Look out of your nearest window, and there’s a good chance you’ll see several expensive tonnes of metal, glass, and plastic sitting idle.
In fact, I am doing that right now.
It wasn’t always this way for me. In the early phases of my investing journey, I managed to avoid the expense and responsibility of owning my own car.
But I could only hold out so long. And between work trips and the need to transport kids quickly and safely, the debate now isn’t whether we need a car – it’s whether we need a second.
Unless you live in a big city with a spiderweb of public transport routes, car ownership can feel mandatory.
But I’m employing every strategy I can think of to avoid ponying up for an extra vehicle.
And with all the app-based doorstep deliveries and on-demand transport options around now, that’s much easier than in the days of the Littlewoods catalogue and the milkman.
A car costs more than the metal
Cars are deeply personal. One person will swear by their 17-year-old Nissan, while another will insist it’s irresponsible to drive something without a top Euro NCAP safety rating.
So to figure out the cost of car ownership, I’ll have to make some broad assumptions.
This won’t match every Monevator reader’s particular needs – or their adeptness with an oil can and socket set.
But we must start somewhere, so let’s start with the key spending categories:
- Depreciation – The stealthiest cost of all. If you buy a car for £40,000 and sell it two years later for £28,000, you’ve spent £500 per month through depreciation. With leases, the depreciation is baked into the monthly fee
- Opportunity / financing cost – If you put £20,000 into a car in preference to filling your S&S ISA, you’re also missing out on investment growth. Borrow £20,000 to pay for it and you’ll be paying interest on the finance deal
- Running costs – MOTs, servicing, and fresh tyres. (Here’s your reminder to check your tread depth if you haven’t recently!)
- Tax – Vehicle excise duty depends hugely on the age and type of car. Pay-per-mile charges are on the way, too.
- Insurance – Particularly costly if you’re young.
- Fuel – Whether you pump it or plug it, the price of powering your motor adds up.
What’s the price of a Polo, anyway?
Let’s introduce two hypothetical investors. Both want to own a Volkswagen Polo. But they have very different driving habits and financial tolerances.
So how much financial damage can a modest German hatchback actually inflict?
Alice and the new car premium
Alice has a long commute – 10,000 miles a year – and she can’t afford to be late for work, so she values the reliability of a new car and a warranty.
She decides to buy a brand-new Polo for £20,000 outright.
- Depreciation: £3,000 (new cars shed value like a wet dog sheds water)
- Opportunity / financing cost: £20,000 at 5% is £1,000 per year
- Fuel: £1,500
- Running costs (including tax and insurance): £800
- Alice’s total annual cost: £6,300
Alice’s total commitment to her car is £121 a week. Every week. All for the privilege of driving 10,000 miles a year.
Note that opportunity cost reflects the investment returns you forgo on the money tied up in the car while you own it. Some of that capital can be recovered when you sell.
Gary and his sensible secondhander
Gary can get the bus to work if necessary, so he’s less worried about a new car warranty. Hence he buys a three-year-old Polo for £10,000.
Gary mostly uses it for errands and weekend trips, and clocks just 7,000 miles a year.
- Depreciation: £1,200
- Opportunity / financing cost: £10,000 at 5% is £500 per year
- Fuel: £1,050
- Running costs (with tax and insurance): £1,000 (older cars need a bit more TLC)
- Gary’s total annual cost: £3,750
Gary is paying £72 a week. Vastly cheaper than Alice’s shiny new motor.
How about skipping the car altogether?
We can do better!
Jess the car avoider
Jess took a close look at the purchases made by her friends Alice and Gary, and she decided she wants to forgo owning a car entirely.
She also realised she doesn’t want to spend a chunky chunk of her day chugging through traffic jams. Getting a job within walking distance of where she lives solved that problem.
Jess earns £25,000 per year. That gives her £21,521 after tax.
And when Alice points out there’s a vacancy paying a much higher £35,000 at her own workplace, Jess runs through the numbers:
| Walk to lower-paid job | Drive to higher-paid job | |
| Gross income | £25,000 | £35,000 |
| Net income | £21,521 | £28,721 |
| Car costs (based on Alice’s cost) | £0 | -£6,300 |
| Total income | £21,521 | £22,421 |
Jess would effectively only earn £900 per year more with the new job – albeit she’d also be treated to the joys of being stuck in traffic twice a day, thanks to its commute.
Now let’s acknowledge that Jess could find a cheaper car, just as Gary did.
But equally, many of the best-selling cars in the UK are more expensive than a Polo!
So clearly there’s a lot of people out there who either don’t do these sums, or who think it’s worth paying a premium for that new car depreciation smell.
Car ownership costs compound
Inspired by Jess and her savvy ways, Alice decides to do better.
Somehow Alice is able to ditch the car without losing her income. (Perhaps she found a different job, or moved to another city. Or she convinced her employer that working from home is trendy again…)
Alice is now spending £6,300 less per year (£525 per month) without a car. The money that previously went on motoring she can now plough into an investment ISA. Over a period of 20 years with a 5% return, she’d end up with £213,915.
Nearly a quarter-of-a-million quid, which could easily be the difference between retiring early or having to continue to slog away at the 9-to-5 for a few more years.
There are downsides
Not everyone can do without a car. You might have medical reasons for needing one, or children that have to get to a distant school. There are myriad other scenarios.
But often car ownership is more of a choice.
Our family already has one car. Our debate is whether we can manage without a second.
And I’ve found there are lots of options these days that lessen the need to have two Frugalist household vehicles doing the rounds.
Instead of driving to the supermarket, I can get an annual subscription for free grocery deliveries. Most supermarkets offer passes for around £40 per year. Adding on Amazon Prime (including Deliveroo) for £95 per year gives access to still more delivery options.
I could budget for an emergency £20 taxi ride every month. Between the local cab firms and Uber, I’ve found it’s pretty easy to find a ride.
A taxi won’t work for a week-long jaunt to the countryside though. So I could also budget to hire a car for one week a year at £200. There are a couple of traditional car hire places where I live. Turo and Enterprise Car Club are other options, depending on your needs and location.
Added up, these alternatives still only cost £570.
The point isn’t that all of the above are essential if you don’t have a car.
It’s that you can afford to splash out on some apparently extravagant services, because compared to spending several thousand pounds per year on a car, they no longer look so extravagant.
Your mileage may vary
For some people driving is a hobby first, and a mode of transport second. If driving and maintaining your car is something you love, then clearly money won’t come into it.
