Car vs. Scooter: the verdict one year later

On the topic of my scooter, I’ve been riding it for a full year now. I can’t believe it’s already been a year! So in honour of a year passing, I wanted to do a comparison over how much money I’ve saved by getting rid of my car.

• Price difference between car and scooter (sold my car for $1,600 and bought my scooter brand new for $2,200): - $600

• Price difference between annual insurance ($80/month to $12.50/month): $810

• Price difference for gas if I had to drive my car the 8,700km I’ve ridden my scooter (based on 375km per 40L tank for my car, and 180km per 5L tank for my scooter, and a modest price of $1/L): $686

• Average annual cost of repairs to my car over the 4 years I owned it: $700

TOTAL SAVINGS:$1,596

I’m still glad I got rid of my car, but having a scooter can get really annoying sometimes:

• Every day is a bad hair day when a helmet is concerned. I don’t even attempt to do my hair in the morning, I just pull it in a ponytail and shove my helmet on. This is especially annoying if I want to look polished and professional for a meeting, or if I’m working for the hockey team after work.
• When it’s pouring rain, even the best rain jacket won’t keep you completely dry.
• Riding on slippery roads or when it’s snowing out isn’t even an option.
• Bringing work clothing every day to change into.
• Never being able to take a passenger.
• Planning a travel route in order to avoid any road with traffic that travels over 60 km/hr.
• Not being able to transport heavy/big items around. I bought a beautiful pizza pan, but it wouldn’t fit in my seat compartment or in my top box trunk, so I ended up having to duct tape it to my scooter. How ghetto am I?
• Sometimes it’s annoying when you just need to run a quick errand to have to put on a helmet, warm up the scooter, park the scooter, take off the helmet, go do the errand, put on the helmet, warm up the scooter, etc.
• There’s no cup holder!
• If you need to talk to someone on your cell phone, it’ll have to wait until after you park. This can get annoying if you’re expecting an urgent call and have a long commute ahead.

I’ve been toying with the idea of buying a new, faster scooter. I figure if I can’t afford to buy a new car, I might as well get a new scooter which will make the commute to work a lot faster and more enjoyable. Because my scooter has some dings on the body (from my crash earlier this summer) and it has high KMs by scooter standards (closing in on 10,000km), I probably wouldn’t be able to get more than $1,300 for it … and the scooter that I want would be $3,100 brand new … which is still a heck of a lot cheaper than the beautiful Vespa I’ve been eyeing for years, or a car, but it’s still a lot of money.

But still, having the new scooter would mean I could take a passenger (my current one is only a one-seater), and it would increase my top speed from 62km/hr to 80+km/hr, and that’s a huge difference.

One Response to “Car vs. Scooter: the verdict one year later”

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1. A Heart to Heart with My Car » Money Rabbit – a Sassy Personal Finance Blog for 20 Somethings says:

   Monday, November 21, 2011 - 07:37pm at 7:46 pm

   [...] thought is that, come spring, I will probably try to sell my vehicle.  Maybe I’ll pull a Krystal Yee and get a little scooter, so that I can still run errands for my boss from March-November, [...]

   Reply

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