do. If we only ran light cars and motorcycles our roads would last several years more than our practical use with heavy vehicles to transport our stuffs and people, the impact on road materials increases a lot with the high weight vehicles.
I think he equated “more expensive” to “bigger/heavier”. While not the full story it is a simplified and generalized way to look at it. A higher end trim of the same vehicle model is almost always heavier.
Trucks are ~3-10x heavier than heavy cars. But it's true most SUVs are pointless and as usefull as any (lifted) wagon like A4/6 allroad, Outback...
To my knowledge, most damage to roads is done by weather mostly freeze/thaw cycles, so I’m not very sure that roads for bikes would be cheaper from that perspective. Though they could be much smaller and that should
generate a significant cost reduction.
@@paulzapodeanu9407 it doesn't freeze everywhere, where I live the temperature never goes that low
It’s so dumb how big cars have gotten. Everyone wants a bigger car to feel “more safe” on the road. It wastes space on parking, roads, damages roads, creates blind spots, causes more damage when crashed, uses more fuel, are more expensive. There are no benefits.
Most people (I know) do take cost of ownership into account. It's just that currently the alternatives aren't good enough.
Biggest reasons to resist this is something you don't talk about: "Time to travel", "public transport availability (or lack thereof)", and safety on/during the trip (if you're working irregular hours or work in shifts).
And that's something I sadly enough notice in your video. Your pov is a work-from-home single person with no kids. That's not the home/work life of the average person.
A lot of people have kids (which can require you to travel a lot an can require you to take more luggage with you than bikes would allow), and most people still need to go back-and-forth to their workplace. And these workplaces often lie in areas that are not easily reached by public transport. Or if they have a good public transport available, they only run (well) during 7-19h, which then handicaps people who work in shifts (which is the case with a majority of blue collar workers). People who start at 4-5 AM and/or work until 9-10 PM (not even mentioning night shifts) often can't access this type of public transport, or have to travel in less safe circumstances.
For me personally it's time-to-travel & road safety that is holding me back. But luckily that's changing. The Belgian government is slowly rolling out bike highways (fietssnelweg) pathways, and one is scheduled to come on my road to work in the future, which would provide me with a safe road to work that's a lot shorter than the current alternatives.
Travel a lot with the kids? Wow you must be a great father.
@Andreas Becker "I do this so you can" is not a good argument.
You see, the problems you name are mostly because the system is forced towards cars. If cars and parking would be made more expensive and public transport better half of the people gad mad, always taxing the cars etc. Sadly most societies see cars as the way to move when you do well, you're poor if you don't. Luckily you also name the changes happening.
@Andreas Becker no it isn't. I want to see you doing 40KM every day in 32C with 70% humidity. Do all people have showers at work? Or/and if you are an average person that physically can't do that. Or if you have couple of kids that you have to take to school/kindergarten in the morning, get to work, get the kids from where you put them in the morning, take them to whatever activity they are doing afternoon, do the shopping get and all of that within 12 hours.
Before you start talking about kids on their own, in some countries it's illegal to leave kids unsupervised until certain age - even at home.
So while you can and do, many others simply can't for very long list of reasons.
I own a 2012 Subaru Legacy. That just doesn’t break. I live in Switzerland and my yearly costs are (converted to euros):
- 2000 euro fo fuel (about 150 a month)
- 700 euro for insurance
- 300 for road tax
- 1000 for parking
But seeing that I live in a place that would take me 1.5hrs to commute to the office by public transport, and only 30 min with the car, I do enjoy the freedom of owning one and going on trips. I guess maintenance of a car is costly depending on how reliable it is or not.
Small correction for 6:24: You most likely would not even need the 978€ ticket for Berlin as the BahnCard 100 that lets you travel by train in Germany actually includes CityTickets for local public transportation in 130 cities including Berlin (Zones A+B)
WOW that is incredible
and the cost of the rails and the cost of the roads and parking wasnt counted in that price was it
@Egalitarian917 but the people that drives are the onces keeping socity working public transport is a pipe dream it wont work before the day people say cant wait to get rid of the car what an upgrade public transport is and that will never happen becuse public transport is broken by design
@Egalitarian917 doesnt work in denmark and in any of the countries you said
can public transport take you to a random field anywhere in the country at any time of day and year in any weather conduction
is it as fast as car no
do you control the temperature no
does you have to wait for it yes
can you bring any tools no
can you have weapson for hunting on bord no
can i drink while on there no
can my dog sit on the seat no
can i drive the thing no
do i have to listen to babys crying yes
do you get there in time depens is there any kind of weather no
tell me one thing that works with publc transport becuse right now i see none
there is a reason a country can exist without public transport but no country exist without private transport becuse the public dosnt work due to limitations that is deal breaking
well that sounds like a broken ass design to me
@Egalitarian917 you call me dishonest what have i said that isnt true
You messed up the Excel formulae in the 60 year total and the figure made it into the video. You've summed B98:B137 and C98:C137 but these include the 50 year subtotals (and miss out the first 21 years of usage) which massively distorts the figure. If you're going to use subtotals like this I'd recommend you use the subtotal formula. The correct 60 year figures (based on the numbers you've decided to use) are 223,298 for the bike and 1,041,288 for the car. This sets the tone for the rest of my comment because if you were viewing any of this with a critical eye you might have noticed that the 60 year figure is more than double the 50 year figure. Suffice to say I think the approach you've taken is biased and overly simplistic.
I'd also take issue with the approach to some of the figures you've used from studies (in particular the Gössling one) - the 'blame' for arising social problems caused by cars is being placed on car users ('selfish, stupid, ignorant drivers') with no critical analysis of the social factors affecting why people might *have to* use cars, and this whole video comes off as a sales pitch to get people to stop using cars which oversimplifies the complexities of the issues surrounding car use. I don't have the time to separate out which factors that have been added to the 'cost of car ownership' are fair to apportion to drivers themselves (I can think of several other interest groups that could bear responsibility for cars being necessary in the first place); that was supposed to be your job: to view the study with a critical eye rather than using it as a tool to sell bikes.
This line from the Gössling study is interesting: "For example, many businesses provide vehicle parking facilities to employees and customers that are unpriced or priced below their full production costs (including land, construction and operating expenses), while providing no comparable benefit to those who travel by other modes." (And you make many similar arguments in the video.)
I wouldn't consider taking less time to commute to be an employee benefit just because I live closer to work, that's time I'm saving because of where I live which isn't really either my choice (entirely) or my employer's; if an employee *needed* a car to get to work, it is surely appropriate that the employer provides a parking space, otherwise presumably the cost of parking would fall on the employee - why do both you and the study believe workers should be further penalised for driving to work if there is no other practical mode of transport? There are different ways of approaching this issue and this video gives no critical analysis.
I'm disappointed to see the figures presented in the way they have been in this video. For example, you've given no explanation of why it would be appropriate to compare the cost of a car *including social costs* with the cost of public transport *without social costs* (did you think it was fair to assume that there were no social costs to public transport?), and then comparing just BVG subsidies with the full social cost of a car - what useful information is this actually giving us?
I think the problem you have in tackling an issue like this is that making a simplistic comparison like this is never going to work - it's not providing information that can accurately assess the unique factors that motivate each driver to own and drive cars and whether or not it's possible or reasonable to ask them to ditch the car. I agree we need to reduce car usage but this video takes the wrong approach imo. What are the factors holding people back from shifting away from cars? I don't think you've adequately covered them in this video.
such a well-thought out response. a shame it seems itll go to waste.
The "All of Germany" annual train pass costs about the same as an annual season ticket from London to Chelmsford in Essex (a 31 mile journey). You can't use this ticket for ANY other journeys and if you need to travel onwards in London to anywhere else you'll need another £500-£1200 for a tube pass. You don't even get a guaranteed seat for that money either.
Cars are a pain but UK trains are horrendously expensive.
Bad government policy. Simple.
Incompetent governance or corruption is not inherent to any form of transport.
The rail network in the UK is an outlier and broken thanks to privatisation. "Rich man's railway"
@@g4egk The publicly owned and run TFL (transport for London) is also expensive (an adult going between zones 1-9 is capped at £20 a day on payg, more on a day travelcard). Its the same for LNER services, publicly owned and expensive to ride (a trip both ways between London and Edinburgh can easily cost over £100 booked weeks in advance).
@@foryou6888 It's not completely true to say TFL is publicly run - they are required to contract out the running of underground trains, bus routes etc. to private companies like Abellio, Arriva and MTR.
We also have a government who are convinced that public transport has to turn a profit and pay dividends to its shareholders 😒.
I suspect that LNER being required to operate as a publicly owned business in the framework of the previous franchise model also increases its cost. (I have to use it a lot and wish it was cheaper too!)
@@matthewwatt2295 From what I gather the only part of tfl that was profitable pre-pandemic was the underground? Also I have no idea about LNER and how it is run, I just know its currently publicly owned (maybe not run I don't know), and charges quite a bit.
I think the cost of a car is greatly overestimated is this video.
The depreciation of more than 3000€ a year is in the case of a brand new car but for a used cheaper car it's actually a lot less. I'm not even considering the fact that 75% of the people in France (that's probably the case in Europe too) don't own their cars but rent it.
So you can probably divide the budget by a third or more.
The insurance cost is above the roof. Nearly 1200€ for tax and insurance a year is probably the most expensive you can get in my country (France). As an exemple, i pay 300€/year for a car bigger than a Golf.
What is other ? 1320€ is a lot so it might be interesting to precise what it is.
To counter my own arguments, it seems that all the cost in this video are wildly overestimated (public transport, train, bike maintenance) or maybe Germany is ten time more expensive than France but i doubt it.
To conclude, yes, owning a car is probably a lot cheaper than what you argue but so is the case for public transportation and bike. Overall your video makes total sense and the work behind it is impressive !
Yes, the costs are counted for Berlin, which is obviously more expensive than most parts of France. Also the Germans love cars and change them often, have high insurance costs and have infrastructural priority for them. I still think the costs are a bit exaggerated.
In Poland I pay for my mid tier SUV 7000 EUR yearly which includes lease, insurance, service, tires and depreciation. On top of that you have to add fuel, parking, maintenance which sums up to about 1700 EUR as I do drive very short distances mostly and go about without the car in the city. This means my cost totals at 8700 EUR yearly in Poland. Of course for a much nicer car than - A new Hyundai Tucson with nice specs.
But the numbers fit. And in Poland that amount is much more to bear than in FR or DE
I thought same about depreciation, but in 50 years you need at average 6 new cars, and the cost of 6 cars adds up almost exactly to the depreciation put in video. Also, if you are renting (long term), you for sure will pay for it more than depreciation, the renter would loose money if you didn't.