Or perhaps you have access to an excellent company car scheme. With due consideration of the Benefit In Kind brackets, you can enjoy some very cheap motoring.
But most of us are definitely forking out a pretty penny for every mile travelled and every month of ownership, even if we don’t have to feed coins into a dashboard to stay on the road. So it’s worth working out how much we’re spending and why.
How much would your life change if you didn’t have a car? Would your job become impossible? Could you find another employer closer to home?
Which parts of your life rely on having a vehicle, versus where it’s just nice to have? Could some of the challenges be offset with a bit of targeted spending elsewhere?
If you must own a car (or two)
Obviously staying away from the new car dealerships is the best way to reduce the hit to your future net worth.
Modern cars are so well made that many buyers can realistically keep even a used one on the road for a decade.
Pay cash if you can to avoid financing charges.
Finally, buy the smallest car that’s practical for your situation. It’ll usually be cheaper and it will reduce all the ongoing costs, too.
Buy a fancy pair of shoes if you want to show off. They’ll cost you £20,000 less in the long run.
Every little helps
I was talking to a neighbour recently who bemoaned their frustration at having to drive to the big retail park every time they run out of milk.
Somehow they were completely unaware of a small supermarket that’s within walking distance.
I suppose if I’d been driving myself – rather than walking back from said supermarket – then we’d never have even stopped to chat.
We’re all different. Personally though, I feel a bit richer by reducing my car use.
Not just financially, but physically and mentally, too.
Car ownership is still treated as almost a rite of passage. But if you can swallow your ego and buy a smaller used car, walk around more, and actively try to design your lifestyle around the newer alternatives such as supermarket deliveries, then you might just hit that more important milestone – early retirement – many years sooner than you expected.
Best cars are bangers just before they might become classics, so not much depreciation left, but potentially upside
With bangernomics it’s wear & tear + insurance + petrol + tax vs the cost of a yearly bus pass, but busses are slower than walking where I live
Cars save valuable time
Bangers are also a good way to hide wealth, as everyone assumes you’re poor
The point is well made about reducing the cost for those who view their cars as little more than functional A to B boxes like washing machines with wheels.
Rural living means a car or two is essential (but it can be an uber), although I think it would be stretching a point to argue that my sixth was an essential element of family life.
Last car I bought cost 7.5k and is now worth 35k. Free of CGT, too. Worth examining what happens when the depreciation flows the other way… But it isn’t a financial asset for me (not on my balance sheet at all), but a source of great pleasure to drive and to share with other drivers.
No point earning it if you don’t get some pleasure out of it.
One “hidden in plain sight” thing to look for are pre-registered (pre-reg) cars which are basically ex-demonstration “new” cars. I’ve had a couple of these. The upside is you get something which is indistinguishable from a new car to any normal person (one had 10 miles and the other had 90 miles on the clock). Normal warranty etc. But you pay a much lower price, usually 20-30% off. Like a new car without the depreciation. The downside is you have no choice at all over the colour, features, etc. and just have to take or leave whatever the dealer has that day. For people like me who don’t care about cars in the slightest beyond that they work reliably to move me from A to B, I don’t care what the car looks like within reason.
I believe there are certain times of the year when dealers need to meet quarterly sales figures so if you know what those are you can get even better deals on these.
Also technically pre-reg cars are second hand cars, but that made no practical difference at all for the two that I owned.
The mileage does vary enormously for contractors and higher rate taxpayers. A salary-sacrifice EV operates on entirely different financial physics from buying a petrol car outright.
Also, outsourcing personal logistics to taxis and delivery services often costs more than the delivery fee alone. Eg, grocery deliveries mean missing out on the discount aisle bargains and having little control over substitutions. You can reject unsuitable replacements, but you can’t pick a better alternative that’s sitting on the shelf that day. Some goods and services simply aren’t available for delivery. Likewise, many taxi drivers won’t take dogs, what if you need to get yours to the vet?
Then there’s the option value of physical mobility. An asset-light lifestyle can become a liability during periods of economic uncertainty (see: redundancy). A depreciating asset can act as a hedge for geographical flexibility or even become a source of income when things change (parcel deliveries during COVID are an obvious example), rather than a drain on capital.
Personally, I suspect having a car will matter more to me in retirement than it does in the runup to it. That’s when I expect to finally make proper use of my National Trust membership (brace yourselves, lovely NT volunteers… you may also want to refresh your recollection of the differences between haute-lisse and basse-lisse tapestry weaving, because I have questions. Also about fountain mechanics, historic window frames, caring for oak floors, weird music boxes, and whether the dwarf orange trees in the orangery are genuine historic varieties or if you’ve just bought a few from a Dutch catalogue last year to complete the look?)
And, with the way the NHS is going, there are situations where being able to get yourself (or your spouse) to A&E is quicker than waiting for an ambulance.
@Mathmo #2… “Rural living means a car or two is essential (but it can be an uber)”
You don’t live rural if you can Uber 🙂
We are in the wilds, and car ownership is pretty much essential. I agree with anyone who lives in areas well served by transport being an optional car owner, but realistically, not having a car can take a lot of fun and opportunity away from an individual. Being spontaneous and having a weekend away because the weather looks good or you saw a concert in a distant town you fancied at the last minute could be hard work getting to without one. Taking rubbish to the dump is a ritual with a car, not easily achieved without one (Ubers might balk at a dumpy bag full of rubble).
One of my hobbies involves pulling a trailer with a very small car to motorsports venues – try hire a car with a tow hitch.
Buying any relatively new or new car is not necessarily cheaper without the finance, I will explain why. Car sales dealership are primarily credit brokers. If you go with cash, they do not give you the best deal as a lot of the profit is in the finance. Taking the finance (and then paying it off as soon as possible) will get a better deal most of the time.
I do advocate end of life vehicles, and end of life – in my life time – has moved from 7 year old cars to 17 year old cars as they don’t fall to bits as readily as they used to.
We have two cars. One is over 18 and the other is a mere 16 year old. At the last MOT the 18 yo romped through and my mechanic said it might manage yet another for me. 147000 miles, high profile cheaper tyres, C.£500 servicing this year. Annual mileage 12000. Depreciation is about £300 pa.
I have yet to break down in it (I am touching wood for luck after saying that).
JimJim
To live/work without a car you need to be in a city, which tends to jack up your housing costs. They also compound.
