| 2009.11.28 |
I'm not half-geek for nothin'. This is the part where I admit I keep a spreadsheet which catalogs certain information about my car.
Not that this is necessarily anything to be proud of, but this thing has five tabs: one serves as a service record. It's the main
reason why I keep the document: If I should decide to sell this car, any prospective buyer can see everything that has
been done to the car from a maintenance perspective. As a buyer, I think that's important. The other tabs document oil changes, gasoline
milage, cleaning, and the last contains graphs based on the data. That's where the chart I posted in May, 2007 came from.
The gasoline milage tab is well-used. It is here I record data from my gas receipts. Columns include date, odometer, calculated trip distance,
gallons, price per gallon, calculated mileage, the cost to drive the car per mile (based on gas prices), and the date interval between fills.
As you can probably guess, the input values serve as the basis for the calculated values. And although the calculated mileage per gallon is
the main object of the exercise, I later added columns which compute the total number of gallons of fuel the car has consumed, the total cost
of fuel for the car, and the car's length of service. Yeah, these are pure infoporn, but they somtimes reveal interesting information.
Which brings me to the odd milestone. Apparently on my October 21st fuel stop I crossed the $10,000 mark in total fuel costs. On that date,
my car had been in service for just under 8 1/2 years.
Knowing that seems to just inspire more infoporn: That puts my average annual fuel cost at $1,190, and an average daily fuel cost at $3.26.
Damn. Think about that. It currently costs me $.21 per mile, or an average of $3.26 per day — just in gas — to DRIVE MY CAR.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand because I couldn't leave well enough (?) alone, I figured out the average annual and daily maintenance costs just now. (I need a hobby.)
Factoring those in, it's actually costing me $6 a day to drive my car. The annual maintenance costs average out to about $1,000 per year.
I don't know if that's good or not. But whether it's bitch-worthy or not, the car is paid for.
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