We use our car almost every day (groceries, errands), it would cost dramatically more and take more time to rent vehicles. These sorts of posts always seem over-fitted to highly walkable areas. And maybe that's the intended audience but they rarely qualify the advice.
You're over-fitting to a specific example in this post. It's not about that; it's about the principle.
If you either determine that you use that car a ton, or you do the math, work out exactly how often you'd need that car, and what the costs are for the nearest viable alternative solution, and the car's TCO is cheaper - great. You did what this post is trying to tell you to do: Stop thinking about an unattainable hypothetical 'I shall be using this at maximum usage all the time', and start thinking about what you actually need, and how often you'd need it.
Aren't both arguments just overfitting then? The article is an overfit of a situation unique to them (great walkability and on-time, frequent public transit is not commonplace) and the OP you're replying to sees a high need of independent travel on their own unique schedule outside of their local public transit time frames and rideshare availabilities.
Perhaps the lesson to learn is simply judge and balance your own unique situation to your needs, and drink a large cup of stfu when it comes to judging others for what their needs are rather than push your own choices/agenda upon others?
At which point in the would be future you could peform the calculation again based on present use cases and weigh whether or not you should buy the car. "Don't throw away that extra axe, you might be a lumberjack one day" isn't great advice.
Yeah. To his condo point, fine. But if you choose to live downtown in an expensive city, who expects you to necessarily have a guest bedroom? (And if you own a house, you may well have a spare room that can be used as a guest bedroom but you also use for other things.)
As for vehicles, I have a mid-sized or so SUV and sometimes I transport people but I often transport stuff from the home improvement store, etc. I have no interest in owning a small vehicle and then have to rent on a semi-regular basis.
And, yes, I own tons of stuff that doesn't get used much. But most of that stuff can't be easily rented or borrowed for the times I need it. Should I rent an electric drill or a weed whacker every time I need one? There have been whole business models based on this idea but they ignore the transaction costs.
> But if you choose to live downtown in an expensive city, who expects you to necessarily have a guest bedroom?
I think this one is not quite like the others. if you only need a car for one week each year, you don't lose much by renting. but putting your friends in a hotel is not really a substitute for having them stay at your place imo. if I only get to see a close friend once a year, I want to make the most of the time that they're in town, cooking breakfast together, staying up talking until we can't keep our eyes open, etc. it's really not the same if a day of hanging out starts and ends with transit to/from a hotel.
Honestly, if they're a close friend, buy an air mattress or let them crash on the couch. I've done it plenty of times when visiting someone who didn't have a guest bedroom or there were a bunch of us.
I agree on the car if you're really only using it for a trip or two a year. (Indeed, I wouldn't even consider owning a car in that case. I probably would if I were going away a couple weekends a month though.)
That works fine in your 20s but not in your 30s when your friends are shackled to highly dependent screeching children, or in your 50s when your friends start having shitty backs and can't crash on your couch or leaky air mattress anymore.
I did this by renting a hotel room next to my friend for a few days. It’s actually fun and renting 2 rooms for up to 2 weeks per year is significantly cheaper than paying for an unused bedroom in a city. More importantly you retain flexibility to use that for more than just an empty room.
Couch surfing is also a perfectly reasonable alternative.
> There have been whole business models based on this idea but they ignore the transaction costs.
There's monetary and temporal costs. Instead of having to spend minutes to an hour to arrange and get a rental, you could have the item waiting in another room, ready to be used.
The author doesn't even say not to get a car. He says don't optimize your car purchase for something ("schlep a bunch of kids far away") you almost never need it for. Optimize for the common use case. So buy a small car for day to day and rent the mini-van for those occasions.
This doesn't work for rural and suburban America. What are you going to do, drive half an hour to pick up your other car? And spend another half hour waiting? That's incredibly inconvenient and costly.
The car-agnostic ideal won't work outside of major cities. The backbone of America is car travel. People outside cities have more space and more stuff. They expect hauling and utility function in their vehicles. This isn't changing.
Maybe if you can convince suburbanites to downsize, you might have a point. But that's also a city-centric viewpoint imposed by limited space and desire to move easily. Neither of those things are desired in the suburbs.
City dwellers don't get it because they don't live that life.
> This doesn't work for rural and suburban America. What are you going to do, drive half an hour to pick up your other car? And spend another half hour waiting? That's incredibly inconvenient and costly.