Obvs you could live in the sticks within cycling distance of work I guess, and arguably I did for many years, and indeed sort of wrote something similar in my purer frugalista days
But my life would be very crimped if I didn’t have a car. Life is too short to accept the slowness of a bus, and that would add an hour round trip just to get to the nearest station.
But sure. If you’re rich enough to live in London, a car would be a right pain in the backside until you’re in Zone 5/6. What you’re saving on the car you’re more than giving back in rent/mortgage 😉
We chose a cargo ebike instead of a second car, covering all trips within 5 miles. It carries the weekly shop, up to 4 children and can be parked almost anywhere. It was an ex hire at £2800 8 years ago and it probably wouldn’t be too far off that value now. Far cheaper, plus you get the health benefits of cycling as a bonus!
Seems I’m aligned to most readers in valuing a car, even though I do not rely on it to commute at all.
I’ll add a data point on my own economics for comparison:
Purchase price 4 years ago (was already 10 years old): £4000
Let’s be pessimistic and treat this as £1k a year depreciation. I’ll pretend that pessimism offsets opportunity cost exactly to avoid figuring that out.
Annual insurance around £300
Annual maintenance around £600
Annual road tax £170
Annual fuel around £1000 (around 6000 miles)
I therefore reckon on an annual cost of approximately £3k or around £60pw.
It’s a little more than I had thought, so good exercise to write it out, but honestly that still feels like a bargain considering how useful it is to be able to take the kids to extracurricular activities several times per week, go shopping, camping, whatever, whenever and wherever I like. I also take it on the ferry sometimes, which isn’t a goer for Uber or hire car.
I recently got a 10-year old Citybug. It’s cheap to insure and run (averaged 57mph) and other than a slight worn synchro on the gear box the wear and tear is indistinguishable from the 3-year old I handed back on the work scheme.
Fair to say that while we had the discussion whether we can make do with one car it wasn’t a very long one, though our other car is 12 years old so most of the depreciation hit has already been felt.
We live a bit out of town with rubbish bus service so a car is a necessity. However we have 2 and once had 4 but they were all cheap. My aim is always to be the last owner of a car which has worked out asI have been lucky (current car 2008 plate 26000 miles). Keep track of old folk getting rid of their cars !
However, as the available cars get to be later plates maintenance requirements go up. If you own anything from 2016 you really need to keep on top of oil changes etc. This is because regs have forced manufacturers to sweat the technology to the limit of what is sensible.
If you own anything with ‘eco’ in the name sell it now!
In most cities these days, the best ans easiest method of transport is bike, followed by ebike. Even my plumber turns up on a cargo bike.
Three of my university long vacation jobs needed personal transport: I’d bought a motorbike using the money I’d saved from my summer holiday jobs as a schoolboy.
My first cars were a couple of old bangers. Then I bought the only new car I’ve ever bought, using a bank loan. I kept the car for 15 years and then sold it for almost as much (in nominal terms) as I’d paid for it. Ain’t inflation wonderful?
Since then we’ve always had a car en route either to being stolen (one) or ageing gracefully to 20 or so. Our present 2005 car does us just fine – heavens there’s not much more than 200,000 miles on the clock. (2005 because 2006 saw the introduction of buggeration devices imposed on diesels by the EU.)
For years “school runs”, commuting, and errands were done by pushbike. I’m too ill to drive; when my wife is too old to drive I’m certain we’ll miss it. Her preferred mode of gadding about at the moment is to drive to the Park-and-Ride and then use the busses. Works a treat for many purposes. And Free! (in the sense that someone else pays for the bus and the parking).
@mathmo that has to be the dream right? A car that you love and an appreciating asset as well!
@hosimpson absolutely, I am thinking about doing an EV and salary sacrifice analysis as well, but it would have turned this article into a mammoth. Of course, that option is that it depends a lot on your employer. The quality of service question is an interesting one. Personally, I’ve settled on Ocado in part because substitutions are so rare. With the mainstream supermarkets it was constant and it was annoying. The cost might be a bit higher, but with careful choices it is competitive. The bigger advantage for me (which is absolutely personal) is that I’ve removed an hour of driving and trolley pushing from each week and can put it towards something more enjoyable. This is getting a bit off-topic, but my local supermarket is now like Fort Knox and between the self-service tills screaming at me and the endless queues at the manned tills, I wasn’t enjoying the experience either.
@dearieme yes we had one of those veritable tanks, right until someone slammed into it and it resembled an accordion. I certainly wouldn’t be without any vehicle at all, far too useful for hospital trips and the like. But I do like to question every so often whether we’re getting value for money from things!
Like me, you forgot to include the hours spent commuting. When I included those hours in my calculations, I took early retirement very soon afterwards.
In this example, Jess could take home £900 more, but 10,000 miles/year can take around 2 hours/day, or more in a big city.
So in the example given, lets assume Jess works 35 hours/week for 52 weeks, and walks for 30 minutes each way:
Including travel costs and time commuting, Jess pockets:-
£21,521 ÷ 40 hrs/week = £10.34/hr.
For the new job option, lets assume Jess drives 30 miles at an average 30 mph each way, each day. Her second option becomes:-
£22,421 ÷ 45 hrs/week = £9.58/hr.
Try working these numbers for yourself.
I currently drive a 105,000 mile 2016 Tiguan bluemotion, 4wd which has been handy out in the sticks. I got rid of my last car (Golf bluemotion) at 274,000 miles. FYI, when I retired, I learned to fly and spent £100k on a small private plane, and don’t regret it one bit. I knew my frugal car habits would be worth it in the end!
@Matt — So you swapped a fancier commute for a six-figure plane? Love it. Ramit Sethi would be proud. 🙂
Hmmm, understand your point but the choices of example seem to suit the argument.
Perhaps a better analysis would be to look more at Alice’s situation.
Does she buy second hand and pay for premium breakdown cover.
What are the opportunity costs of working locally vs commute vs buying a local property.
You touch on these but without grounding it in actual data.
Clearly these are case by case judgements.
Owning a bright shiny new car to impress the neighbours (no one) is obviously a terrible financial judgement, commuting to a city 25 miles (10k pa?) away to earn 2x is probably not.
It’s long winded way to say buy 2nd hand or public transport depending on circumstance.
