I’ve bought myself a new car, well it’s not really new but it’s new to me. It’s a nearly new ex-demonstrator with low mileage and in a colour that I think looks good. Well I haven’t really bought it either, I’m paying for it on a PCP which I thought was angel dust but stands for personal contract payment and means I pay so much a month for three years and then can give it back.
I’m happy with the car, it has everything that I wanted, low cost, good economy and air conditioning and, unlike my old car, everything works as it should. All is well so far except that I am suffering from a bout of parsimony and I have become obsessed with how much the car is actually costing me to run. By the time that I add everything up, the monthly payment, the insurance, servicing costs and fuel it all adds up to a tidy sum and then when I divide that amount by the distance that I expect to drive the cost per mile turns out to be frightening.
Oh dear! I wish I’d never started as I am left in a quandary as I now realise that the further I drive the more the car will cost me but the lower the cost per mile will be, in other words the more I pay the better value I get. How can this be? It just doesn’t make sense, surely the value is determined by the lower the amount of money I pay. Of course not, value is driven by the amount of worth that is derived from the purchase and so the more worth I get, the more miles I drive, then the greater is the value and the lower the unit cost of each mile travelled.
If this was not true then the car with the greatest value for money must be the one that never leaves the garage and does no miles at all whereas in reality the opposite is true and the best value car is one that continues to be used long after its capital value has been written off.
But then I started thinking whether or not all of the miles that I drive have the same value. Do those that I need to do such as going back and forth to work have a greater value than driving up to get an ice cream or to go to the theatre? Is it better to take a shorter route and save money or is it better to take the route that is more aesthetically pleasing and so improve the value and my enjoyment?
Down this route surely lies madness and I need to stop worrying about such details and stop looking at the display on the dashboard that tells me the fuel consumption. As if it would ever be possible to take such things into consideration when setting out to buy a car. Instead I think I’ll measure everything in kilometres and suddenly it will all seem to be better.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 