Edit: the only thing is that most people buy second hand cars, so they pay way less for a car. But for those who buy brand new, it is right.
i think it is just really generalised. i live in the netherlands and i got the cheapest insurance i could get for my 2003 volkswagen bora and it is 155 per month and taxes are 55 per month so i already pay €210 a month for the car if i don’t drive it. so i think the numbers could be somewhere near what they are telling us in this video but every country and specefic case differents from each other ofcourse
In Germany as well as the whole of Europe by far most of the people own a car rather than renting it. To be honest I'm shocked to hear and can't really believe that around 75% of France are renting cars instead of buying them. It would interest me if you have statistics for that.
His calculation is the actual price of the car when you buy it + upkeep. upkeep alone is about 3k in germany. but you have to buy the car too, thats another 2k/year, depending on how long you keep the car.
1:40 I feel this is a bit manipulative, since apart from private cars, roads are also used by healthcare, fire deps, police, supply, public transit and maybe more. So I wouldn't say that society is paying for the drivers, since roads are useful also for people without a car
At the same time, roads are twice the size to accommodate parking *only* for cars. Imagine the cost of streets that have no parking at all, only two lanes instead of four where public transport and trams can still drive.
@@Pragmatic_Optimist_MCR I guess not every road is a 4 lane one, and not all of them has parking on it. In my city it's a majority of roads that are 2 lanes only without any parking on it's side. Strange, it seems like the world isn't only USA...
@@_r4x4 If there is almost no parking space and no public parking lots that are for free, so that you always have to pay a ticket, except on your own property, that's great! I am from Berlin and every street has at least one lane for parking, even at the outskirts. Which is horrendous. Where do you live? Sounds great, if there is this little public parking space and more room for pedestrians/cyclists
@@Pragmatic_Optimist_MCR just normal, not so big city in Poland (about 90k people). Parking is mostly dealt by your destination, so if you live in flat then there would be some parking spots nearby, work places or other destinations also tries to give some parking spaces. There isn't much of public parking spaces, I guess it's mostly because majority of people would say that using it when not needed would be unreasonable due to it's cost.k It's not that big city, so if you aren't going that far it won't be bad, dedicated biking infrastructure is almost non existent, but there are roads and pedestrian paths (or "dedicated" mixed use bike/pedestrian paths... Yeah you wouldn't even notice them if not sign putted there), but still enough for most people.
True. I work for my city and I fix/maintain its infrastructure. It would be impossible to do that without my work truck. And how would city even work without roads for truck that bring goods?
These numbers feel incredibly inflated, a standard 2018 golf in my country costs an average of 13k euros, maintenance 3-400e, fuel driving an average 20k a year @ 6l/100km @1.8euros/liter is 2.1k, insurance - 100e. The most it can depreciate is sub 1k a year as it starts off as not an expensive car. The absolute maximum being around 3.5k and even that is really pushing it. How do you even come up with 7.5k is beyond me.
That 2018 Golf is not new. You were subsidized by the first owner. Don't forget, one disadvantage of public transport (including sharing) is that "it is old and dirty". Buying an old & dirty personal transport from the start is not much of an advantage.
Exactly. If his number would be close to the truth then there would be next to no cars in Baltics.
I second this.
I even live in Germany, so this video is very applicable to me, but the costs don't add up. Insurance for a Golf isn't 1100€, it's 250€ if you just buy mandatory liability insurance. 480€ if you take the full insurance.
Also 1300€ for "other" costs. Which other costs, maintenance was already accounted for with 600€, so this could be 85€ für TÜV, a bit for car washes etc., but how would you ever get to 1300€?
I spend a lot of money taking care of my car and even with higher gas prices and inflation I don't spend over 4000$ a year on my car and I drive 20,000 miles a year. I agree. These prices make no sense.
i'm sure anybody who is not a car addict would take the 6000 sample survey data over some random youtube comment but thanks for your insight anyway!
I don't know how it's possible but my yearly cost of owning a 2017 Skoda Octavia (bought second hand for 12k euros) is nowhere near the estimated 7600 euros mentioned in the video. I summed up all my costs and I am well below 3000 euros per year (including depreciation).
well from watching half of it now it seems like he's trying to prove a point that cars are bad or something. It's biased but I get the point he's trying to make. he does sound like a communist slash marxist, which is no surprise seeing that he lives in Berlin
I bought a Opel Astra (second hand, 1 year old, for 15k) and It's even lower for me, i barely spend 2k a year for everything. I don't get how people pay 600 euro for maintenance. I pay around 200 euro every year for maintenance. Also taxes and insurance are very low since it's a small eco-friendly car compared to the overpriced 2L engine Golf they showed in the video.
Yep. I have a 6 year old (2016 model) Skoda Fabia in the UK and it's costing me about £1600 (about €1900) a year to keep on the road. It's not been getting as much use since COVID, but it cost me £7300 back in late 2019.
The car is setting me back about 3-4% of my annual income at most in terms of cash costs. The UK estimates per-mile costs at 23p, so that's about £1150 in annual wear and tear although the car is exceptionally reliable and hasn't had any major issues. That £1150 is also hypothetical and not coming out of my pocket.
In any case the convenience and freedom is definitely worth it, plus in my area you can expect to pay the same for a season ticket on crappy public transport that takes you nowhere and at times of their whim. You are also pre-paying for journeys you will never make and routes you will never use.
Car wins. My personal opinion is that people are grossly exaggerating vehicular running costs and it saves me having to buy expensive train tickets, or pay delivery charges or suchlike.
@@mxbx307And you can also learn to work on cars 😅.
I've owned the same car for 15 years, so not overly concerned about depreciation. Insurance, tax and maintenance on the other hand are massive expenses
I think depreciation is highly overestimated in these calculations. If you use the new car more than 7 years or so, or count with second-hand car market figures you get a much lower number than €3100. My example is a 10 years old Suzuki Swift that depreciated £1700 in three years!
He has the typical attitudes of a young, physically fit city dweller with no children and high disposable income, with little idea what it is like to live in the countryside, particularly in the UK, with non-existent public transport.
He also forgets to mention anything about me, who owns a 32 year old Volvo that's literally appreciating in value... Just doesn't seem accurate to talk about "the cost of owning a car" and not mention some of the people that own cars... lol
you are using a uncommon exception to argue against the rule (i.e. that folks buy millions of new cars every year). It's like saying the price of vegetables is of no interest because you have a garden where you plant carrots.
@@martian9999 Buying a brand-new car is far more uncommon than buying second hand. Most drivers buy cars that are a few years old at least. New car sales in Germany were 2.6 million last year. 2019 was 3.6 million, which is a typical year. This is in a country with 84 million people. There's no way buying a brand-new car every 2-3 years is very common in Germany.
@@FuelPoverty You didn't watch the video, but that's okay. No one is saying to ban all cars or that cars never have a use. But building cities around using cars for personal transport is as silly as building subways out in the rural countryside. It just isn't the right tool for the job.
And either way, you the premise of the video is still true. Cars are expensive. Some people need them, and conveniently they are most needed where cost-of-living is usually low. Doesn't make sense for people who don't use cars to pay so much to subsidize car drivers.
Good video, however, I would say it applies for countries where most of cars are bought brand new, i.e. Germany. Where I live (Bulgaria) probably upwards of 90% of cars are bought second hand. It comes as no surprise then that the average age of a car here is somewhere around 17 years. Even in larger cities, most "newer" cars are still around the 6-8 year mark. Most people I know do not change their cars in the 3-7 years span, irregardless if they are well off. Even if you see some high-end car brands like Mercedes, BMW, Porsche and such (talking about newer models or specifications), probably still 90% or more are not bought here brand new, but are imported after they have been driven abroad for around 5 years and their respective lease in that country has ended. As for what the costs are to actually own and run that car - this is actually one of the prime concerns here when buying a car. People really stress on whether the spare parts/repairs are cheap / fuel economy / reliability / actual cost to buy the vehicle. Probably that is the reason there are so many cars from the VAG Group here - virtually similar cars with a high degree of interchangeable parts. And bear in mind that Volkswagen isn't exactly a low-end car. At least here this segment is occupied by the likes of Dacia, Great Wall, Renault, Fiat. Volkswagen and the brands that comprise the group are actually middle to high end segment. Also - I wouldn't call a Golf tiny. It is actually a good representation of the average European's car - hatchback so that you can more easily find a parking space in a densely congested city, enough room for a family of 4 plus luggage, good fuel economy. Think the C-segment actually comprises about 1/5 of sales in Europe, could be wrong though. As for the Corsa - probably could call it tiny, but most people would call it a small city car. Cars like Smart, VW Up and such can be called tiny.
Your argument might work at a personal level, but not at a systematic level. Someone had to buy those cars brand new so that you could buy it used.
@@RajPatel-vq6if it still means that on a systemic level cars are not being replaced every 3 years. Someone is still buying them on that regular basis, but presenting that regular basis as the basis for average calculations across the whole population is not valid.
Agree from Latvia. Probably in your country car repairs are cheaper than in germany... Old car doesnt have depresation
I concur with you on a level of personal costs. However, the (on average) 4600 - 5200 euros that every person subsidises car ownership in Germany still stands (I'm sure the number is different in Bulgaria). The thing is, spending in the order of 5 to 10 times as much on car subsidies compared to public transportation subsidies as a country is a little strange.
If we transition to for instance sharing a car with a neighbourhood (e.g. th-cam.com/video/OObwqreAJ48/w-d-xo.html), you can still use it whenever you need to take your family somewhere, while not feeling the personal cost of ownership, or having all those individual owned cars drive and damage roads, necessitating maintenance costs, expansion of road costs, environmental costs etc.
We could save a lot as a society this way.
Sadly the statement 90% of the cars being bought are used is just wrong the ratio can never be more than about 50 50 otherwise there wouldn’t be enough cars to go around
As a South African I can’t imagine how a functional public transport system would even look like for me to consider not owning a car.
Yep, even i as a german who lives in the suburban area of a big city can´t imagine that. I gave public transport a lot of tries and always was running late, took forever to get to my destination and so on. Nevertheless, i get the point, of Techaltar, that if we would´ve spend money more on public transport instead of car infrastructure, maybe public transport wouldn´t be as shitty. I really don´t know how to fix this but i think that on street parking should be terminated and that there should be more underground car parking garages below already existing infrastructure. Then of course, you pay for parking, cars are kept out of parts of the town. But personally, i like my car, i am able to afford it and will continue to drive on my own.
As a fellow South African, please hear me out. Get a motorcycle.
True bru, its not like we have other dependable forms of transport either like rail in other countries and the cities here are built for cars first, so cycling and walking are a definite hassle and unreliable.
It would be great to see south africa gradually shift to other forms of transport and develop the infrastructure needed like railway lines and bicycle lanes and keep amenities in walking distance, it would help the country in an unimaginable way imo.
Build the city for the people, not the cars kinda mentality.
You could ask someone from the two thirds of the population who don't own a car.
@@petterericson6230 we're not talking low income individuals, unless you want to drive in a SA taxi or train...