Oh car economics contains multitudes. I’ve usually bought used at 2-3 years old and run them into the ground. Which usually means a final voyage on a recovery truck (perhaps the automotive equivalent of a viking funeral). But then you have the inevitable big bills in later life to adjust to and it’s tempting to do an economic analysis on each. Most recently about 20 mins from home after a long road trip my clutch, to use the garage’s actual technical assessment, massively s##t itself (he actually said he’d never seen one explode that badly outside of drag racing). Replacement cost was maybe 40% of the car’s value. But it keeps me on the road, in a car that I’ve generally not had that many problems with, and saves me the capital cost and hassle of replacement. Plus as an ICE estate it is a dying breed and every year I can hold on, the better the choice of e replacements will be even if I have to accept a dreaded SUV shape.
I’d add that although I do not need a car for work and technically I could use public transport for most journeys, the specific journeys I do most often to family and weekend leisure would be considerably more difficult. So for me it’s an essential lifestyle tool, maybe more so than a sofa etc.
There’s a time and a place for this…. And a big but…
Once you hit FI it just doesn’t matter! I continue to work because I love what I do and maybe in mid 50s I’ll stop but not in my mid 40s.
I bought a new 2026 EV (R5) for £25k. Sold the 10 year old petrol car it replaced for £4k. The quality of my commute is far better and probably saves £150 a month in fuel on the side, as well as being green.
The years of saving, being frugal and living below means has worked out quite nicely.
It’s worth remembering that some jobs require access to a car. With both of us working in construction we had to have 2 cars, insured for business use. We’re down to 1 car now, even allowing that we qualify for free public transport now, I can’t see us going totally car free for the reasons others have mentioned. Our current city type car was about £4k, 36000 miles, 5 years old, we’ve had it about 8 years now. Zero road tax, lowest possible insurance, about £250 (including business use for my self employed gig) just got back from a weekend away where we got high 60s mpg. Normal fuel cost is about £500/ year. Maintenance maybe £200/year. I’ve always been lucky with cars, my last two were both about 20 years old when changed, hope this doesn’t jinx it….
Larsen, what car did you get? 4k for 5 years old and 36k miles is way better than anything I can find. 60mpg! It’s perfect! You sure you haven’t dreamt you bought this car 😉
@Rhino, Larsen bought the car 8 years ago, in the good old pre-inflation years. I agree you’d probably spend at least double that today for a similar car.
@Rhino, @countzero is correct, I just did a search on Autotrader and you’d need about £8-9k now, that’s quite sobering.
I’ve tended to go for the 2-4 years old and keep until 10 ish. Paid for typically by negotiating hard leveraging the sales teams incentives to sell PCP deals etc then pay off immediately using interest free credit cards. Its served me well over the years and I think that strategy is my preffered for personally owned vehicles.
Its certainly worth considering company car schemes if they are available to you. I opted into a refreshed company car scheme around 18 months ago. I sold my long ago paid off 12 year old golf and took a high spec premium EV company car. Even with the loss of a car allowance its working out substantially cheaper per month. Having run the numbers and forecast out known changes is tax etc I’d say that is only possible for certain tax bands and with full EV vehicles. Its worth looking into for anyone with that option open though.
@Frugalist – you’ve left me in suspense! Will you do without the second car? Can you really make do with a bunch of delivery subscriptions and Uber?
Is there a gap in views between you and your partner?
Mrs TA wouldn’t countenance living without a car. It spells freedom to her. She’s not into messing about with taxis or car clubs either. Maybe if an autonomous vehicle turned up on demand she’d be OK with that. She wouldn’t have to talk to it but she would want to drive it.
We’ve always been fine with one car but then we don’t have kids. I imagine that’s gotta be the tipping point for most.
Buying new cars is nuts. Does anyone do that in the UK? It looks like they do but surely they’re mostly lease cars or company cars?
I guess the lease cars option is asking for trouble financially?
How about buying a banger for a couple of hundred quid then ditching it whenever it needed a repair?
I recently bought a Nissan Xtrail 7 seater pre-reg with 200 miles on the clock. List price was ~£39.5k ( so no extra road tax for 6 years) and got around £12k off. We did have to drive 200 Miles to collect though – the plan would be to keep for 10 years and sell for £5k+.
It’s the second “new” car I’ve bought (ex co cars) – my wife was feeling poor v her other friends driving around in new cars….she was/is very happy
I sold a Fiat 124 about a year and upgraded to a Mercedes SL350 before they’re banned – best £5k upgrade I’ve ever spent. Fingers crossed for the reliability of a 11 year old car
This is a academic analysis of the lifetime cost of driving from 2022.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800921003943
I enjoy counting all the money I have saved by never having a car.
“ Buying new cars is nuts. Does anyone do that in the UK? It looks like they do but surely they’re mostly lease cars or company cars?”
Generally true I guess, but not always. We bought the new MG4 a few months ago. Would have been cheaper through salary sacrifice but that particular upgraded model wasn’t available through the scheme (too recent probably, it had just come out), and I’m retiring in the next 12 months so it would’ve been a non-starter anyway. 8-year warranty, don’t remember the annual service cost but cheap, charging more or less free with solar panels, +/- a month or two over winter and an odd road trip where even the most expensive rapid charger still works out at about a third of the cost of petrol.
Back-of-a-fag-packet calculation: take the purchase price, divide by eight years, and that’s roughly our annual depreciation. Everything else is peanuts.
Obviously China is dumping EVs into Europe, but as a consumer I have absolutely no (zero. zip. zilch) objection to Chinese taxpayers subsidising my motoring.
Admittedly, this is only one of our three vehicles, but the other two are toys, so don’t really count.
Oh, and if I was a contractor, I could write some of it off on tax.
I’ve only ever bought one car new. That was a Skoda Fabia. I will never but a Skoda again. Terribly unreliable with some unfortunate design choices.
However, in all my car owning years, I have yet to work out when to get rid of a car. In the absence of an exploding engine, it’s the regular trickle of hefty bills. Especially for things like brake drums and suspension arms, that I always expect to last over a hundred thousand miles, but don’t seem to any more.
I live in Zone 2, and one of the things that make me happiest is that I never have to drive anywhere. Driving is sheer purgatory.
I cycle to work on a bike I bought in 2012 for £500 – my commute is 3 miles, around 15-20 minutes. I also have a motorbike which cost £4500 (second hand), and which is perfectly capable of longer journeys. For example, I went to Oxford and back on it earlier this week, far more quickly (and enjoyably) than it would have been by car. I’ve used it over the years to take my kids to ballet classes and cricket matches and whatever else.
