Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mschuster91 366 days ago
> But that was only possible by doing spontaneous 5-20km car rides. For the sim-racing rig, driving a bit farther was necessary.

Yeah, but you don't need your own car for such things. In Landshut for example, there's a car sharing association, and if we would need to go on such a ride we could just rent a car from them, there's always at least five of them available. And on top of that: a move is like what, a once in a decade event?

A car is hundreds of euros a month (the cost of the car itself / depreciation, maintenance, fuel, replacement parts, insurance, rent for a garage plus of course the fuel). It's an incredible waste of money to own a car if all you're realistically using it is once a year for a trip to Italy and once a year to haul some furniture.

The hardcore "car brains" are the worst - so many people who own a car spec it to the demands of their once-a-year vacation trip (and massively overpay as a result) when a cheap Dacia Spring (~17k new) would be more than enough for their daily demands and they could just go and rent a large car for the vacation trip.

1 comments

> In Landshut for example, there's a car sharing association,

Driving like at least 20 times alone would have cost me what, maybe 1000 bucks? Ignoring all the other trouble that makes it less spontaneous.

Also, those cars specifically aren't the right size to transport furniture in the first place. I also can't wear them down like my own car.

> a move is like what, a once in a decade event?

Depends, but there are other situations where you want to move things.

> A car is hundreds of euros a month (the cost of the car itself / depreciation, maintenance, fuel, replacement parts, insurance, rent for a garage plus of course the fuel). It's an incredible waste of money to own a car if all you're realistically using it is once a year for a trip to Italy and once a year to haul some furniture.

Our car is a relatively cheap one, probably 150-200 euros a month all in (about 50 Euros/month for fuel, 50 Euros/month insurance and taxes, about 3500 Euros for buying and maintenance in 3.5 years, you can expect the average cost of ownership here to go down if we hold it for another couple years). Apart from commute (2x/week), we use it 1-2x per week on average. Plus, we can use it for holidays and other trips.

For the basic person-transport needs we could probably use Car Sharing cars if we need it less than 5 times per month (we need it more), but it would be less ergonomic.