According to the AAA, It’s cheaper to own, maintain, park, and insure a car than to take Uber or Lyft. A lot cheaper, like by half. Astrid posted the article over on parknews.biz. Check it out here.
Since I don’t even believe my lying eyes, I brought out the old abacus and ran some numbers. It seems that the cost of taking ride share in LA for a year based on just over 10K miles normally driven, was about $17,951. That seems like a lot, but if you figure the average ride was $13.15, that comes to 1365 rides per year or 3.7 per day. If you add round trip to work to a couple of kid deliveries or runs to the store, you can get to 3.7 pretty quickly. The average distance per ride? 6.6 miles.
The cost of owning a car can run $7 to 10K per year, depending on the cost for parking. If you have a place to park your car for free, like a garage or on street, the cost of car ownership drops dramatically. So you can see, worst case, that the cost of ride share is easily twice what car ownership would be.
Granted AAA has a dog in this fight. Their existence is based on car ownership. However the numbers seem right. Of course they get a commercial buried in the story, that is if you buy a ‘preowned’ vehicle through AAA, you will find the cost of car ownership even less, as depreciation is figured in the cost of car ownership and it will be lower if you buy a ‘preowned’ vehicle.
I really can’t see car ownership plummeting anytime soon. Particularly if we are worried about Uber and Lyft.
JVH