Whichever bike – with engine or without – I’m using, I always know how long journeys are going to take and I (almost) never sit in traffic. So, I’ve gained thousand of hours over the years – time I’ve spent reading books, listening to music, cooking food from real ingredients and talking to friends, rather than sitting in a metal box getting cross.
If we want to go on a family trip somewhere, I’ll hire a car – pricey, sure, but much less expensive than actually owning a recalcitrant lump of metal with all the associated insurance, depreciation, servicing, parking permits etc.
And I know people always say “oh, you can live without a car in London because of public transport” – but I honestly use the Tube / buses pretty infrequently – at a guess maybe every other week, at most. I know for a fact that the last time I went on the Tube was the 19th of June (although I expect to use it again on Monday to get to St Pancras to catch the Eurostar).
The rest of the time, I get where I need to be in an entirely self-directed and self-propelled way. It’s the transport equivalent of Financial Independence, and I’m sure it’s going to help me to retire early.
I also live rurally and public transport to work would be prohibitively expensive and time consuming, and that’s assuming the timetable would even work for me.
I used to keep cars until they died or became too unreliable and/or expensive to maintain. But, having discovered the hard way that breakdown services are not what they used to be, I’m not sure how long I’ll keep my current car. (Happy to provide details for anyone interested, but I will never rely on breakdown services again.)
I buy nearly new from a dealership, preferably just before March 31st when they’re more desperate to sell. The discount on the new price is huge for a car that’s only done about 2000 miles as a demo/courtesy car and is maybe 4 months old (about 30% on my most recent car). They still have most of their warranty too. I’m also in the ‘buy the safest car you can get’ camp – having known someone who died young in an accident in old banger, I don’t think it’s worth the risk if you can afford something newer and safer.
And a warning about salary sacrifice – if you earn a reasonable amount and you have a DB pension, your salary appears to go up so much when you return the car that the annual allowance tax bill on your pension that year could very easily wipe out all the income tax savings you’d made and add a hefty financial penalty for the privilege too. Something else I wish the anti-DB pension crusaders in the Torygraph understood.
Oh, I should probably add that my current car is an EV – I believe the discounts on nearly new for these are better because manufacturers have to meet government imposed sales quotas.
I’m a bangernomics guy. Wouldn’t be without a vehicle, public transport in Lincolnshire is non existent and two school age kids in tow.
Just upgraded from our tatty 17 year old diesel Focus on 147k, bought for £2k 8 years ago, to a 9 year old Audi estate on 157k, this one for £4k. My wife laughed at me as I requested some “cashflow assistance”, as I stripped my liquidity last month filling my S&S ISA, this wasn’t a planned purchase, more a reaction to the umpteenth complaint from the children about a lack of legroom or something.
I’d be lying if I didn’t admit when I turned up & spotted the badge, the fancy screen, the lovely seats, how immaculate the inside and the engine bay is, the £2.5k of steering, suspension and glow plug work the previous owner performed in the last 12 months and the deathly quiet test drive that I was instantly swayed. Plus, even though it’s an evil 2l TDI it is still just about ULEZ and £35 VED.
Plus it’s came with a 3 month warranty which I’ve already had 500 out of for a sticking rear caliper and some air con work, so a couple of other bits fixed already.
Is it a risk? Of course. The age, the mileage, the complexity of a modern vehicle, I think any car presents financial maintenance risk, I consider it a normal enough motor that most stuff can be handled by my independent, without going anywhere near a stealership. I’m fairly adept at Google diagnostics and having a go myself, I service my own vehicles anyway, £40/y for a driveway oil change keeps most engine maladies away, plus it gives me an excuse to avoid the kids for an hour on a Saturday morning and get my hands mildly dirty while feeling like I’ve accomplished something.
I personally think this is a fairly efficient financial strategy to vehicle ownership, but it certainly isn’t for everyone.
Since Covid, new cars are becoming simultaneously luxury items in terms of price and commodities in terms of function (EV). ‘Peak Car’ has been argued to be about 2010-2014 so people running these to end of life (15 years? and I include myself in that category) need a new strategy because the 2020-2024 versions may not have the same longevity due to manufacturing cost optimisation and the amount of ECUs they carry.
For those that can access them, and have home charging, a salary sacrifice EV is a good basic plan and then buy it at the end of lease. For ICE then follow the heard to get the best nearly new deal on a safe and economic modern car (VW Polo/Volvo XC40) and in 10 years time EVs will be the default.
Oh, and get a manual sports car while you still can!
Ultimately I expect cars will become just another pay on demand form of transport (autonomously driven) unless you can afford the luxury of owning your own depreciating asset. If you can then make it something that gives you joy every time you use it.
I feel almost embarrassed to admit that the last three cars I have had have all been bought new. The one defence I have is that, as EVs and bought through my company, they have at least benefitted from 100% write off in their first year of ownership and all costs including charging go through my company rather than personal accounts. Of course, depreciation is still scarily high. I see clients by Zoom as much as possible, but many still demand personal visits so life without a car would be very difficult. Still, buying Teslas probably has more to do with vanity than common sense!
My partner and I used to commute into London, and shared a VW Polo for use on the weekends. Then bought a used Peugeot 308 and pre-reg Toyota Aygo 10 years ago since we both needed cars to commute to work (outside London).
Bus services here in NW Hampshire have been significantly reduced so have kept both cars since retiring. The Peugeot for trips to the recycling centre, holidays, and ferrying relatives to doctor appointments; the Aygo as the town runabout and short trips to the countryside. No plans to sell them as both still in good nick, although maintenance costs have risen as brakes, tyres, fan belts need replacing. Insurance premiums have fallen slightly over the past few years (with shopping around).
Interested in buying an autonomous vehicle when we reach our dotage, although not keen on in car cameras, tracking devices.
I always bought 3 year old cars and kept them until the repair bill crossed over their value. Although, the last two have been 6-9 months old when I bought them. As good as new but 30% cheaper. I’ve always tried to keep the cost to a minimum.
I’m OK taking the risk of old cars breaking down because I’ve never relied on a car to get to work. I live on the edge of London transport zones which means pretty good public transport provided I’m going into London and back. Anything else and you need a car to get anywhere quickly.
Interesting article and comments. I gave myself permission to spend some of my (still increasing in deccumulation) retirement stash, went to a main dealer and traded my 15 year old tired out Renault for a brand new hybrid. The old car was looking like it might become a major cost centre after some MoT warning flags with the AirCon being packed up for some time and expensive to fix.