Man, I love cars, I’m a car guy, but I absolutely agree with your points. Cities are for people, not for cars. Also car prices are ridiculous for average human or even a city (I mean road maintenance and parking spaces losses for city budget). If you don't absolutely need a car or just want car as a hobby don’t buy one.
? Wen I need a car dont buy one? Do you mean wen you are no care person, and dont live in the middle of nowhere. Dont buy a car.
Or do like a lot of us are doing right now and get out of overpopulated cities. If you have the means and can work from home, do yourself a favor and get out while you can.
@@smoguli I like living in cities with alot of people. As long as they are walkable... A city doesn't feel as crowded when you can get places without a car. I'm living in Tokyo so it's pretty much the definition.
Big cities are too problematic too. We need to create medium size cities, not huge mega cities. At some point is just ridiculous the amount of people we have in just a few parts of the world while most of the other part doesn't any people.
This video is just climate change propaganda, nothing more. Where I live, there are zero trains and nobody wants to ride a bike 30 miles to work every day in the snow. You are delusional if you believe that they do.
"3000€ of depreciation every year" wow I didn't know that my car lost 300% of its value during the three years of me owning it, plus now there are a lot of solutions that avoid this "cost".
i think he was saying about the VW golf.
@@lukasausen that's not the problem here, the thing is that you cannot consider both the depreciation and the maintenance as costs.
@@claudionunziante9347i don't get why he would count that in
@@claudionunziante9347 arent they costs? Wdym
@@lukasausen the thing is that he tried to pass the depreciation of a car as an hidden cost of owning one, that's an incorrect statement because if someone bought a car then he was already aware of this cost so it's not hidden.
His theory also didn't consider the possibility of leasing instead of buying.
I own a car and I will use it to return home from university every weekend spending around 30/40€ in fuel and 3 hours driving, making the same trip with a train will cost me double both in price and time, in the 2 years that I will spend there attending my master degree that amounts around 2800€ and 280 hours more.
I paid my car 3k 3 years ago and I used it to attend my bachelor so I already recovered some of its cost thanks to the fact that using the public transportation service is more costly than driving, using it for the next two years will allow me to "recover" the entire price without considering the fact that during this time I already avoided a lot of costs thanks to sharing my car with my friends and family (it's impossible to share the same train ticket 🤣)
My only problem with this is calling the VW Golf a "small car" :D Idk maybe my standards are different but a small car is a Fiat Panda or even better a Smart. I would consider a VW Golf to be a normal sized car and the Mercedes you showed at the beginning to be a huge car. Sadly there is a trend to bigger cars even here in Germany and thats probably why you said a VW Golf is a small car. Cars are already incredibly inefficient and we keep making them even more inefficient. As a German myself, I hope all of Germany will finally wake up and realize how incredibly unsustainable cars are.
Thank you for contributing to that and making this really well made video!
Here in North America, there are tons of SUVs and huge pickup trucks. A golf is tiny.
I just moved to Germany and I am amazed at how much the car lobying is slowing down Germany. Lacking infrastructure for people and bikes and the pushing for "work in the office is healthy" narrative is what I'm seeing here, guess who'll benefit from that? :)
I've lived in the Netherlands, rural Spain, Italy and a very poor Eastern European country and let me tell you, you have a mix of everything, you just need to improve on the "people before cars" and the quality of life will improve exponentially.
@@RaduVlad92 Yep its sad. We had a lot of transportation ministers in the past that seemed to be really close to the car lobby. Doesnt seem to change that much right now but lets hope itll get better especially if more and more citizens put pressure on them
I live in the US in a major city and used to own a MK7 GTI. Much of the reason I traded it for a 3 Series was due to the claustrophobic feeling I felt while constantly getting boxed in by larger vehicles. In the US you gain very little by having a tiny car like a Golf, even in a city.
@@RaduVlad92 it is not that simple. With out the car industry, germany will most likely run bankrupt.
Since half of car owners don't understand the costs of car ownership (including myself), can you explain the costs more fully at 2:48? What is included in "other?" You may also want to include a time factor for comparing different modes of transport. There is a cost for the amount of time it takes to get from door to door. Let's say walking is the cheapest form of transportation but it takes 1 hour to walk versus driving 15 minutes with a 5 minute walk from the parking to final destination. Taking the train might take 35 minutes plus a 10 minute walk, etc. There is a cost associated with these various times.
Learn to live more slowly. Not in a rush. Yes you might lose some time, but you're free on the ride to read, learn, work too.
2 possible counter counter arguments.
First, are you willing to work during the saved time? If not and it's just for leasure, can you really convert the saved time into hard cash and compare it to the hard cash in the subsidies? If not, why not just make the subsidies even for private vs public (it states in the video that it's private leaning) and see which people pick? Being more market-ish rate?
2nd, how much more time would be wasted in traffic jams if people drove more due to more drivers from reducing the subsidies for public transport or more subsides for private transport.
Probably more relevant to cities already with traffic problems or in a city where there are people demanding more private transport subsidies.
In the city that I live in with a relatively small population (1.5m), I've been in traffic jams during off peak hours that doubled the time for my trips. (Yes, I'm a car owner)
Other might be parking and such
yeah, of course it takes so much less by car, everyone is speeding. I have recently gotten my licence and I am constantly overtaken despite running at the speed limit - sometimes I speed and STILL I am overtaken by everyone.
Biking should be much cheaper than walking since walking cause substantial shoe wear
As a student I've owned a Toyota Corolla (Austria), paid 6.200€ and sold after 5 years for 3.000€ - 640€ per year. I've driven 30.000 km with it, which cost about 4.000€ (high estimate) - so 800€ per year. Taxes came in at 600€ per year and repairs and service (new brakes, oil, etc.) make up for 500€ per year. Makes 2540€ per year. Let's be generous and say 3000€. It saved me at least a full day per year in time on planing, walking, waiting, scheduling my time to fit the public trans. schedule and ultimately gave me more time to spend with my family. It also eneabled me to opt for higher paying summer jobs, which would've never been reachable by public transportation (otherwise I would have needed to rent an expensive apartment somewhere near while still paying for my other one). I had the option to buy stuff in bulk, which I could have never carried home otherwise, thus saving me additional money. It gave me flexibility, freedom and spontaneity. I've learned a lot on the way. Absolute win, keep breathing fart air in your crowded hot & stinky bus. In the meantime, I will be driving full speed on the highway.
yeah i'm a car enthusiast. and yeah, i like this video. we exist XD
seriously tho, make cars a pleasure vehicle again. they should be a hobby, not a burden. i don't want to need a car. i want to love my car. i don't want to use it everyday, i prefer public transport.
Damn right ! I'm an auto engineer myself and can't stand dailying a car in suburb area ! It is the biggest hobby killer ! (I'm biking to work which makes me happy to take my car on WE for longer distances)
Can't really agree with you though since I enjoy driving to work and back whilst also going on drives with no destination in mind.
You are not alone, 90% agree except that there are many people who need a car as a work tool, but they also suffer from this system.
It would simply be rather difficult for me to transport all the tools I need to work on the construction site.
@@deathtrvcker666pl2 you need a car for the value of a car, not just for transportation. thats the difference. you actually suffer from everyone else using their cars as simply transportation because of the wear it inflicts on the road and the traffic you have to get through. if everyone used their car for utility only and not for transit then you would be better off.
@@m.ahussain4005 what do you enjoy about driving to work? driving around can be something you enjoy, sure, but getting to work is just transit is it not? why not just take the cheapest option?
as a bike only person since 6 years, the social costs really drive me crazy. (tho I would say I am a pretty big car enthusiast) Especially in Berlin, bike paths are in super bad condition and it is so frustrating to drive a bike through the city. Funny that you picked Linienstraße for the A-Roll in the beginning - the only street I enjoy driving at!
Great video, please bring more of these less tech related videos.
Update: As an EV-owner you even get yearly money (something up to 300€) for your carbon credits... Who is paying me to drive a bike?
Nobody's paying you for riding a bike because bikes are not subsidies. Screw you for being actually environmentally friendly
start to pay for roads.. maybe they wont suck.. cant wait till they take out bike licenses
As a bike rider you require more food/energy to propel the bike forward, which has a huge carbon footprint from production to transport.
@@Entertainment- are you actually serious? :D 60-70% percent of people actually need to eat less than they currently eat, and can still drive bicycle with no need for extra energy. You are oblivious at how much we eat for no reason at all :D and on top of that use cars to move around.
@@sell2012 The only Roads in germany even partially covered in expenses by Vehicle Specific Taxes are the Autobahnen, which are not open to non-motorised traffic.
Even those need to be subsidised partially by all other taxes.
*Every* other Road, Bundesstraßen, roads and streets of State, District and Local Levels are fully paid for by *every* tax payer. You are not paying for your own Expenses, the inconsiderate Parasite in this Calculation is not the Cyclist Adrian, it is you.
Using the cost of maintenance of roads and other infrastructure and tallying it as the cost of cars to the government makes no sense, any country literally needs roads for its logistics and therefore for the country as a whole to function
Have to call this out, your figures include depreciation. While this is relevant for new and newer cars, a person has the option of buying a pre-owned car that may have less value in total than your annual depreciation cost. If you look at this from the perspective of someone who buys a 10 year old car (e.g. a reliable Toyota) the figures become dramatically smaller.
If only used car factories would be a thing... but the lizard people won't allow it!
Sorry, but what depreciation isn't, is maintenance. Older cars just need more maintenance. The cheaper the car, the higher maintenance costs they have. By a certain age and mileage nearly everything needs replacing.
@@tompaah7503 You don't have a car, right?
@@tompaah7503 Depends on what car you have, many Toyotas do not follow your rule.
@@tompaah7503 New cars break more often then old cars.
Unless you live and work in a city center where you can bike to work and everywhere else you need to go, the time saved using a car instead of public transport easily makes up for any financial loss if your time is at all valuable. Add to that the convenience factor and the fact that most people don’t have effective public transport where they live and you’ll see why cars are worth it to people who own them.
Depends how you value my time, unless driving is your hobby it is wasted time, while on public transport you can generally do stuff you would otherwise have to do at home/work etc. Like watch this video...
@Nemam Ime I guess that is a good point. I am probably biased because I only really use public transport for long distance train journeys (8hrs 4 times a month) I guess 30 mins every day on a bus could be a different situation
@@joehuttich If you already understand that you're biased, and that you barely use public transport, why do you act as if what you're saying on the matter is factual?
@Alexei Exactly. It takes me more than 4 hours (2-way) to get to work and back. I can only do this because I'm young, and I have no other responsibilities. Imagine if only I had a partner? A kid? A parent to care for? An illness? A car is for better or worse a necessary evil for many people.
@@IM-qy7mf @IM I don't think you can claim a comment that starts with "It depends how you value time.." can be claimed to be making any attempt to be a pure universal fact. It's obviously subjective as is your 4h work commute which is definitely above average and an equally biased starting point.