Maybe. Maybe not. The point is to do the exercise for your use case. If it costs you 1.5 hours and rental fees to get a minivan and you need it once a year, that's one side of the scale. On the other side you have purchase, insurance, maintenance, depreciation, storage and fuel costs.
The point is to be honest with both sides of the scale and to actually do the comparison rather than taking an automatic answer "I need to drive extra kids to camp sometimes, so I must own a minivan." Maybe. Maybe not. Just be conscious about the choice, not automatic.
Just so I can get an idea of the magnitude of the number, I am making an estimation. Please point out any egregiously incorrect numbers.
Price difference between smaller car and larger car: $15000
Lifetime of car: 8 years
Frequency the larger car is needed: once per month
Additional time to pick up and drop off rental: 3 hours
Money saved per hour: $52
So it seems that if someone values their time more than ~$50/hour, they should buy the larger vehicle.
Edit: Forgot to take into account the rental fee: $150
Money saved per hour: $2
It looks like it doesn't make sense to rent, as buying would allow the convenience of using the larger vehicle any time, especially if it is more than once a month.
I think your car lifetime is off by a factor of 2, and you're neglecting that a larger car will likely be less fuel-efficient and may have higher maintenance costs, but otherwise seems like the right ballpark. For something once per month, that seems like a reasonable conclusion for you.
I have a mid-sized car, and I go to Tahoe 3-4 times a year, and probably end up being the driver 2 or 3 of those times. For me, it makes sense to rent a 4WD/AWD SUV with snow tires for those 2 or 3 winter trips, especially since I'll split the cost of the rental among the friends who ride with me.
There's also the comfort/style/happiness factor: I like my car and generally don't like driving big bulky vehicles that are high off the ground; having an SUV as my primary vehicle would make me unhappy.
Do... do people really not drive to different places to have fun anymore or... is fun dead? There's a slightly bit more to life than just utilitarian living. In a 1 hour drive radius to where I live, I have countless many national parks, trails and nature reserves. That doesn't even include the beach, where I go to maybe too often. I get it that they're in the dead and cold lands of Canada... but there's more fun to be had that's outside the city that's kid friendly. Cannuck land has national parks, trails and stuff, doesn't it? I thought it did. Then there's all the "commercial" fun things to do with all that money they've saved... sigh...
Actually, I legit played that game on a road trip since this conversation came up with a friend right before we left (2017 timeframe). I counted and kept track. Through Colorado north bound i-25, roughly 60% were more than 1 occupant. Through Wyoming, then west bound i-80 was about 40% more than 1. Didn't do it on the return trip. Throughout east coast Florida city driving doing it every now and then (especially at traffic stops) ranges from 40-60%. Rainy days seem to be high single occupant days from what I've noticed.
Sure, anecdotal, not perfectly scientific or even at a good enough scale... but I don't really believe the 10% idea. I'd love to see where their scientific data is on that.
If you used the service linked in the article, it would cost you about $60 to get a car for a 5 hour 50 mile trip every month. If it takes you one hour instead, you're saving $90 an hour. And since you just have to get to the closest suitable car, 1 hour is probably more than enough.
And I think most people would trade an hour driving for $50.
This was based on the parent's comment of half an hour to drive to the rental place, and a half hour wait. To err on the conservative side, assuming that this adds another half hour to drive to the destination, this is 1.5 hours for picking up, and 1.5 hours for dropping off.
The result gets worse when you consider that $15K is probably not how much extra you would spend for a larger car, unless your two options were subcompact and full-size. Also, 8 years is 2/3 of what a typically abused car lasts, if you optimize for ROI you can easily get twice that.
Let's say 10,000 miles a year, 30 MPG for small car and 15 MPG for large car, and $3/gallon gas. That give an extra $1000 in gas per year for the large car, or an extra $83 per month if a large car is needed once a month, or $28/hour saved for the inconvenience of the hours spent picking up and dropping off the rental.
Either way, the delta is much smaller than what I was expecting, in the range of a couple of hundred a month at the high end, depending on which way the numbers swing. It can be something that's not worth worrying about, for someone who has a middle class income.
Definitely all the numbers have lots of leeway, and you can play with different scenarios to get different results. However, changing the MPG from 15 to 25 would make only a small difference ($17/mon difference in gas), and my point is still valid.
Assuming all else is equal. But what if you need to move further from work to get a house with parking space for your extra vehicle? Then you should also account for your extra commute time.
