Costs per hour of usage

I spend far too much time on my own in the car. After you've exhausted the radio channels and your music playlists and it gets to times of day or night when the phone calls stop, you have to keep the brain active somehow. 

Yesterday for example, I was still driving home late in the evening with nigh on 500 miles showing on the trip reading since I'd reset it that morning. 

Randomly, I started doing a bit of mental arithmetic. Fiddling with the readouts on the dash, I discovered that the 42000 miles the car has done so far have required 1200 hours of driving. That giving an average speed of 35 mph. 

In in that same 13 months it has cost me £4836 in tax and approximately £650 in private fuel. Being a company car, those are the only significant personal costs of using it and total just shy of £5500.

Divide that then by the 1200 hours and it costs me just short of £4.60 an hour to sit there. Which sounded like quite a lot.

But then I started to think about my wife's car. It (probably) has lost about £2000 a year in depreciation while she's had it, okay, that might not be accurate but it'll do. Then there's her fuel at approx £1200 a year, and tax at £180, plus servicing etc at £350, and I chucked in £100 for tyres. £300 or so for insurance and you get a rough annual cost of £3800.

She does about 8000 miles year at most and let's assume she's also averaged 35 mph, so roughly 230 hours of use.

Her car therefore costs around £16.50 per hour of use !

I thought that was quite interesting. Not to say a bit scary.