Total Cost of Ownership

We finally bought a "new" used car two weeks ago, and yesterday I signed away the title on the Jetta to Good News Garage.  With some work to fix the rust on the underbody, it should be good to go for another family.

Over the years, I've kept all the maintenance receipts, and also kept fairly good weekly mileage data.  By grabbing some publicly available information on gasoline costs (plus some interpolation of the gaps in my personal mileage data), I actually have a reasonably complete dataset of the costs of owning this car for 15 years and 121k miles, and by getting that into SPSS Statistics, you can see:

Very roughly speaking, we're looking at $4000/year or $0.50/mile over the life of the car.

I was a little surprised that Fuel cost more than Insurance, but our insurance rates have been obscenely low the last several years while gas prices have risen.  Breaking it down by year, you can see how the costs shift over time:

I produced the corresponding table and chart by quarter, but the table gets too big to scan and the chart is really jagged.  

Note that this does not include the cost of tolls, parking, registration fees, or the value of the tax break we get from donating the Jetta.  Let's say the latter two are a wash.  We happen to have lived the last 10 years where there are no toll roads, so we only do tolls when visiting.  It's not a hugely significant cost, but I would like to track it in the future because everything now goes on E-Z Pass and it should be easy to track.  For parking, we never had regular parking fees for the Jetta, but we have put change in meters and had some occasional parking garage fees.   Again, it's not a big line item, but this is harder to track because Sarahmac will rebel against recording how much change she put in a meter (and rightly so, to be honest).