The first time I’ve bought a completely new car – the old one was a newish demonstrator though. In retirement I wanted something reliable with a warranty as we are doing some road trips in the UK and abroad. Didn’t want to spend valuable time waiting for breakdown services and repairs with an old car failing on us (it could still happen with a new vehicle though of course).
I quite like the new vehicle but there’s a lot of tech in it compared to the old one with a bit of a learning curve, some slightly flakey software integration going on and a distracting touch screen replacing some controls where I was used to better physical controls before – radio and heater controls being the main ones. It’s got a row of heater buttons below the screen that all feel the same so I have to remember things like the cooling fan button is second from the left etc. Also it seems to have a built-in poltergeist aka “lane keeping” that tries to steer me back towards pot holes and cyclists I’m steering around – it took 30 minutes in the car with the 500 page PDF manual to figure out a custom config to turn that off.
Hopefully the new car will last me into my 70s with no major issues. Then I look forward to being able to cast a spell on a glass tablet to summon a self-driving horseless electric chariot that will take us wherever we want to go!
Lived my whole life so far without a car, including a few years in rural Wales, and the missed opportunities have so far been vanishingly rare. The money in the bank (well, ISA and SIPP) on the other hand is looking real and pretty concrete.
A real challenge to car-free living is the reaction of other people. Not running a car when you can clearly afford one is an affront to some people, even borderline suspicious; was it a medical condition or had you been caught drink-driving à la Boris or worse?
My wife is a non-driver too, though we both have licenses, which is probably not a coincidence.
NB – Something worth noting about living in a remote village without a car is that you really had to embrace village life. Everything was seasonal, be it the food you ate or the hobbies you pursued. It is not for everyone, but then nothing is.
@Azamino — Yes, I echo the comments of your and others who say a car-free life can be a perfectly fine (and substantially lucrative) choice.
When I’ve been around steady access to a car (house sharing with car owners in my 20s, or via parters occasional car usage beyond that) it has definitely thrown a few more options onto the board. And it’s been nice to drive around, say, rural Devon in a car.
But when I add up the practical difference — true, as a Londoner near several tube stations — it’s basically amounted to 5-6 days driving around to visit places that weren’t accessible by public transport AND CRUCIALLY where there wasn’t an alternative that was. Perhaps two weeks in the most car-heavy years. As @Frugalist says, these instances could easily be replaced with a hire car.
I’m not sure exactly what I’ve saved by not owning a car. As others have noted I’ve paid more to live in London, though I would have lived in London anyway. But it’s easily into six-figures, before compounding. Maybe triple that to account for the investment growth? Ballpark.
Not knocking those who want to own a car, but I do feel habitual car owners can be a bit blinkered.
Can’t wait until autonomous (electric!) vehicles make all this irrelevant for everyone if they want. 🙂
We are another one car family although it is my wife’s car, she uses it to get to work and it was only my choice to get rid of mine.
We are semi rural, our village has a shop and a cafe but anything else is a 6-8 mile bike ride for me. Although there have been a couple of times when I missed the car overall the pluses have outweighed the minuses. I know I ride my bike a lot more than I would have if I’d kept the car.
My wife is retiring next month and her mother passed away last year so we no longer have anything keeping us here. Our plan is to move somewhere more urban. We have watched my parents and several of my neighbours struggle once they were forced to stop driving so the idea is to make that change on our own terms rather than waiting for it to be forced on us.
If you don’t own a car to save money then you probably don’t need to, if you play a canny game.
If you don’t own a car because you don’t need to, or don’t want to, then that’s an entirely different thing.
My ideal would be to live in a web of cycle lanes, tram lines, and bus routes that made a car superfluous. Public transport isn’t quite up to it where I am.
Did anyone on here have kids and decide to do without cars? Sorry I’ve missed it if someone’s mentioned it already.
I’m still reeling from the dude who replaced his car with a plane 🙂
I’ve only just remembered, but our local council did so much work on restoring the river that people started paddle boarding to work.
@TheAccumulator ‘How about buying a banger for a couple of hundred quid then ditching it whenever it needed a repair?’
There is the element of safety to consider. My first car was a 1-litre Vauxhall Nova, bought from my sister-in-law, who had inherited it from her grandmother. It was definitely a banger and its engine had the unfortunate habit of cutting out in the wet – and duly did so when we were in a severe rainstorm while driving at night on the M62 just outside Leeds. I had to swerve across two lines of traffic to the hard shoulder with no power. Scary.
After that, we bought our only new car so far – a Skoda Fabia for about £9k (plus £400 trade-in for the Nova!) That lasted 12 years before requiring significant repairs, so not bad. Generally though, if you are just doing small local journeys, a banger might be ok. If you’re on the motorways doing 600-mile-plus round trips (which we regularly do to see family up north), then a trustworthy and safe car is essential, I’d say.
Our neighbours (in East London) have two kids at primary school and don’t have car. They manage on bikes, buses and the odd hire car for longer trips.
@Lakeland – Good on your neighbours.
Re: bangers – heh, yes, bangers in that sense probably shortened life expectancy. I guess I’m thinking more about contemporary bangers. These days I think you can pick up a decent car for a couple of hundred quid that’ll do you for several thousand miles or more. We’ve shipped on two in that class in the last ten years. They were still good cars, but resale value was near zero.
I’ve known a couple of people who do it but they’re also keen amateur mechanics and know how to spot a bargain.
I always look in puzzlement at costings like these. I bought a year old automatic Aygo for £6,000 with 6,000 miles on the clock 15 years ago. It has now done 65,000 miles. A replacement of the same age and mileage would cost almost as much as I paid. £20 road tax. £300 insurance. It has to be serviced and is starting to corrode, but is far cheaper to fix than a new monster car. My sister drives a 25 year old Micra.
“Buying new cars is nuts. Does anyone do that in the UK?”
We did once, years ago. The point was that we expected to do a lot of weekend driving in the Highlands since we were keen hill-walkers. An unreliable banger (and they did tend to be unreliable in those days) was not for us. Did second-hand cars as reliable as our current 2005 model even exist then?
@Alex #30 > having discovered the hard way that breakdown services are not what they used to be
What gets on my tits is they don’t give you a spare wheel or even one of those small emergency jobs. Tyre grief in the main cause of unscheduled stops in my motoring life so far, and I’d feel a right berk calling breakdown to fix a bloody tyre. Although I have heard success from others having used the aerosol latex squidge. Which you have to replace every five years, apparently.
