Nissan Primera Lifetime costs

Summary

Introduction

Scientists don't earn much money because their work is often interesting and therefore popular enough to counteract any rarity value for a Ph.D. Some of us might think that initially purchasing a car is expensive, but in my experience, the maintenance adds 50% to the purchase price, the fuel costs add more than 100%, and the loss of earnings from not having the money invested costs more than anything else. Some people take out loans to make their cars even more expensive, or worse, sell each new car after just three years where the deflation rate induced losses would be even higher because you would have needed 5 new cars over the 15 years. It takes time to buy a car, to take it for MOTs, for servicing, new tyres, body repairs etc. but this time was not costed (car drivers like wasting their lives sat in traffic jams too). I have taken conservative assumptions throughout and not recorded all repairs so this is the minimum cost. My old Nissan Primera was a great British-built car, but now I have bought a foreign-built Dahon Vitesse 7 folding bicycle which was GBP 300 from Evans cycles and, at least in the Summer of 2007, I am carless again.

To be completely truthful, the car actually cost twice as much to buy as stated here because the Provisional IRA managed to swindle the original buyers out of their first paid-for Primera in some kind of disappearing company trick but that is another story and the second car ordered from a local garage arrived later and is the one detailed here.

A consumer organisation called Which did their own calculations and came up with a figure of over five thousand pounds (GBP 5000) per year to own a car. The AA calculates that it can cost over 2 Pounds per mile to run a new car less than 10,000 miles per year.

We need to move to the European fuel economy measure of litres per 100 Km because miles per gallon seems simple but is actually very misleading especially in The USA.

Notes:

• All costs are in UK Pounds
  
• No account was taken of inflation.
• No charges for tolls or parking were included
• Interest is calculated compounded only annually for a full 15 years for purchase price, and for just 15/2 years for total of all the other charges.
• No estimate of the cost of alternative forms of travel were deducted so this is not a relative comparison at all
  
• To be conservative, the interest rate was assumed to be 4% (0.04) but is currently around 6% at some Australian banks and 12% in Brazil (which has had a wonderful economy for over a decade unlike traditional safe havens - ha ha !).
• For simplicity, petrol was assumed to be 70p per litre (but is currently over 90p)
• The car had three owners over the 15 years so many maintenance and replacement charges will have been missed.
• Dates are usually approximate.
  
• I assumed the car always drove at 35 Miles per gallon efficiency which it can actually only do at a steady 60 mph or behind a coach on a motorway.
• The car was sold for GBP 10 but the total actual amount may have been blown on a taxi-fare home after celebration beers.