Regardless I may have a disproportionately good experience with public transport but that is in part because I a) use it frequently and b) embrace it
Of course getting a bus sucks for someone whose only experience of catching a bus is when there car breaks down, only a regular user will be able to truly find alternative uses of the time once they are fluent in the routes, times etc.
Finally I do have a lot of past experience using public transport daily in different contexts. I've had a commute that had me spending 3hrs on buses in rural Scotland each day and I have spent many years commuting on the Berlin Underground too, I have always found ways to use the time well sometimes I wouldn't want to get off the bus at work/ uni/ etc.
@@joehuttich i use my phone while i drive. Its called multitasking ;)
16:32 this number is not just wrong, but you sweep people who live in our area where they would have to carry their groceries for 15 minutes from the public transportation to their house, or would be completely reliant to organize their private life around times when they can still catch public transport, together with the ones in real dense city areas like Berlin, that only make up a small percentage of the overall population
Really loved the video.
What we are seeing right now, is the result of Car Companies Lobbying for years and years all over the world.
Here in the US, on a Residential Area of Sacramento, CA, I have to walk 2 Km for a crosswalk... Basically, if you don't have a car, you can't go anywhere, since the public transportation is no existent (I have never seen a Bus around my neighborhood for example).
Ironically Sacramento was my first experience with a light rail.
But now we're seeing quiete the opposite lobby. They want the private cars only for the "elite".
Here’s what’s interesting for me. I live in the U.S, for the last couple years I’ve been thinkin that a well designed and built public system would be more beneficial to citizens than having a car, and I’m the type of person that legit loves to drive. And I’ll admit, I live in a city that has, what I’d consider, a poor public transportation system. So having a car is pretty much necessary. But if my city and other cities across the country would agree to develop one mass or several mass transit infrastructures. The benefits I feel would out way the expenses us citizens would have to pay and we’d be saving money in the long run.
And, for the people like you who love to drive, a good transit system means the people who still drive are the ones who either need or want to drive. They're more likely to be good drivers, and having fewer idiots on the roads is good for everyone.
I like subways they can be faster than a car. For city interconnect highspeed rail would be nice too. Unfortunately neither are common in the US.
@@lejoshmont2093 Alternative modes are a lot more common than they were ten years ago. Problematically, because the country is so huge, and so many systemic factors feed into the problem, it will take a lot of effort and probably some years to correct the situation, unfortunately.
You’ll never convince Americans to give up the freedom of their own cars and roads. We have a giant country that’s near impossible to cover with public transportation and rely on trucks for much more than you may think.
It is just a miscalculation. The author forgets that the infrastructure for cars not only benefits private car owners, but also the business world, from which cyclists and pedestrians also benefit, as it is used to transport their goods for a living, etc. Life is more complicated!
I have a 1993 MX5. It doesnt depreciate anymore, its appreciating since 2020. Service is done by myself, parts and maintanence is very cheap. Its cheaper to run than public transport and saves me a lot of commuting time. Only an electric bike would be cheaper. Never buy a car on bank loan, buy used, pay in full.
Scotty Kilmer is that you?
You are not average. And 1993 mx5 is pushing 30 years old, not many everyday driver would know how to take care the old lady. Btw, good on you keeping her alive.
Well... when many cities (at least in Europe) don't allow older vehicle (in Brussels: 2012 or earlier I think), and will entirely ban petrol vehicles in 2030-35, it'll be tough...
@@G91YS The ban is on selling ICE vehicles but if you mean access to the city I don't see it as that much of an issue since P+R spots seem to be wildly available. At least in the west. Of course if you like old cars and live in a city you'd have a problem but I don't see that working out well even now due to lack of space.
@@G91YS Its not banned here yet but they are considering the ban of older diesel cars without particule filter.
The one thing I feel like pointing out is that depreciation on used cars is way less than in new cars, which is what I understood you used for your calculations.
My car depreciates less than €1000 euros per year, and maintenance is about the same. This are generous estimates. Insurance is about €500 per year. After this, only petrol remains of the direct costs.
Yeah, when my car only cost ~1400 euros to begin with and I kept it for 6 years before selling it for ~600 euros... The depreciation costs just aren't a big factor, I'm glad new car buyers exist but I'll never be one myself.
Yeah I'm not some car mad guy but this video is completely flawed since it doesn't take used cars into account and just uses averages. You can get really solid 10 year old cars for £1500 and the depreciation would be like £200 a year and the maintenance wouldn't be too costly either if you know what you are doing.
Used cars don't magically pop into existence. Someone has to buy the car new. So if we talk about averages for society in total then it is realistic to use new cars. Because someone in society bears these costs so in the end the averages will be alright
@@trulyUnAssuming Well most new cars are bought by company for their employees and after 5 years sold cheaply. The company does get a better price because they buy in bulk and can write the cost off to pay less taxes. So at least here in Germany most people who don't get a company car buy a used car...
@@Till113 they pay less taxes which means that the tax payer is paying for the car which is everyone. So tell me how we are not paying for brand new cars again? If it weren't for these tax incentives, the companies might give you the money directly instead...
The issue here is people wasting their cars, buy a car and keep it longer than a year lol
Yes. However I have dug deeper. If you examine fleet vehicles you notice they are very new. There's a fine line to draw between increasing repair costs versus paying for massive depreciation and fewer repair bills. I'm sure if old cars were more affordable, profit motivated capitalists would maximize earnings by keeping fleet vehicles for longer than a few years
@@lesterroberts1628 You can use a car for 10 years easily and the used car market is a testament to that
@@rokaspleckaitis8924 of course. Nothing is stopping people from using cars for 10+ years.
If you look at the calculations for cars, the biggest single expense in that calculation is depreciation. If you buy a new car and keep it for 10-15 years, it shouldn't really matter very much, as it's been a useful asset in that time period. If you buy a 10 year old car and sell it when it's 15, it wouldn't have lost much value, as cars loose most value in the first 4 years. If you buy a new car and sell it after 4 years, then you are an idiot. I bought my car when it was 9 years old. Now it's 13 years old, and I could sell it for almost as much as I bought it for, because used car prices have increased.
Also you can often share trips in your car with your family for basically no extra costs. In public transport, everyone needs their own ticket. Public transport is also heavily subsidized which is something not mentioned here at all. Just the cars social costs have been taken into consideration. Most ÖPNV operates at a hefty loss in Germany.
@@CastaneaMa Please at least watch the video before whining about government subsidies for public transportation, that part IS being addressed here.
useful? how is a 4000lb motorized wheelchair useful? i can ride my unicycle everywhere just as fast, go indoors with it, is less expensive quieter easier to use and so on/
@@CastaneaMa he did actually cover the subsidies. The social cost is complete BS though. A bus driving on the same road also incurs same social costs. It's not like the roads disappear because there is less cars on it - you need deliveries, ambulances, police, whatever, so the road would be built anyway.
@@BigFx There's a big difference between a street used primarily by cars and one used primarily by buses and service vehicles, in terms of noise and air pollution, maintenance, walkability, accessibility, and so on - simply because there are fewer motor vehicles going by. Obviously, some maintenance is always going to be required, and some roads or streets are never going to be pleasant, but as it stands, far too many of them could be if they weren't blighted by car traffic instead.
My gas costs a year are about 1000€ a year in Germany, insurance is below 1000€. Didn't have to repair anything in last five years. Golf 5. Did I forget some calculations? TÜV and Tax isn't more than 500€
I would prefer to not use a car, like in Amsterdam. But getting to work and around is at the moment 3x faster than by rail for me.
TÜV HU/AU? Maybe washing your car a few times a year.
Depreciation is a weird point. I bought my car for 2000€, the money is gone, I am the last driver. Why would depreciation matter? I don't want so sell it. So that wouldn't count for me right?🤔
@@android-user ah yes I forgot thanks, but still I'm overestimating my costs, I bet my fuel cost a year is still below 1000€ and insurance is just 800€ to be precise. Maybe it's just because I do not own a newer car? Even if I add a 1000€ a year for maintainance and stuff it's still much lower.
It's obviously an estimate and will vary from person to person.
Fun fact these calculations are based on numbers from the ADAC so I think they are fairly accurate.
The numbers in this video also include 250 euro a year for car wash and 200 a year for navigation lol. it's complete nonsense.
I take my lunch in my car, I dont want to be around people in the lunchroom. A bike / public transport can't help me there.
I did a calculation for me here in Sweden, and my total cost/year for a large Jeep plugin hybrid, is about to €8000. I'm also including (several types of) road taxes & parking in that, estimated rather safely.
Our public transportation is essentially garbage. It's also all different systems everywhere, so getting one of those "travel wherever you'd like", just doesn't exist. Hell, just going to the _next town over_ means a new company to buy a ticket from. UGH.
Also, you should make a collab with Economics Explained on this ;)
Sweden’s public transportation is not garbage ffs 🤦🏼♂️
@@kapoioBCS Oh really? Let's ask the public what they think of SJ for example. Or Västtrafik, or one of the other companies operating. And we would have to ask about them all separately, because none of them work well together.
Instead of having a state-owned entity responsible for ALL of our public transportation, every person needs to deal with a multitude of companies just to get from one area to another. Nah, it's shit mate. Especially when you start comparing to Germany or Japan.
The idea is that the video motivates improving public transport.
A video for voters and governments, not changing individual lifestyle.
Imagine a city like Baghdad with absolutely no buses. Yeah, this video wouldn't be good advice for them.
Sweden is quite a large country. If you're not living and working in the same city, then a car is almost mandatory. It works the same in the Netherlands, although public transport will work if you're lucky enough to live nearby train stations, which IS the case for a large enough majority of people. But if you live in a village far away from direct access to a city train station, then you have to jump over to bus stations, etc etc. And that suck.
It suck even more if you have to switch trains between different train oprators. Didn't know it's like that in Sweden, but at some trajects in the Netherlands it's the same, but these other operators are only active in small(and rather remote) parts of the country. Majority of the people in Netherlands do not have to deal with that. But I can imagine that it would put ANOTHER drempel to going with public transport.
@@patrik5123 as someone that takes the bus often in västra Götaland - the public transport is ok. Absolutely not garbage,
Cars are expensive, and compared to public transit - you have to do all the work!
Time. Time is the biggest reason why public Transport in Canada kinda sucks. A 20 Min car ride is a 1h 15min bus/train ride where I live. The difference is terrible if you need to get somewhere fast and on short notice.
This's why we need to fund public transportation more
Small question about the calculations for 50 years cost of ownership, did you keep the depreciation in the calculations? Because the depreciation has a curve and cars usually depreciate up to a point then stagnate for a while. Was that taken into consideration?
Almost none of the numbers actually make sense.
Yeah, this number seems way off and I believe that might be the reason.
I have only ever owned used cars, the first one, which lasted me for many years, was not even worth what he assumes to be the yearly depreciation.
According to my observations, an average car loses about 50-60% of its value every 5 years on a logarithmic curve. So buying used cars that are 5 to maybe 8 years old should take a huge chunk out of the total cost of ownership.