Nobody seems to carry basic tools these days either. I’ve changed a clutch cable by the side of the road, admittedly after breakdown recovered that car to Ipswich from Heathrow 😉 I made a profit on that journey, as the clutch cable was about £7 and the fuel would have been more. Having said that, apart from tyre grief I’m not changing anything else, when I open the bonnet on cars now I struggle to know what’s what. I had to look at the book for one car to know how to check the oil, they had intelligently put the dipstick in the filler cap. Can’t argue with the logic, but I’d never have looked there.
@TI#39 > But it’s easily into six-figures, before compounding.
yeah, but how’s about the capital cost of rent and the extra on your flat? I looked and if I threw everything I owned I could afford to buy a flat in Onslow gardens in South Ken, which is where I would have liked to have lived when I left university. I’d even have enough to just about afford the service charge which looked eye-watering, I’ve never lived in a flat so I have no idea if it’s reasonable or usurous. I’m not sure whether I’d take him up on it if I rubbed Aladdin’s lamp and he said you could live in Onslow Gardens for free for the rest of your life. I could see the attraction, but there’s zero nature, obvs each to their own. Anyway, the point is, sure, cars cost you money and it compounds. But living where you don’t need a car also compounds, because World + Dog wants to live there. Which makes public transport work, because you have the density of population, but it makes rent/mortgage eye-watering, because that populating is competing with you for all the things, including housing. And food, the cost of food in London is eye-watering too, particularly if you want it not to be stale. Let’s not even talk about the beer, which is fine, but pricey 😉 I have no understanding of why food (in supermarkets) is so dear in the Great Wen. You’d have thought the economies of scale would fix that. Obvs junk food is cheap, but, well, you can get away with that up to midlife, after that, not so much.
You pays yer money and you takes yer choice. You get reamed on cars or you get reamed on housing 😉
@ermine — Ah well if you’re going to do that maths from that direction then of course it’s important we remember that a house you own is an asset too:
https://monevator.com/why-house-is-an-investment-and-an-asset/
I haven’t worked it out, but roughly going on when I believe you were at Imperial I’d imagine an Onslow Gardens flat would have at least ten-bagged between the early 1990s and the pre-Brexit peak. Conceivably you could have sold up for over £1 million, depending what you bought at the start of course.
So that’s quite a lot of gain, on top of not burning money for 30 years through owning cars…
But yes, no seaside nearby. Though Kensington Gardens isn’t the worst. 😉
My first car was a 1984 Mini Mayfair, bought second hand via AutoTrader for £1.6k. I can’t remember the mileage on it.
Subsequent cars were all new (4 of them) but the last new one I still own, bought in 2012 with 55k on the clock. I used to commute to work in it but a change of job and moving house had me using public transport more.
I have it on a service plan to spread costs but maintenance costs average from £400 – £1500 a year, depending on what needs to be replaced.
I don’t do many long journeys in it, it’s just supermarket, gym, visiting friends locally.
My next car will probably be brand new as I’m hoping it will be the last car I ever have to buy.
Plus it will be automatic – leg hurts when clutch-controlling in heavy traffic.
I don’t come anywhere near six figures for 30 years of car ownership – doing a quick back of the envelope.
Then you gotta deduct the public transport costs I’d otherwise have to pay. Plus god knows how much time hanging about for buses.
And Mrs TA would have to pay her share…
I’m pro doing without a car as and when possible but it’s a lifestyle choice.
@TA — Well, perhaps a renowned FIRE advocate on the UK’s leading financial independence blog isn’t a universal benchmark. 😉
Googling around gives different figures of £2,500 to £5,000 as the average cost of both owning and running a car annually. So that’s pretty much six-figures right there, before compounding the opportunity cost. Of course in the 1990s that figure was lower in nominal terms. FWIW (ahem) Chat is still telling me £1.5K to £2.5K in the 1990s per annum. I imagine cars were cheaper to buy but less reliable?
Assuming I didn’t buy a car for £3,000 in 1996 and a car-less life saved me a steady £2K across the 30s years. (Less at first, more later). At a mere 5% nominal return that’s £150K saved. Bung in 9-10% nominal for global equities and you’re looking at £300-450K depending.
Of course as you say for 99% of people there would have been offsetting transport costs. And accepted if a car is shared across two people then there’s savings to be made there, presuming it doesn’t encourage the ownership of two cars!
You do live a different lifestyle without a car, and must make choices accordingly, no doubt.
It’s hard to follow a lot of the comments here, mostly because the acronyms are a foreign language for me, and the sterling equivalents don’t say much to me, but thought it might be interesting for some of you UK residents to have a comparison with Japan.
So my mechanic found me an 10 year old petrol engine kei car in 2013, so I’ve had it for 13 years. Kei cars are 650cc light cars, which have cheaper insurance, road tax and MOT/inspection costs, and sometimes cheaper parking, so they are wildly popular here. Mine is a box-type one, so a five seater, but the rear seats drop flat to provide a 2m long rear space. It’s older, so fuel consumption is quite high for the size and weight, but I just use it as a local runaround.
So, costs are –
Annual tax – my partner is disabled, so gets an exemption from the Y12,600 tax.
Annual inspection (in Japan they’re every two years, so I split this) – about Y10,000, includes the test itself and a weight tax. I get my car serviced beforehand, so that comes within the maintenance cost below.
Annual maintenance – last year was Y135,000, but before that was probably around Y40,000 average, including the pre-inspection service. This year I spent Y60,000 to get it up to scratch to pass, so obviously it’s getting pricier to keep on the road.
Annual compulsory 3rd party insurance – around Y13,000
Annual extra insurance, including cover for a scooter, Y65,000. Insurance does start to climb steeply over 65.
Annual fuel – probably currently around Y90,000.
Annual parking at a suburban condo Y110,000. This is way cheaper that what you’d pay closer to the city centre, unless you’re lucky enough to own a house with a parking space with no parking fee.
Around town parking – basically zero as my partner has a disabled pass. There is basically zero on street parking in Japan, apart from a few short term parking meters. Do it, and you get a parking ticket. Car parks are expensive here, and many shops I use, you have to spend a minimum to get an hour or so free parking pass. Other people without a disabled pass would have to spend more on parking to get around in city centres.
Tolls – again, because my partner is disabled, we pay half when he’s on board. Most motorways are toll roads, so we usually travel on the main roads instead to avoid tolls.
