Interesting

[Q45tech]

"One of the largest vehicle fleet management companies in the world recently released numbers on the average cost of vehicle ownership. They pointed out a number of trends that have not only escaped most vehicle owners; they seem to have escaped the service industry as well. It wasn’t just the fact that vehicle ownership is more expensive than it has ever been before, I think we’ve all figured that out on our own. It was more a sense of exactly how much extra it is really costing and where those dollars are going.

You see the cost of vehicle ownership has increased by just under five times: from 9.3 cents per mile in 1960 to 45.9 cents per mile in the year 2000. But, the study went farther than that; it broke the numbers down into two categories. The first category dealt with the “hard” costs involved in vehicle ownership; the second, the “Variable Costs,” dealt with maintenance, repairs and fuel. It pointed out that between 1960 and the year 2000, Fixed Costs increased by 550 percent, while Variable Costs increased by just 170 percent, and that’s where the numbers begin to dance."

http://www.motorage.com/motora...73043

"Variable costs (up 170 percent) haven’t even come close to keeping pace with inflation (up by more than 400 percent for the same period), while Fixed Costs, the greatest percentage of the cost of operation, incorporating depreciation, license and registration have increased by more than 500 percent. If you pound the numbers hard and long enough you’ll find that maintenance, service and repair account for only about 30 to 35 percent of the total cost of owning or maintaining a truck or passenger car, or an average of about 15 to 18 cents per mile. And, that’s where things really start to get interesting because the more aggressive the level of maintenance, the lower the average cost per mile appears to be.

I ran the numbers on scores of vehicles and the results were all the same. Aggressive maintenance resulted in service, maintenance and repair costs of 12 cents per mile or less consistently. Those customers who maintained their vehicles less aggressively, but still met minimal factory maintenance requirements spend on average 4 to 6 cents per mile more (30 percent to 50 percent), while those individuals who criminally neglect their vehicles can equal their fixed costs, more than doubling the cost of automotive service. More than that, there was an obvious correlation between maintenance and breakdowns: The more aggressive the maintenance, the less the likelihood of any kind of mechanical failure. In the end, it’s a simple matter of understanding the numbers and what they have to tell us. Spend more on maintenance and the vehicle costs less to own and operate over its lifetime of service. Spend less on service, and the vehicle will cost exponentially more in terms of unscheduled repairs and costly breakdowns.

So when it comes to what you spend and what you get, I guess you could say the results are more or less a simple matter of … more or less."