I thought its time I put my GNUCash Data to good use and worked out how much I spent on fuel. I loaded up a simple Cash Flow bar chart in GNUCash and selected my expenses column for Car>Petrol and voila.

If you are astute you may have also noticed there are additional ‘fixed’ (varies annually/monthly) costs to running a car such as tax, insurance, maintenance and depreciation but I have chosen to eliminate these costs because I would like to explore the benefits of buying another car. We can use this graph based on the last 3 years to estimate this car, my 1998-1999 Vauxhall Corsa costs £73.88 monthly (excluding this month from the data)

So How far does £74/month get you?

Good Question, I’ve always used my car when I’ve needed it. I have little reason not to use it. I’ve used it to commute to University, School and Work and on days out. It’s my main mode of transport is what I’m trying to say.

Unfortunately, I don’t keep the history of my car’s odometer, however, I can use the mot history of my car to estimate the £/per mile. Using the mot history, which has the date my car was taken in for MOT for two different dates recorded in the MOT history, one in 2017 and one in 2019, we can determine in that time I did 19,205 miles so roughly 6.66k miles a year.

We can then use this 19,205 miles, which have around 1 year, 11 months between them to get (74*23) £1,702 expenditure during that time, which compared with the actual data gives £2,051.23 (over £300 diff, 21%) gives us a fairly low confidence, however we can use this to estimate my cars cost per mile on fuel alone is around £0.106 per mile. 10p per mile (2051.23/19205) or 740 miles per month, give or take 20%. That’s 24 miles per day!