[Robotbeat]

What about a $10,000 used car you buy with 50,000 miles and run until a good 150,000? That's just 10 cents per mile. Depending on the make, the repairs may not be much, either.

I've bought $500 cars before. Didn't last too long (it was a nice car, but it was an interference engine and broke the timing chain), but averaged 10 cents per mile.

People who spend 45 cents per mile are the type who lease their cars or buy new cars regularly. Lots of us out here make do happily with far less.

[adrianN]

Mister Money Mustache estimates "very cheap" driving costs to be around 17 cents per mile:

https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/the-true-cost-of-...

Now, I will admit that it is possible to bring your cost per mile down somewhat. That’s one of my own specialties, which is why I still keep a car of my own around for affordable family roadtrips. If you buy the right car for $5,000, you might be able to squeeze 100,000 miles out of it with no major repairs. In this case the car depreciation is 5 cents per mile.

Gas, at $3.50 per 35 miles (assuming 35MPG), is 10 cents/mile Tires, at $300 per 50,000 miles are 0.6 cents Oil, at $25 per 5,000 miles is 0.5 cents Miscellaneous things like wipers and occasional maintenance visits: $200 per 20,000 miles = 1 cent

So the ultimate cheap driving in a paid-off economy car still costs at least 17 cents per mile.

[Robotbeat]

It's possible to do even better... I bought a used electric car (Volt) for about $9600. It had about 65k miles. It does about 85% of its miles electric (meaning oil changes and brakes are super rare), so over the next 100,000 miles, we're talking about 14 cents per mile total, roughly.

[bluGill]

Many of the assumptions are different for different cars. For my car it is $3 per 46 miles, or $0.065/mile. Note that 46MPG is actual, EPA would give me 41.