

Show HN: Car Cost Calculator – my weekend project - khet
http://car-cost-calculator.com

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emeltzz
You might add a parking cost field, because for anyone in a city, parking's
unlikely to be free

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sixQuarks
Where did you get a 20-30% average depreciation on cars? Depreciation is not
linear on vehicles. Most of the depreciation occurs in the first few years and
then tapers off. Is this calculated into your algorithm?

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OrwellianChild
While I'm fine with exponential depreciation, the rates are very high (or
maybe just variable by car). My RAV4 has closer to 9-10% depreciation
(assuming 15k miles/year) per the Edmunds TCO mentioned elsewhere. May be
constructive to look up your individual car and input it into _khet_ 's
calculator.

Kudos for giving us the option. May be helpful flag inputs that are highly
deterministic of the output and suggest look-ups.

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uncoder0
Yeah I actually have an outlier that has negative depreciation. Got it used
for 26k with 44k miles. 6 Months later my insurance company informed me that
they had to put my car value closer to 32k due to replacement costs and that
this may go up over my ownership of the car.

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korzun
Like someone else mentioned, there are better tools to calculate static
ownership costs. This is definitely a good start.

I'm working on [https://www.maintenr.com](https://www.maintenr.com) and we
allow you to calculate your service and fuel expenses dynamicly.

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darksim905
Could you explain what your planned features are & who your target audience
is? The 'tutorials', will you have any generic ones for people to use or a
repository of them? Can the tutorials be made public vs private? This is
interesting & I signed up just to see what it's about. I don't do my own work
on my car but I knew a few mechanics & I understand the 'process' of how to do
certain things with my vehicle. I also keep a pretty detailed record of the
work I do on my car. Neat!

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korzun
Target audience will be shifting towards general market. I focused on
enthusiasts at first as I know that market very well.

Tutorials can be private and could be shared if you wish; we offer 'export'
functionality.

Down the line, as we collect more data (makes things interesting) there is a
plan to introduce some sort of crowd sourcing aspect.

Feel free to bug me if you have any questions! Thanks for checking it out.

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gedrap
The other week I was thinking about buying a car to save money on commuting...
And I'm sure I am not the only one.

I definitely see value in this tool. I have 0 experience with cars, and I am
sure I have no idea how much does it cost to maintain, repair. Again, I don't
think I am the only one. So is £20 or so worth paying to get accurate numbers,
tweaked for a specific country, with nice explanations why and how? I think so
;)

I would really consider experimenting to see if this could be monetized,
whether people are willing to pay. It won't make millions, but as a passive
income source? That might work.

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bitJericho
Don't the maintenance costs go up after a while. Otherwise people would only
buy 10 year old cars as they'd be like 20-30k cheaper :D

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khet
The problem there is, I have no idea how to model maintenance costs! The field
is basically a hack. If there is a better way, I'd like to do that.

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OrwellianChild
Depends on how deep you want to go, but you could set up a table with common
considerations and let users set frequency...

Most maintenance is mileage-dependent, so if you base your schedule on their
monthly mileage, it could look like:

    
    
      Repair           Cost           Frequency
      ------           ----           ---------
      Oil Change        $30             5000 mi
      Tires            $500            45000 mi
      Battery          $150            30000 mi
      Timing Belt     $1500            60000 mi
      Misc             $200            15000 mi
    

Do the math in impact/year and input that cost into your table...

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vonmoltke
To complicate matters, some of those items are time or distance items. Oil and
battery, for instance, need to be changed after a certain amount of time
regardless of the miles driven. Not too hard to work into the pricing
algorithm, though.

If you wanted go get even more creative, you could get users to crowdsource
scheduled maintenance tables for their vehicles. It's all in the owner's
manual and just a matter of transcribing it.

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pcl
This is a great tool! It'd be awesome to add lease information into it as
well, to help with the lease-vs-buy decision.

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officialjunk
I too would like to evaluate lease versus buy.

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timjahn
The default gas price is shown as $3.40/gallon. Where are you getting gas that
cheap??

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nilkn
That's pretty typical for Houston at least.

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timjahn
Wow, that's amazing. Was $4.17 in Chicago when I filled up a few days ago.

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adrinavarro
Ah, the 8$ per gallon price in Europe. And I find it affordable…

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xexers
Thanks!

Feature suggestion: Metric units (for every other country that is not the USA)

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guidedlight
I completely agree. This tool is useless to me in Australia, unless I convert
all the units.

Even within the same measurement system different countries express units in
different ways (e.g. Imperial Gallon vs US Gallon; and MPG, L/100km &
Km/Litre).

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Istof
I would be curious to see this versus an electric car cost calculator

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sebnukem2
You could approximate by saying that a gallon is a kWh of energy. set up the
Fuel Price per Gallon to electricity cost $0.1(a), 3(b) MPG, and a much lower
maintenance cost...

(a) 10 cents per kWh (depends on where you live), (b) 3 miles per kWh (or
333Wh/mile, depends on the actual EV)

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altcognito
> and a much lower maintenance cost...

As long as your figures include replacing the batteries every so often....

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sergnech
Good idea, unfortunately barely usable on my ipad - entry text fields are too
slow

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zdrummond
Nice idea, but I actually think Edmund's TCO is a bit more comprehensive and
uses real world data for each car.

[http://www.edmunds.com/porsche/911/2011/tco.html?style=10138...](http://www.edmunds.com/porsche/911/2011/tco.html?style=101380348)

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OrwellianChild
Nice aspirational example there with the 911...

Didn't know about TCO, but I like the idea. First glance impressions of the
Edmunds tool:

    
    
      - Mileage assumes 15k/year, which may not be accurate for a
      large part of the population (I only drive 10k/year, which
      affects depreciation, maintenance, etc.)
      
      - The math governing financing is opaque, as is maintenance
      and repairs. I'd like to know what they're assuming will
      break, need service, etc. Esp. because it's non-linear. Not
      sure how I'm going to accrue $500 in maintenance in the first
      year on my 2012 Rav4 - all it needs are oil changes (3 x $30).
      
      - Insurance also strikes me as astonishingly high (over
      double what I'd pay/year).
    

All of this is to say, I see the value of a more flexible and transparent
calculator to meet individual needs...

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maxerickson
There's a reasonably high chance that you will need to replace the tires
fairly soon after buying a used car (which is how I read it working). That's
most of that $500.

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sebnukem2
such caclulator. very caclate.