Sure, there might be more maintenance and repairs to deal with, but owning a used car also makes it possible to go to off-brand shops to get the work done or to even do stuff yourself.
@@dh510 Yes i agree, i have owned 7 - 8 cars till this point, bought them all used and i made sure i get a good enough deal that when i resell i either don't lose money at all or even win a little ( it's important to mention i only keep the car for 1 to 2 years tops since I'm an enthusiast), and that helped me avoid tbe depreciation all together since cars i buy have already lost a good chunk of their value already and getting a good deal helps a lot.
There was the assumption that you get a new one after a certain time, which would repeat the appreciation cycle again
Also that assumes that depreciation is a factor for you.
I have concerns about the reliability of the lifetime income data on the table for lifetime car costs as a percentage of net income/wealth. I realize you didn't put that table together so I went looking for the source. The study in question says they used data from the German Federal Statistical Office and that their full calculations are in the supplement, but the lifetime income calculations are missing in the supplement.
My concern is that they may not have inflation-adjusted the income data. The correlation between increases in inflation and income is complex, but that data needs to be adjusted somehow to account for the fact that ownership costs have been inflation adjusted, otherwise those figures are not comparable. Since the paper doesn't provide their calculations, I don't see a way to verify the reliability of their lifetime income data (short of recalculating their figures from the same income data they used and I don't have the energy to do that)
It's a minor point since the video and that study are mostly about car ownership costs and those seem rock solid, it just bothers me. Otherwise great video!
Assuming the source data is not inflation adjusted, you can apply a correction:
b = a/N * (1- (r^N+1))/(1-r)
N= numbers of years
a = lifetime income without inflation
r = mean rate of inflation over next N years
b = lifetime income with inflation
From what I can see in the DE Statis and Credit Suisse reports cited as sources, that table might have been derived by bodging together German wealthy distribution figures with average income figures. If that is the case (and I may have misunderstood) then I wouldn't rely upon it at all.
Just what I was thinking. I'm not sure why you want to look at lifetime figures here anyway, simply comparing the annual costs of car ownership with annual income should give you a good figure. I tried this and it comes out similar for the lowest income group, at least.
@@jbaidley yeah, and it wants contextualising against typical food, energy and housing costs as proportions of income for those demographics. Doing really good, meaningful stats analysis and presentation is A LOT of work
I own an old car. 2009 Ford Mondeo. I'll change it when I can't fix it anymore.
Man without a car, in a city with good transport alternatives, complains about cars for 20m
Cars are the result of poor transport options. My trip to work literally takes twice the time, and costs more on public transport in Sydney.
Transport stops late at night, and makes visiting friends difficult.
And even if that was all fixed, my bad back makes public transport impractical for most trips, as it hurts to sit on most transport seats, and makes it impossible to carry heavy/bulky items (which I’m often carrying).
Great comment! Many people forget the ones with medical problems
I also noticed that people vastly underestimate their TCO, since they often only look at gas prices. But you can significantly reduce your yearly costs by buying used and smart. My Ford Focus '15 Diesel has cost per km of around 0,19-0,22ct/km and in 5,5 years of ownership it cost me around 15.000€ (not including the purchase price but the depreciation). Another point I want to mention is the city argument @ 16:22. By definition I live in a small city in Germany, but that doesn't make the ÖPNV at all comparable to big cities like Berlin. We don't nearly enough have the same amount of train/bus connections and even that what we have really dies down at evening/night. A recent example would be from visiting a friend in Stuttgart. On my way back home I actually took 3 hours to get back home (normal is 1.5 hours). Due to full and late trains I took substantially more time. This is not acceptable when in contrast Google Maps shows me under 40min for the same route via car.
To buy used and smart, someone must have paid a good chunk of the new and expensive price though.
The Deutche Bahn being unreliable kinda falls under point 5 of the video.
The not just bike video on Switzerland trains shows that city size does not matter that much when it comes to rail infrastructure. Low density urban sprawl is a nightmare to service, but villages and small urban centers can be efficiently connected by regional rail.
I agree with what Jean f says - check Not Just Bikes video to get a proper response to your post.
You have assumed that people live on their own, but if you calculate a family of 4, it is impossible for a person earning an average income to pay for these expenses. Also, public transportation in Germany is not at all convenient for people living in small towns. In the city where I used to live there was a bus every hour and it took 1.5 hours to reach the nearest big city by train. By car, the journey takes only 40 minutes. Not to mention the difficulties for a family traveling with a baby and children. A car is the most economical means of transportation in Germany if you are not driving alone (please don't give the example of a 9 euro ticket, it is temporary and will expire this month)
At the same time, the costs of a used car are never as high as you say, if they were, young people who just started a new job would not be able to afford a car :) Unfortunately, none of your theoretical calculations are valid in practice.
I should also mention that in Germany the trains are never on time. I leave much earlier when I travel because you can be surprised every time: 30 minutes delay, train cancellation, cancellation of all trains on the line, etc.
yOu jUsT hAtE tHe PLaNeT
Here in Switzerland we have a public transportation card for about 3800$ a year. With this card you can take almost all trains, busses, trams and even some boats for one year. And the infrastructure is very good. Compared to a car it's actually very cheap
Isn’t Switzerland a landlocked country?
@@TheAmericanCatholic yes it is and we have many lakes..with boats
SBB, GA
The thing is, I don't choose to go by car to save money, I use it to save time. There are some places in my city that by using public transport It takes twice as much time. Moreover at nightime where there are less buses
This! And, although you can get stuck in traffic, cars are sadly way more reliable still if you have to be at your destination at a specific time.
@@floppypaste Yeah, I only find bikes and the subway more reliable. But for a lot of destinations, those are not viable options
@@floppypaste I guess at the end it depends on destination, and time of the day.
Unfortunately I think a lot of public transportation is badly designed and horribly underfunded. Where I live in the US, buses are the most common short distance thing other than cars, but since they’re always stuck in traffic they’re consistently arriving and leaving early or late everywhere. (Also, for some reason the bus system really likes redoing their arrival times every couple months and not telling anybody? I don’t know why they do this, but it makes the bus system a headache.)
@@DementedMK In my city (Buenos Aires) some avenues have bus only lanes so they can avoid traffic and sometimes they end up beeing faster than cars. But yeah, arrival schedule isnt even a thing.
The best solution is to have buses have good gps tracking. Some buses in buenos aires have it but not the majority
You count depreciation as a cost, you do not need to pay extra money for it if you have a 60 year old golf. Let's say you bought it for 30k 60 years ago, yes you won't be able to sell it for 30k now but you can still sell it for like 3k
I'm not proud of it, but I recently bought a car - last time I had one was 18 years ago. I just got sick of trains being late all the time or often being canceled without any replacement. At peak hours a train car can be filled to the brim with people. Since Germans don't believe in air conditioning, the heat can get insane in the summer - a friend literally got heat stroke last weekend because of this. And then there's the anti-maskers. I just couldn't bear it anymore. I'd definitely ride bikes more often though if I was living in a city that did that well. And I agree with all the points in the video.
Oh ya, I heard about the trains in Germany during the summer getting way too hot.
I'm not a big fan of over using AC, but I think it makes sense in areas where a lot of people are at constantly. Maybe if enough people complain and quit taking the train, they'll put AC on them. It's a negative externality, but the alternative is more people driving their own clothing clearance climate controlled cars using much more AC collectively than if they had just put AC on the train.
Wait, Germany's still doing masks? I mean, intellectual honesty I guess, but are the anti-maskers the exception or most people? Legitimate curiosity
@@ex0stasis72 Overusing ACs is absolutely stupid. Uncomfortabely cold, massive waste of money and energy.
*Using* ACs ain't, tough. Especially in trains... I mean in theory our trains are supposed to have AC. However, as explained in the video, the goverment spent all our Tax money on cars for the last 70 or so years.
Therefore, the train system is absolutely f***ed up. The trains are constantly broken, there isn't enough maintainance personal (or funds to hire more); so staff will focus on the most important things first, because they simply can't fix all.
I mean I suppose a working engine and breaks are more important then AC; but in summer they should be required to work (seriously, heatstrokes!). And more importantly, there should be enough fundings to keep all trains in 100% working condition constantly, god damn!
@@midwestnagyfa It's only mandatory in public transport and doctor's offices (and hospitals of course)... I don't know about exception, but it's not split 50/50
Oh no, those evil anti-maskers! lol.
Additional argument: not everything is about cost. Consider time. Time is money. Let's consider travels. With car i can go anywhere directly. With public transportation your trip time can take twice as much time.
Public transport is often late in Poland. If you have to wait for 3 hours because it is just late is really terrible.
Another thing: consider travelling with kids. It is much more time efficient since you can pick multiple relatives in the city in multiple places.
Sitting in traffic is a huge waste of time.
He did mention that cars may be useful for some people. However, the delays of public transportation can be a consequence of lack of investment, which could be remedied if all the money that both government and citizens directly spend on cars went to public transportation instead. Of course you will never have door-to-door trips, but at least you can be sure there won't be traffic jams.
Also, cars cause many more deaths than public transportation, both directly (in car accidents) and indirectly (pollution). Not everything is about money, indeed, and human lives should be at the top of the priority list.
That really sounds incredible.
It would mean that I am after say 30 years of not owning a car (and few transit costs and the bike I maintain myself) I would be easily a half-millionaire.
Which I am not.
Still car numbers are always mind-boggling.
Exactly, there are so many flaws in this video. That it's obvious that we cannot translate to the real world
Let me know if you get there
It sounds incredible because it is not credible.
I have no idea how "Depreciation" is calculated and the language barrier with specific terms is a bit annoying, as I can't understand everything perfectly, but that number for the Golf doesn't seem to fit.
If you purchase a new Golf for 33'000€ and you replace it at the "average" replacement cycle every 12 years, that gives you a loss in value of 2750€. Provided that you throw it away for 0€ which usually isn't the case as some people sell their old cars instead of throwing them out.
Sell price of 12 year golf is fairly close to zero
@@swgar I wish, Im looking for a car for my mother and 2010 golf is around 5k euro in Poland. That's around 15% of the original price but almost a one year of ownership as per sums presented in this video.
@@swgar You are telling me that I will have to pay the guy I will be selling my 21 years old car to? Damn that suck
Also included is that you could have invested that same sum and made a profit that way.
2:51
Why is depreciation categorized as a cost here? When you buy a car for a certain amount of money(let's say 20.000 euros), and it depreciates 2000 euros in a year, this is not money out of your pocket because you have already paid it. Adding it a second time(after the cost of purchase) does not seem to make sense.
I own an electric kick scooter, Segway mini pro, motor scooter, motorcycle, cars, bicycles, an e-bike, and with the exception of cars, none of them are safe or practical during the winter, or on my route in general, take too long at the lower speeds, and just not a practical alternative.
