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Drive 36k miles a year and the car will quickly have a resell value of 0 and repair costs become more frequent. Insurance is probably the only true fixed cost that benefits from scale


If you were going to approach this in a purely economic-rationalist manner, you'd (probably) discover that buying cars new is wasteful - and that you want to look for late-model full-service-history low-mileage second hand cars in the 2 or 3 year old range. The original owner will have borne the brunt of the capital depreciation, and you can drive higher-than-average-yearly-mileage for a few years while "low mileage" to "slightly high mileage".

(Where I come from, Australia, there are tax breaks that make 3 year old cars fresh off company-car leases pretty commonly available - many people structure their salary package in a way the strongly encourages them to lease a new car every 3 years, and off-load the previous one for often 35% of its original purchase price - and to have those cars get all their required dealer servicing done using pre-tax salary.)


I agree that repair costs and depreciation grow (probably roughly linearly) with miles driven, but those would have been factored into the $9100 median separately from the car payment.




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