Honestly, why not? I grew up in the suburbs in a two car family, and on a couple road trips we just opted to go to enterprise and rent a giant van to better fit all of us and our crap for a week and keep the mileage off the regular cars. It wasn't a novel thing, either, a few families I knew growing up would do things like that for traveling.
The delays and uncertainty associated with renting make that a total non-starter for parents with busy schedules. The only practical option for most of us is to buy a bigger vehicle. Or buy two: a big one and a small one.
Perhaps the 95% in your situation would be more like getting a smaller car instead of, e.g. a minivan? I'm not saying you own a minivan, just that his general advice is not "don't get a car," it's don't get a car that based on some vision of what you want to do with it that only ends up actually happening 5% of the time. The insight is that it's usually cheaper to rent for the long tail use cases than to buy outright and leave idle for the vast majority of the time.
Many minivans are less expensive than many small cars. I do think there's a good life hack here of "don't spend a lot of money on a car" but I'm not sure it says much about the type of car.
Right, you have to pick the dimension of comparison to matter to you. Maybe the extreme case is getting a sports car that you only get to drive on the track once every couple months instead of a cheaper workhorse vehicle you'd use every day.
I am quite sure he is not talking about your situation. If you saturate the capacity of that car, then it seems warranted to buy it.
It could also be buying that DSLR camera for going photographing twice a year instead of renting for these occasions, or buying that 3000$ workstation to play games that require that power once a month instead of going to a net cafe (or using Stadia or whatever).
I'd refine that some to "places where most development occurred post WWII, and they didn't maintain a tradition of mixed use development", so a lot of the US, especially in the west, Australia and Canada too, most likely, although I'm less familiar with them.
The US used to have corner stores and fairly walkable places, but it's something you find in the older parts of towns and cities, and it may have decayed since it wasn't prioritized much for many years.
And in Europe, too. Sure, America is huge and there are a lot of cars, but in Germany (as an example) there are still over 500 cars for every 1000 people.
When I went to a business trip to Germany my German coworkers told me to rent a car. The city I was going to didn't have good public transport. Sure if you go to one of the cities in Europe (or Asia) at anyone can name there is good transport. However even in Europe (or Asia) there are a lot of tiny cities and towns either without good transport, or limited transport. (There are of course some tiny towns with good transport)
Notice above I qualified it with Europe or Asia. If you go to South America, or Africa odds are even the city you are going to doesn't have good transit for most people. (A handful are building, but there are lot of cities that could have good transit that don't have it)
I don't think this is true at all. Most of the world population lives in third world conditions. They may not have a car, because they can't afford it, but that doesn't mean their neighborhoods are "walkable".
Visit the slums of Mumbai, or the shanty towns of Lagos, or the favelas of Lima. These may be high density, but they're certainly not "walkable". Either in the sense of being pedestrian friendly or having many services easily accessible by walking/public transport.
There's a reason that the motorbike is one of the most popular consumer products for middle income countries. In the vast majority of the third world, the populace is desperate for any sort of personal motor transportation.
A lot of people seem to think that the choice is between modern US cities (where indeed it's often hard to get around by foot or decent public transit) or the core of Amsterdam (or a number of at least parts of European cities). And that all of Asia in like Tokyo. I assure them that Jakarta and KL are not Tokyo.
Your car doesn't stay idle 95% of the time, then. While the general principle might still apply in your case, the original examples don't, because your situation is different.
Agreed, but maybe it's best to think of the 95% as a convenient placeholder to remind you to account for extreme cases rather than a hard and fast rule.
I think it might be even more useful to think about the time you saved - i.e. without a car, will you be spending more than 5% of your time on transportation?
Data point: as someone who grew up in villages and small cities in eastern Europe, I've seen cars being used for whole hours a day in total. Driving somewhere for thirty minutes a day is still a short total commute time relative to what I have experienced in rural and little-urbanized regions.
Tangential, but my god why'd they have to name it that. All I can think of is that dirty viral video from a decade and a half ago. Damn my millennial early internet upbringing.
I also think that leasing or buying used negates the car-rental argument. The costs of owning a used sedan are very low, and the on-demand convenience imho beats renting a car for $8/hr. Leasing enables one to have a new car without taking the depreciation hit.
> Leasing enables one to have a new car without taking the depreciation hit.
That's not accurate. With a lease you're just paying for the depreciation directly, at a predetermined rate.
It can definitely make sense, though. I leased a Bolt for my wife for $6K for three years. Even if she only drove it once every week or so it would be hard to do on-demand rental for less.