All the above are common things people here do to cut on motoring costs – have a kei car, live out of town centres, use the car as a runaround, avoid toll roads, take the car for inspection themselves rather than pay a garage.
Another way to save on comprehensive insurance is to buy online, but as a foreigner, you’re always at a disadvantage in the case of accidents, so I prefer to have a physical English speaking broker for support. Even for best case zero % at fault accidents (recently a taxi grazed my parked car, and called the police), it’s important to have the back up to avoid getting adverse judgements and your claim reduced or disallowed.
Online shopping and home delivery have grown a lot, but maybe aren’t nearly as developed as in the UK, and are probably much more expensive, making a car journey more favourable.
– Uber does exist, but the taxi business is so controlled, it’s basically online regular taxi services, no cheaper than a regular taxi.
For frugal lives, driving to cheaper shops significantly cuts shopping costs (I estimate at least 30-50% savings over the nearest local shops and supermarket. For example, equivalent to farmers’ market veg are 50% less than the cheapest supermarket, itself a 5km drive away. With the current situation, I’ve switched to doing this on a scooter, which makes huge savings – probably about Y4 a km, as against Y10/km by car.
Things I didn’t see mentioned in other comments:
– I live on top of a steep hill. Long, hot, humid summers at 30C-35C make cycling down to any shops unattractive and increasingly impossible.
– Although I call an ambulance for my partner in emergencies, it makes more sense for me to follow the ambulance by car, so I can get back home in the small hours without the expense of a long taxi ride (often the hospital the ambulance goes to is not the closest one)
– I can sleep in the back of my car. In case of an earthquake, or another nuclear accident, the car is a means of evacuation and also a place to live in and keep emergency supplies. Ditto I keep the scooter as well for this reason.
– I actually live next to a bus stop, and the bus service is reliable from 5am to 10pm. Even so, the pensioner pass here only kicks in at 70 in my city, and is not valid for trains, which are still full price.
So this shows there are many more semi-financial reasons or to factor in to the “cost” of getting rid of a car.
Wow – cars are expensive!
I knew that, but I hadn’t actually sat down and done the sums before including all costs over a lifetime – especially depreciation.
A quick search found an academic paper (here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800921003943) – it’s for Germany, but I imagine the costs are similar to the UK. It found a driving lifetime cost (50 years) of 600,000 euros for a Corsa, or 956,000 for a Mercedes GLC!
Exact figures of course will vary, but basically… running a car for a working life costs about the same as buying a small house 😮
I think I’d rather have a second house than a second car…
@TA I can only offer you some more suspense! No second car yet, and still aligned with Mrs F. Mind you, it’s her that drives, and me on relying on shanks’s pony. In all honesty, I think work would be the tipping point for me. If I came across a new role that ticked a lot of boxes, but wasn’t conveniently located, I wouldn’t give up on it out of stubborn refusal to get a car of my own. But in terms of day-to-day living and my current (admittedly occasional rather than 5x per week) commute I’ve got so used to it that even when our car is sat on the driveway it doesn’t occur to me to drive it, so I’ll walk straight past it to the shops.
@Angela that’s all fascinating, thanks so much for sharing. You’re absolutely right, some major differences there. I’ve certainly never thought about using the back of the car as a safe space away from the house, but it makes total sense! I think the interesting thing for me is questioning the necessity of things that I might once have considered essential. As you point out, when you start considering things like the incline you live on and possible trips to hospital (likewise, we could not cope without any vehicle due to frequent hospital trips), it can turn something from “unnecesary spending” to “essential spending”. I am more comfortable when I can articulate my thinking, though!
@TA (#41)
“Did anyone on here have kids and decide to do without cars? Sorry I’ve missed it if someone’s mentioned it already.”
Yes, we did while living in a provincial city with reasonable radial public transport (non-radial is generally poor). I walked or cycled to work. Kids walked to school. UK holidays required planning (i..e., a destination either on or close enough to a railway), while international holidays required an airport taxi. Now, both kids live rurally and own cars (but we still don’t)!
Ha, so it can be done! Would be interesting to generate a list of UK cities that approach London for quality of public transport. I suppose it very much depends on where you live in each city?
When I was a kid, I could walk ten mins to the bus stop. From there, I had to wait max another ten mins for a bus into Newcastle city centre.
We lived three or four miles out on the Great North Road. The bus connected to the metro only another five minutes away. From there I could get to the sea side.
We left when I was 14 so I can’t say whether I could have lived an adult life without a car from there, but I guess I could.
I’ve never lived anywhere quite so well connected since. Where I live now, I can cycle into Bristol city centre inside 30 mins, entirely by cycle lane. It’s amazing.
Cycling in Bristol is brilliant but public transport is poor and traffic into the city can be an absolute mare. Bristol really needs to resurrect it’s old tram lines, or the inter-urban railway network that is still lying there, disused.
I spent a week in Berlin a couple of years ago. You could catch the overground, underground, tram, bus, electric bike, or flying carpet. (I may have made one of those up.)
Needless to say it was fantastic.
@TA (#55)
It is about 5-10 minutes to a bus stop on either of two main roads from our house. From there, 20 minutes into the city centre with a further 5-10 minute walk to the railway station. Buses are every 15 minutes or so. However, getting to the major out of town shopping centre by bus is a nightmare (one of the few non-radial buses only runs once per hour).
I suspect it is hard to measure the quality of public transport (although a quick search threw up a few attempts). In the UK, London and Birmingham appear to be the best followed by Glasgow.
We came back to the city from a small rural town by bus at the weekend – £3 for a 90 minute journey (that a car would take about 35-45 minutes to do). However getting back from any of the villages not on the bus route would have been impossible without a fair bit of walking.
Yes, there are so many journeys I wouldn’t even attempt by public transport. Those autonomous vehicles will come in handy one day. The other possibility is e-bikes. Fantastic range extenders while still enabling you to stay off the roads.
I’m minded though that what seems a good idea when you’re young may wear thin later in life. Doubt I’d want to hang about if I had complicated health issues requiring constant trips to the GP / hospital.
On the other hand a bit of active travel might keep you away from the GP or hospital.
Yes – I don’t have an ebike, but loads of folks round here have bought one in the last few years. I see loads of them now on the school commute, using those long-tail ones with two or sometimes three kids on a sort of bench seat on the back. Two of my colleagues have just replaced a second car with one of those so their partners can do the school run (having had one of the local school bus routes removed last year).
“using those long-tail ones with two or sometimes three kids on a sort of bench seat on the back.”
Love this!