I would love an enclosure for the E-bike so that it could be re-geared to go 70 mph with pedal assist, but such systems are more expensive than motorcycle. Its hard to beat the utility value of a used Toyota Corolla or Prius, in terms of a heavy Costco run or junket grocery trip piking up 150kg of foods // moving furniture or if Meg & I ride together on Sunday to our Church which is 30 miles away up a very rugged highway mountain pass route where anything other than an automobile would be very unsafe or impractical. We had a Nissan LEAF SV that could barely make it one way with a full charge, but traded that in on the Corolla Hybrid.
So..how does that work out if you buy a 20 year old car (corsa) park it on your own property, do the maintenance yourself and sell/wreck it at 25 years old?
Only pensioners and companies can afford new cars around here, unless it's an "up".
Another very interesting video by Marton, I really enjoy his insights and videos. However, although I generally agree with him that owning cars is much more expensive that the users may perceive. However, I believe that this video, or the presented calculations at the very least, are simply wrong and untrue:
1. A product can depreciate a 100% of its value, after which it's considered to be fully depreciated.
Therefore, it's incorrect to count absolute currency values of yearly depreciation, and even more incorrect to accumulate them over a reasonable expected product lifetime. Even if we were to consider the currency amounts of the face value, the cumulative depreciation should never go beyond the cumulative price paid for the car, adjusted for the inflation of course.
2. If you look into the expense of buying a car (or paying a monthly car installment to the bank, or whatever) as an investment - and not every expense, by any means, should be looked at as an investment - than you should also consider every other expense mentioned in the video (buying a bike or purchasing a train pass) also as an investment, and see how much of it's value has depreciated over time, just by the inflation if nothing else. The math would then have showed a different outlook, but that doesn't change the main flaw with this argument - that not every expense should be treated as an investment, since the mass majority of people would not even begin to know how to invest successfully - in terms of adding value with their cash over time.
Again, I generally agree with his bottom-line opinion that the true cost of owning a car is usually hidden, but the estimates given in this video, as well as numerous other sources on the Web are essentially flawed and plain incorrect. Nonetheless, I will continue to the TechAltar as it's one of the most insightful and entertaining channels out there.
Some cars appreciate in value, right?
how is your second point a criticism of the video?
LOL none of that makes sense. Cars are just expensive to own and maintain. Period. You could argue in favor of EVs being more practical and economical but it still doesn't take away from the fact that we should move away from a car-centric city design and push more towards public transport, biking and walking means. It's criminal that we have such flawed infrastructure, especially in NA cities and would be even more criminal to not do anything about it. Cars are not an investment
@@linksys813 please give me a god damn break with your anti car crap!
@@RavenL1337 😂😂 it's facts though
I love the pivot to urbanism content. Are you planning to make more videos like this?
I'm loving the Not Just Bikes revolution, where suddenly, even tech TH-camrs are starting to get involved with communicating the costs and problems of cars. Thank you for doing your part!
you'll own nothing and you'll be happy
@@boroborosu2410 Very original, only seen this line posted 50 times before. No clue where you're from but if it's the U.S like me your rights are simply a suggestion. We literally have a constitutional amendment that says you can be enslaved if you're imprisoned. Not to mention Civil Asset Forfeiture in case of a crime, it doesn't take much for a cop to plant a bag of drugs in your car, then for them to seize it as "Evidence."
People shouldn't have to own massive, deadly machines to get to work. We don't own them, they own us and our streets.
Yeah sod off
I know RIGHT, after having joined r/fuckcars a year ago, just a month ago I found NotJustBikes and I couldn't get enough of it. So glad that more and more people realize the severeness of the cars' disadventages.
@@lenjaminbang you sound like a bot with that wording
I own a VW up! And i do the maintenance my self (oil change, filter change, brake change (including discs and fluid), which makes the car very cheap to run. It only costs me around €60 a year for the oil and filters change and €25 extra for brake pads (€75 in total including the brake discs).
Monthly i pay €22 for tax and €19 for insurance. Which makes it cheaper to run an up! than an electric bike.
The numbers in this video also include 250 euro a year for car wash and 200 a year for navigation lol. it's complete nonsense.
If you paid for your car upfront, you parked your money in something that loses value every year. You need to calculate the opportunity cost (investing that money in something that generates income) and the depreciation cost. Or you may keep the car in the best shape and make your depreciation zero. That means updating every single part of the car over years. That is maintenance cost plus your own labor. And this video is about averages. I am sure not everybody can fix their own car.
Interestingly, the 2012 Prius I purchased 5-years ago appears to be worth about the same as I paid for it, $11,000. Gas is well under $100 a month at today's prices for 1000 miles (average) and full insurance runs $220. Over that time, new Michelin tires cost me $600 (Costco), a water pump $95 (Amazon), 2 gallons of Toyota antifreeze $55 (dealership), brake pads and rotors on all 4 $150 (eBay), 2.5 oil changes a year $125 (Groupon and dealer coupons), catalytic converter $0 (manufacturer's warranty), non-OEM air filter once a year $10 (Amazon), and OEM spark plugs every 50,000 miles $35 (dealership). Taking those numbers, my cost of ownership of a Toyota Prius III is approximately $4200 a year. Granted I do all my own maintenance other than oil changes (too messy) whenever possible and luckily my car held its value.
Prius are overpriced though
@@k4piii So far after 6 years of ownership, I am very happy with my investment. Further, living in South Florida, I would not for a second consider not having a car. Maybe if I lived in Manhattan but I don't.
I think we need parking spaces in cities which are only allowed for reasonable commercial reasons:
Store delivery drivers, craftmen etc.
Yes, especially in dense parrts it is often hard to find a spot with a delivery van. Just having 10% of the spots saved for deliveries between 10am an 7pm would be a blessing. Afterwards you could just park there.
In Amsterdam there are parking spots reserved for people moving which I find amazing.
I'm too lazy to dig through that chart, but it seems like you're implying that every car is scrapped after a maximum lifespan of 12 years. If that's the case, I strongly disagree. Even though the original buyers of most cars usually don't keep them for a long time, the lifespan of cars on average far exceeds 12 years.
Also, the amount spent on subsidizing cars seems unrealistic. Does a subsidy in this context only include tax money that has actually been spent? Or is a part of this the tax return lump sum for work trips and tax returns for submitted parking tickets?
(Edit): Please don't take this as hate towards you or the numbers you compiled. I'm genuinely interested.
The biggest "subsidies" the driver never sees in its bank account. It is the streets and the land they occupy that is expensive. E.g. a parking spot with 10 m^2 of land (probably to small) could be worth up to 6 figures in German cities. With a "reasonable" profit expectation that common investors use of 7% p.a. this parking spot should cost 1000 or more € per year. Up till last year any German city could only ask for 30 € for onstreet Parking. So there is already a 1000 € or more the driver never sees
@@matthiasmayer7328 Do you have any examples for this 30 € onstreet parking fee? As far as I'm aware, onstreet parking is 6€/hour at best in all of the larger cities. And even if you only pay for 2 hours per day that would come down to 4320€/year.
@@matthiasmayer7328 , those investor expectations are way too high, as most mature branches operate with profit margins of 1-4%.
Also consider how the existence of those parking lots does to the value of the surrounding properties, or rather, how the lack of roads and parking spaces would influence the value. Point isn't that you are right or wrong, but that it is much more complex when taking a closer look at it. What would for instance be the net result of value if the parking spaces between road lane and pavement was replaced with some other means of transportation, like a conveyer pavement or low-speed mini-trams like in amusement parks?
Cost of car ownership is looked at through the microeconomics lens by us, or “how much do I pay for it”. This varies a lot, so it’s not very important. The much more important problem is related to cost of car ownership in cities. People owning motor vehicle in the countryside should not be a concern, the problem is the subsidies given to car commuting that encourages people to drive. The cost here seems high because it is calculated using city related figures. Bigger, more populous cities have gigantic car subsidies just by accommodating them and not charging drivers adequately. It might seem like a classist, dystopian nightmare to burden personal motor vehicle owners so much in city that only the needy and the rich can afford personal vehicle in cities, but that’s reality. We skewed the market by subsidising cars so much that we incur other cost to our health and time. Only by pricing it appropriately and combining with investment in dense mass transit and alternative transport can cities transportation be priced appropriately. It’s unfortunate but city transportation space and time are luxury and if you use it you should pay for it. In the countryside, this shouldn’t be an issue as large roads are subsidised by goods transportation. It works because there are not enough vehicles to be subsidised by goods volume. However, the moment there are enough cars using the same transport roads to cause traffic jam, the subsidy is used up and we enter deficit territory. That’s why only in and near cities are personal transport a big problem.
I think the Bahncard100(which I assume you meant by "all inclusive ticket") also allows you to take local transport. If so, at 6:16 you shouldn't add the 978€ on top.
I think inflation and depreciation were used in accurately in this video. You can't add dollars from today with dollars from a year from now, from two years from now, etc. Therefore inflation shouldn't scale because everything scales. Depreciation also looks too high.
My calculations
Owning a car for 60 years and calculating everything in terms of PRESENT dollars
Buying new $30000 car every 5 years. You lose 60% of value after 5 years so you're spending $18000 every 5 years for a new car after trade in. Round to $20000 for other fees/inflation in car prices (probably overestimate).
12 five year periods * $20000/ five year period = *$240,000*
insurance+maintenance+gas+registration/year = $5868
insurance+maintenance+gas+registration for 60 years = *$352080*
total cost after 60 years: *$592080 in PRESENT dollars* MUCH less than ≈$1500000
Inflation shouldn't be used against you because you will likely keep up with inflation through wages increases and investments.
Moral of the story: Be careful when adding money from different years. A promise for a dollar a year from now is not the same as a dollar in your hands right now. Time value of money!
More than $4000 yearly without it being moved...jeez.
yes 500K from today, but you will be spending more and more on insurance+maintenance+gas+registration every year because of inflation+car buy, youre actually lowering the amount you WOULD spend, bringing for a present value wich is false, youre keeping depretiation a fixed value as if a 2060 car that would cost say 40K instead of 30K would depreciate less than a car today, makes no sence, and youre not acounting for the car changing value, and i agree with you that bringing for a present value will bring more of a "true" understanding of your expenses but in actuallity no investment is calculated in present value, so bringing to present value brings no benefit other than a better visualization of expenditure. because in order to understand if youre going to save money by not using a car you have to use future value, from your income to investments that you could make with the money, to the depretiation and expenses. also its much better for people that have a unreliable source of money, like third party artists or small shop owners to understand how much they would have to """"""increase"""""" sales/prices in order to keep up with the car( i know you dont actually need i guess you understand my point)
One of your best videos. Very thorough and thoughtful. Now that I am retired, I am giving serious consideration to getting rid of my car. I do love my new e-bike; it's just a pity the painted bicycle lanes don't really connect or go anywhere!
just buy an old nissan leaf, very cheap, nicer than a bike.
