The true cost of owning a car is much higher than most people think. On average, society pays about 5,000 euros per car per year. If drivers had to pay for all the costs themselves, even an Opel Corsa would only be affordable for high earners. A recent study by the University of Mannheim showed that car owners in Germany underestimate the costs of owning a car. On average, owners estimate the costs of purchase, maintenance, fuel, taxes, and fees to be 221 euros per month lower than they actually are. Now, a study by Linnaeus University shows that in addition to the costs that car owners pay themselves, society also incurs costs of about 5,000 euros per car per year.
The study, published in the journal Ecological Economics, calculated the total costs for three types of cars: a small car (Opel Corsa), a compact car (VW Golf), and an SUV (Mercedes GLC). With a hypothetical usage period of 50 years and a mileage of 15,000 kilometers per year, the total costs of the Opel Corsa would be 600,000 euros (12,000 euros per year). For the Golf, it would be 653,561 euros (13,071 euros per year), and for the Mercedes GLC, it would be 956,798 euros (19,136 euros per year). The study takes into account 23 factors in calculating the costs, including expenses for driver’s licenses, parking and toll fees, and even waiting times in traffic jams.
The costs for society include air pollution, land use, and the maintenance of roads and other infrastructure that cannot be covered by drivers’ taxes. Other externalized costs include restrictions on people who travel by bike or on foot, as well as noise and the acceleration of climate change. The study is significant because it converts difficult-to-quantify factors, such as waiting time in traffic, into monetary values. The researchers, therefore, set waiting time as lost work time and thus come up with costs of 555 euros per car per year. The costs of air pollution were determined based on its impact on life expectancy and surveys in which people explained how much additional years of life were worth to them. Even under the assumption that the real monetary value of life cannot be determined, the study shows that the true cost of owning a car is much higher than previously thought.