@@howardsimpson489 From a practical perspective good advice, but not as satisfying or healthy 😄
I live in a city that is at least on paper great at public transport - Stockholm. I've lived there for many years without a car just using busses and the metro. I've also recently moved to a less central part where I need to rely on busses and commuting trains. I got a cheap new car (a Dacia for about 14k euro) couple of years ago and having lived now both with and without I can say that it is a great increase in quality of life having your own car. I live with my girlfriend and we are now able to, with ease and at free will travel to more remote parts of the city very comfortably. We can also travel the rest of Sweden very easy and comfortably. We can visit friends in the city late at night without feeling unsafe riding at night time in the metro. Grocery shopping is so much easier now that we got the car as well. I pay a lot of tax for "things I dont use", but in the end those things attract skilled and passionate people who will want and demand these things. Estimating the true added benefit of services and things is usually highly complicated (which this video sort of to me highlights un-attentionaly by talking about the "insane cost" of cars and trying to pit people against each other because one group dosent wanna pay for that thing they happen to not be personally using). What is the value of an all-night open grocery store, a café that serves special tea only or a popular night club? Dont be so quick to be the one who demands that something you happen to not like being banned - you just might get it and the city you loved might turn into a place you no longer like being in when those people you were so keen on denying their needs up and left
This is exactly what I was thinking. The video does seem to want to pit people with opposing views against each other. In addition, it is presented from a very monolithic perspective. People have other circumstances apart from those mentioned in the video, which to me, are idyllic. First-world country, great public infrastructure, less corrupt governments, relatively low levels of crime....Yet, even in a place like Stockholm, crime is something that would deter someone from taking public transit. The convenience of a car is undeniable. Why does it have to be so black and white? Why not promote a combination of cars that are better for the environment and better public transportation?
Exactly. Basically, what you're summarising refers to the social benefits of car ownership, which are much greater than the social benefits of bicycle ownership or public transport, simply because bikes don't get you very far and public transport will not get you to many destinations and is much less versatile than a car. These social benefits of the various transportation modes were completely ignored in this video.
"You will not own anything and everything will be rented, and you'll be happy" Thanks Klaus
better than you will live your life in debt and sacrifice all your life in an endless cycle of repayment
Being in an accident in a car is much cheaper than being in an accident on a bike
Plus I drive 150+ miles a day
Considering that people in rural places cant do without a car and have no access to Carsharing this only applys to people from at least Medium sized Citys. If you Account for the higher cost of living in citys I guess that should cancel that out financialy. On the other side pretty much everybody in rural places have some Kind of a bike anyways for recreational purposes but because of the far distances it is not suitable for grocery shopping.
The rural population is always used as an argument, but few people live there. There must be ways to compensate them in stead of subsidising car ownership and driving in metropplitan areas.
@@frida507 yeah, people who live in suburbs often think they live in rural areas cause they have a forest closeby. Car dependency there can be easily fixed with buses, trams, or a metro running from there to the city centre.
@@frida507 I live there and with all the artificially added costs like expensive taxes on oil nobody is subsidised here. 46% of the world Population lived in a rural Area in 2015. In Germany it's about a quarter of the Total Population.
used car figures are much smaller, and if you hold them for long time even smalller
@@RoGi797 I think cars in general need to carry their cost and then you could have a special tax reduction for rural areas (and/or a transfer so for example retired citzens and low income earners don't suffer.)
This is my favorite video of yours by far. I really hope that urbanist ideas keep spreading quickly like they seem they have over the past couple years.
Great video. Great arguments. Very informative yet very easy to get a grip on such a massive topic.
Thanks a lot!
I came here after watching on nebula just to say that I love this video! As someone who recently sold his car (I live in Darmstadt so it was an obvious decision for me) I’m constantly confronted with people who just don’t understand that their calculation of car ownership is simply wrong. This video is a tremendous help in arguing with these people.
I've been recently to Darmstadt thanks to 9-Euro-Ticket and the amount of trams and buses in the city centre is absurd.
I grew up there, so I never had one. This video just confirmed I was right.
I recently went through similar calculations when trying to get my wife onboard for buying a Tesla Model Y. In the end, turns out our current Kia Sportage 2007 costs us 3500 EUR/year, including fuel, to operate (incl. fuel) and we can only resell it for 4000 EUR right now, with that falling in the future. For the Tesla, our costs are 1500 EUR/year, including electricity, and at its circa 60 000 EUR purchase price we're getting it for, adjusted for inflation, we'll be able to resell it for roughly 30 000 EUR 2022 money, judging by the current 8-9 year old Tesla prices and a very generous 7% annual inflation (ha-ha, I was optimistic back then).
P.S. Here in Bulgaria, public transport isn't really an option - it's half-decent in the capital, nonexistent elsewhere, and intercity busses and trains are a slow and dirty nightmare. Apart from that, we often travel to visit relatives in a city 100 km from us, and we also like to travel abroad by car sometimes. Despite all that, I'd be perfectly fine with cars being banned in the city and on-street parking removed (it's very much the same here as you showed in Berlin). We can always, as a society, spend money once to build several multi-story parking lots and ban street parking altogether, and utilize the freed up space for the actual inhabitants of the city - the people :)
Tesla, or any electric car will have problem with decreasing range as the battery age. I'd say the cost is about 15000 euro, after 8 years I believe. Max 12 years it could last.
Fellow bulgarian here aswell.
Feel like Tech Altars examples are radical and not considering all the different realities. We are family with 2 kids 5 and 1 years old - car is more of necessity just because we often travel all of us..
If I was single would have not owned a car.
But I agree with the sentiment that aiming cities to be not so car-centric would be nice
@@WolfySnowy Then why do 8 year old teslas cost 35000 EUR and above now? Your batteries will have retained around 90% of their original capacity in that time, so battery degradation isn't a big factor in value retention, unless you're driving 100 000 km /year or something. I tend to drive a lot and I've only put 75 000 km on my car in 5 years.
@@r_rumenov there were already news about a man being asked to pay 22 thousand dollars for battery replacement on Tesla car. It is likely i don't have enough info. Tesla itself covers only 8 years or 100 thousand miles. Whichever comes first
The 30.000 you're expecting to get after driving it around for 8-9 years is unlikely considering the uptick of NEW cars in the 30.000 - 40.000 euro range, and the technology being dated. Electric cars are new, and improvements move fast. Look at how dated and desirable a Nissan Leaf is now...
My Skoda Fabia, which is smaller than a VW Golf, cost 13.500 Euros (EU-reimport). Tax: 36 Euros, insurance (for 15.000 km/year): 320 Euros, Fuel: 1300 Euros. It is now five years old and apart from regular servicing (less than 300 Euros per year so far) there were no repairs at all necessary. I want to use the car for another five years. After ten years the car will be worth about 3.000 Euros (very conservative estimate), so depreciation is about 1000 Euros per year. Of course the maintenance costs will increase (new sets of winter tires, summer tires and brakes at least). But I don't see how the yearly costs could be any higher than about 3500-4000 Euros.
Public transport is only a good alternative if you live in a big city - at least in Germany. The car saves me more than an hour on my daily commute so it's worth it.
We need more videos like this. Even regular TH-camrs outside the urban transit bubble now get that autocentric infrastructure is a waste
It is ridiculous how we turned cities into parking lots. And I haven’t even been in North America, where pedestrians are not even considered.
I don't know if I'd lump the entire _continent_ into the "pedestrians aren't even considered" bin.. New York, Montreal, and many others are pedestrian and/or cyclist friendly. But yes some of the worst places I've experienced for pedestrians are in NA (I'm looking at you, Los Angeles).
It depends on the city. Vancouver and Seattle are decent in terms of public transportation and biking
One thing that you also need to consider is that the cost of the car is massively amplified by the lost opportunity on investing the money spent on a car. For example, you buy a 50 000 dollar car and the moment you have it, it will start losing value rapidly. Not only is it losing value, it is also costing you in terms of maintenance/taxes etc, as shown in the video. Now, someone who doesn't buy a car can invest that 50 000 dollars in some index fund and just let it grow + they can add to that fund, the 2000 dollars they save by not having a car. This will earn you 200 000 dollars by the time you retire.
Hey long time viewer of the channel here that also lives in Berlin. I think some of the personal car costs are a bit extreme. I share a used 3500 euro VW Up with my partner and our yearly costs are under 1500 euros, as we try to take transit and bike as much as possible. I'm also in favor of less cars clogging our city, and parking costs need to be increased dramatically. I think taking the most extreme scenario and extrapolating it to be the average takes the teeth out of the argument a bit. But let's keep that anti-car sentiment flowing! I'm happy to pay considerably more than I do to use our roads, and let's bring public transit costs down for everyone.
I think a huge chunk of the costs he mentioned was related to depreciation of new cars :)
He has all the calculations on a spreadsheet you can go check there and tell what he calculated wrong
Yes, I agree that people who stick with buying older used cars can cut the cost quite significantly. The cost of the last half of a car's lifetime is far, far lower (to the consumer) than the first half. Maybe 1/10th the total cost?
Back in the day, here in the U.S., you could buy an older used car for $1000 or so, count on spending $1000/year in repair and maintenance, and then of course you have the regular fuel costs.
That's one way people on the lower end of the economic spectrum get along.
Since 2008 or so, with the used car buy-back program, and now with Covid disruption, the days of the $1000 used car are gone. You might have to buy more a $5000 or even $10,000 car instead of $1000. But then it will definitely last you 5-10 years with some care. So the economics might be a little worse now, but the same basic plan still works.
(Of course this doesn't help with the social, environmental, and other costs of car ownership - in fact it worsens them, to a degree, because older cars pollute more, burn more fuel, etc.)
Glad I'm not the only one who thought that! Thank you for the comment.
@@bhugh 5k-10k is insane lol. You can still get a used car for $2000 that is plenty good. Just have to know what to watch out for.
as a student in Den Haag in the Netherlands, I pay about 60€ per month for tram travel every month, plus a few trips to Amsterdam and back over the year set me back about 100€, double that for some other misc train travel. For 55€/month I could get anywhere in and around the centre of Den Haag for free, which is a great option for winters to reduce being in the cold. That's already a lot of money to me given that I don't have a reliable income yet. I can't even imagine how expensive it'd be to own a car, with all the fees, maintenance, insurance, not to mention the price of buying one in the first place. Not to mention I could probably cut my travel in half just by getting a bike which I still haven't done, which would've been smart if only I were smart. To be honest, I have no clue how people can afford to study in places where they have to have a car.
Can you imagine how expensive it would be if users of the Dutch public transport system would pay the actual cost of their ticket? Public transport users only pay 30 to 50% of what a ticket actualy costs. The rest is subsidized by the government.
@@Twiggy163 not unlike cars, which, as explained in the video, can cost a state upwards of 10k € per car per year through various subsidies, on top of the ridiculous costs a person bears themselves. If all the people in the netherlands had to bear the full cost of their cars to society, perhaps enough people would drop cars for the dutch government to save enough on car infrastructure to make all of the transit free like it is in Luxembourg and still be better off for it! Matching a 1-2k euro cost is not the same as matching a 10k euro cost.
@@nuloom Quite the opposite.
With the taxes put on the purchase and ownership of cars, the tax income is vastly greater than the expenditure. You should have a look at the national budget (Rijksbegroting).
If car owners only had to pay for what it actualy costs to maintain the roads and compensate healthcare for the emissions, car drivers would have a massive tax break.
@@Twiggy163 the 2 things you listed are hardly the only costs of car ownership. What about insurance and fuel and car maintenance? what about hearing loss associated with noise pollution, land underpriced used for parking spaces (since there must always be more parking spaces than cars), medical costs associated with cars being one of the most dangerous modes of transportation, not just in terms of pollution but actual accidents, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Not to mention you’re insinuating compensating healthcare for the emissions, rather than the emissions themselves. What about the rising need of costly water infrastructure and plenty of other problems, some of which can be priced, others cannot; the decrease of property value in depressed areas due to air congestion, destruction of natural ecosystems, and complete destruction of some land areas near sea level? This video gives you figures for how much an average car costs the state in Germany. Now, it’d be weird if the statistics didn’t include the tax from those cars collected by the said exact state, but even if it didn’t, according to the other provided figures, the tax would have to be several hundred percent of the car’s actual cost to compensate for the expenses.
One other thing is that public transit, when free, actually reduces its maintenance costs due to having no need for ticket systems. Luxembourg gained money by making their transit entirely free for everyone and ticketless because the amount collected from tickets was smaller than actual maintenance costs of the ticket system. Frankly, it’s not a surprise cars are so expensive. Almost 2 tonnes on average in weight to only transport an average of 1.3 people. The average bus weighs 12-16 tonnes, and has an average of 1500-2500 pppvpd (people per vehicle per day). Even if we assume the bus journey to be 100 times longer than the car’s (which is very generous for the car, and likely a more realistic figure would be 10-30), it still is better at worst and almost twice as efficient at best at transporting people per kg of mass. This does not include any external costs like much more maintenance needed for a corresponding amount of cars, and the whole rest of stuff I mentioned already. So forgive me for not seeing those tax breaks you’re talking about. At least not in context of public transit, which clearly costs way less per person in developed areas that also don’t have a system of transportation that sucks.
@@nuloom what are you talking about? If you want to list ALL those costs, you may also want to add the economic benefits the car has brought society. Otherwise you're just blindly painting yourself a 1 sided story.
In conclusion, this video only holds half truths and your beloved public transport is subsidized by car drivers.
Also, what makes you think making public transport free 'greatly' reduces maintenance cost? By far most of the cost is in the trains and the railway, not in the ticket system.
If you're not seeing the tax breaks, it means you havent looked at the national budget. Which makes your entire comment... rather pointless and at some points its way beyond the scope of cars.
I loved the video. So did my own calculation for our car (family of three). I couldn't paste the excel sheet here (formatting reasons). But roughly, we spend about 410 euro per month for our car (or 4880 euro per year).
We have bought a used Ford Fiesta Ecodrive from 2013 which had run around 30K prior. and have been using it for two years now. We roughly drive 12 to 13K Kms per year.
I have assumed that we would use the car only for another 6 years (which is very conservative and I hope we use it for longer). At the end of those 6 years I have assumed I will get to zero euro from the car (so purchase price divided by 6 for each year.
but how do you spend that much? I own a 14k car, got it 10 months ago (new was 36k), since then, insurance was 400, fuel about 820 this for 8k kms, on average with this expensive fuel prices I can get about 600kms for 100euro, I had to get new winter tires for about 600 and car service was 400 so in total about 2200 euros. I live in Romania, here cars make about 10-15k kms every year.
I did not count in for the depreciation but I assume, my, 2015 car, could be worth about 7k euros when it is ~12 years old, that will mean I can add up about 1000euro depreciation
Like others mention, I think you should have added the used car option in the calculations. It's a lot cheaper than new cars.
Also, as NJB mentions in his comment, most North American cities aren't designed for public transport, so owning a car is pretty much required.
My car cost $2500 in 2019 and I've spent just under $200 in 3 years for maintenance. It's not that hard to cheap the fuck out with a little mechanical skill and save a ton of money. And yeah, I walk to work and take public transportation, hell I literally work for a public transportation system. Cars are only expensive when you make them expensive.
@@robierahg17 I agree about the inflation part, but he does account for getting rid of the car, since he counts the depreciation (initial - depreciation = resell)
north america is 3 countries out of like 200 my dude.
@@gondolagripes1674 depending on where you live, insurance is mandatory, and that insurance goes up if you dont get it serviced at reputable places very often. also the video was about new cars. I dont know any new car going for 2.5k. most people dont cheap out on their cars either. if youre buying it because its mandatory, then sure, get the best deal and work on it yourself. but most people dont do that and some even see their car as a status symbol and a lot care about how it looks to others. in that situation, theyre paying a hell of a lot more. we arent talking minimums here, were talking averages. you being lower than the average doesnt change what that average is.
Great overall video. However I do have to say you've made one presumption which is mostly untrue, you've taken sums as cars bought new, however most people buy cars second hand when depreciation has already largely taken place. E.g Golf 2020 new would have depreciated 15k in 2 years, but people buying second hand, buy it for 15k instead of 30 and depreciation is much slower after the 2 year period. In my opinion unless you're filthy rich you should never buy a car new. Im certain most buy second hand cars. Great overall video though!
If the person bought it used, someone bought it new before them. The costs are still there, just divided by 2 different people.
@@andresaliba No because you're assuming cars and people are 1:1. There are cars being manufactured every single year, the cars that are used don't go anywhere unless they're scrapped. Just more new are generated. Ask yourself how many relatives bought a car new vs old. I'm sure many many more buy used.
@@akbartoryalae279 I think you're not seeing your fallacy here. A car can't be manufactured used, so by definition, someone has to buy it NEW before another person buys it used. It doesn't matter how many more people buy used vs new, the sum of costs are all still there, divided among all of the car buyers. Money doesn't disappear.
@@andresaliba I understand what you're saying, but the video claims that the the cost of ownership per vehicle is X amount. This X amount is only for those who buy cars new.
That X amount is in itself correct to those who buys cars new, yes I understand that cars being manufactured are new and people buy them. But a city with 5 million working population only a very small X amount by new. Other amount buy used or don't buy at all. The number that buy used every year is much higher than the X amount.
Also the X amount people spend maintaining a car isn't averaged out so its per new vehicle. Not average including used vehicles.
@@akbartoryalae279 I still don't see the point you're trying to make here. Do you agree with me that it doesn't matter about the numbers for each person, but rather how much total money was spent by individuals for that one object? Regardless if it had 1 or 10 owners, the costs are all still there as a burden to society.
In his example, he obviously exaggerated both for the car numbers and for the public transit numbers, it's much easier to calculate. If he starts taking into account used car numbers, than all kinds of variables start to appear, which ultimately are all useless, as the costs for the vehicle are all the same, regardless of how many people bought it.
Awesome stuff. This was well documented and well researched, I really enjoyed it and found it informative
As a Berliner and a guy with two jobs. I mainly conmute on my cycle for the most part. It has given me a sense of freedom that I absolutely love. Although we have kindda good bike lanes here (compared to India, my home country) there is a lot of work to be done.
Americans are too fat for that to be possible. Homeless people ruin public transportation also.
You aint berliner.
@@myhonorwasloyalty Damn right! If you aren't born here, you're just a annoying tourist.
@@myhonorwasloyalty you do realize that people get INTEGRATED into society. Such racist... Western garbage as we call you around here.
@@myhonorwasloyalty Does that really matter to you?
sold my car few weeks ago and i am so happy! the car was just standing weeks long in the middle of berlin (s bahn nordbahnhof 10115) and was just sucking money for parking, taxes, insurance, future tüv ... now im back to carsharing when necessary or just bicycle!
Nice video, however most people I know buy second hand cars (3 to 5 years old) and let someone else take most of the depreciation. The car costs would be way lower if you calculated it like this.
The rate of value lost as depreciation doesn’t remain static over time.. it’s reduces quite a lot and eventually comes to a stop
This legitimately made my family reconsider our current car situation. We may be selling it soon. Great work 👍
you must be more naive to be convinced of such by this video OR you live in an city with no need for cars witch is NOT the majority of the world even in citys with good public transport
We live in an Major Australian city which to be fair has quite good public transport and bicycle infrastructure. A lot of the associated operating costs are actually a lot higher than the video for our specific situation. We already only use our car maybe once a month so it makes sense got our situation.
So yes, definitely the exception but this video pushed us to actually kick into motion what we should have already done.
@@RavenL1337 The automobile industry is one of the biggest destructive forces on the planet, depleting resources, stoking conflicts, polluting the planet and so on. It’s a common sense idea to desire public transport which can drastically reduce pollution and resource extraction. I have lived in a few countries which are wildly different in development, and you can manage everywhere if you live in urban areas with public transport and also save a ton of money.
@ohsocooll12342 Urban areas are not desirable nor affordable for lots of folks. I would never be able to own anything. Not have a garden. Not have room for my bikes, kayaks, etc. Not have space for the dogs either. Renting forever is a sustainable way. After covid and the price hikes I'm even more convinced. Renting in a city while young or temporary is fine. But living in a city for decades is absolutely unaffordable. At least in my circumstances.
@@baronvonjo1929 there are homes with space for all of these things in the city, check out Chicago
I actually agree with you on most of your points, except for one: weather. The country I live in is a mid-income tropical one meaning hot and humid weather. This completely negates cycling and walking to work if you have an office job, well unless you are lucky enough to have an employer that installed showers at your workplace. A couple of years ago, our capital city had a mayor who was into cycling so he went all out to installimg bike lanes all over the place that now it is possible to cycle anywhere in our city safely. He set up tax incentives for employers and workers, organised promotional rides and went as far as giving out free bikes. Several years on, aside from a few foreign labourers and the odd westerner, the bike lanes are mostly unused. I'm not arguing for car use mind you, I fully believe public transportation is the way to go, especially for my city. Personally, I'm lucky enough to live next to a metro station and use that whenever I need to commute.
People think bikes are so much more important than transit. No, the metro is best.
In some Muslim countries, women can't cycle. So they ride trains to protect their hijab because cycling reveals the shape of the body.
Ok? so what about trams? trains? light rail?
What city are you from?
@@naydsoe27 Very high cost to build, not as flexible for most people, and cost of maintaining them is high as well.
@@naydsoe27 Yes to all.. Lol.. My home city has both and LRT and MRT systems. Problem is that we don't have enough stops though but I realise it costs quite a bit of scratch to set up a new line or add more stops. I love trams, one the cheapest forms of public transportation but sadly they don't seem to be too popular in the developing world. We have on BRT line (bus rapid transit) but for whatever reason we didn't build any more.