{"id":629612,"date":"2026-09-19T13:48:14","date_gmt":"2026-09-19T13:48:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/629612\/"},"modified":"2026-09-19T13:48:14","modified_gmt":"2026-09-19T13:48:14","slug":"be-honest-with-yourself-when-it-comes-to-working-out-the-costs-of-your-motoring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/629612\/","title":{"rendered":"Be honest with yourself when it comes to working out the costs of your motoring"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019VE SPENT THE guts of 25 years in and around the Irish motor industry, and if there\u2019s one question I get asked more than any other at family gatherings, it\u2019s some version of \u201cwhat should I buy?\u201d<\/p>\n

What I almost never get asked, oddly, is \u201cwhat will it actually cost me?\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a pity, because a report out this week suggests most of us haven\u2019t a clue, and the gap between what we think our cars cost and what they actually cost is bigger than most people would be comfortable admitting to their bank manager.<\/p>\n

The research comes from the ESRI, funded by the Department of Transport<\/a>. They took a nationally representative sample of more than 800 drivers, asked them to estimate their annual motoring costs, then walked each person through a full breakdown of what actually goes into keeping a car on the road.<\/p>\n

Seven in ten underestimated, and not by a little. The median guess was around \u20ac2,000 a year. The real figure came in closer to \u20ac3,000, roughly 50 per cent higher than expected, and that\u2019s before you\u2019ve even paid for the car or watched it lose value on the drive.<\/p>\n

Fuel was the single biggest reported expense at a median \u20ac1,560 a year, which tracks, since it\u2019s the cost we all notice every time we\u2019re standing at a pump watching the numbers climb.<\/p>\n

We didn\u2019t just take the ESRI\u2019s word for it. At DoneDeal Cars we ran our own rough sums too, working from typical 2021 model year cars, the sort of ordinary secondhand cars people are actually buying right now rather than theoretical averages, and using the same real-world annual mileage the CSO uses.<\/p>\n

By our estimates, a diesel family car comes in north of \u20ac7,000 a year to run once you add tax, insurance, servicing, depreciation and fuel together. A comparable petrol car isn\u2019t far behind. A hybrid comes in noticeably lower, and an electric equivalent lower again, by a margin somewhere in the region of \u20ac1,500 to \u20ac2,000 a year against the diesel.<\/p>\n

Parking and tolls alone, something almost nobody budgets for, added up to more than we expected too. The headline holds up either way: fuel type still matters enormously once you add everything up, not just at the pump.\n<\/p>\n

Financial planning\u00a0<\/p>\n

Recently on my own Driver\u2019s Republic podcast, we spoke to Paddy Delaney<\/a>, who runs the Informed Decisions podcast and spends his working life doing financial planning for people heading toward retirement. He made a point that I think belongs in the same conversation as the ESRI\u2019s, because it goes after the bit of motoring cost that fuel receipts and insurance renewals don\u2019t capture at all: depreciation.<\/p>\n

Delaney\u2019s argument is that cars, however much we love them, are depreciating assets, and that cost is one \u201cpeople don\u2019t recognise or appreciate or calculate enough.\u201d<\/p>\n

He walked through an example of a fairly typical PCP deal on a \u20ac50,000 car: a \u20ac15,000 deposit, roughly \u20ac400 a month for three years, and a balloon payment of around \u20ac25,000 if you want to actually own it at the end. Add that up and you\u2019ve paid in the region of \u20ac55,000 over three years for a car that, by the time the deal ends, might be worth somewhere near that \u20ac25,000 figure.<\/p>\n

Do the sums and the depreciation and interest combined work out at close to \u20ac10,000 a year, \u201cno matter what way you spin it,\u201d as he put it. For anyone on a higher tax bracket, he reckons that\u2019s the equivalent of roughly two months\u2019 gross wages, just to cover what the car has quietly lost in value while it sat on the drive.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s not anti-PCP, to be fair, and he\u2019s upfront that if you know the number and you\u2019re happy to pay it, more power to you. His issue is with people who don\u2019t do that sum before they sit down at a dealership desk, where, in his words, \u201cwe\u2019ll smell the cookies in the oven and we just want the cookies,\u201d and the financial reality gets pushed to the side while the emotion of the new car takes over.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s also got form for a good line on this: he once compared PCP to \u201ca very popular recreational hallucinogenic for many years also by the name of Angel Dust,\u201d which is a fairly memorable way of saying that low monthly payments can make you feel like you\u2019re getting more car than you\u2019re actually paying for.<\/p>\n

Emerging pattern<\/p>\n

Put the ESRI\u2019s numbers, our own DoneDeal figures and Delaney\u2019s depreciation math side by side, and a pattern emerges. It isn\u2019t just that we underestimate fuel or insurance, though we clearly do. It\u2019s that the biggest single cost of owning a car, the bit where the value quietly drains out of it every month, is the one nobody puts a number on until they\u2019re forced to.<\/p>\n

Whether that\u2019s the ESRI pointing out that seven in ten of us guessed wrong, our own figures showing a near \u20ac2,000 annual gap between the cheapest and dearest car to run, or Delaney\u2019s point that a flashy three-year-old PCP car can cost more in depreciation alone than most people\u2019s annual grocery bill, the message is the same: know your numbers before you sign anything, whether that\u2019s a finance agreement or just a fill-up.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll admit to being a bit smug reading through all three, because after 25 years of reviewing cars and running my own, I do keep a rough tally of what mine costs me. But even I hadn\u2019t put a figure on parking and tolls until this week, and I\u2019ll confess I\u2019ve never once sat down and worked out what my own car has lost in value since I bought it.<\/p>\n

None of it feels like much in the moment. All of it adds up to a genuinely large sum by December, whether it\u2019s dribbling out of your wallet at the pump or quietly disappearing off the car\u2019s value while it sits in the drive.<\/p>\n

So the takeaway, beyond a mild sense of unease, is this: before you next change the car, do the full sum rather than going on gut feel about the monthly repayment or the fuel figures alone. Compare tax, insurance, servicing and depreciation too, not just what\u2019s on the finance leaflet.<\/p>\n

None of us are going to stop needing cars any time soon, certainly not in a country this thin on public transport outside the cities. But knowing what something actually costs you, rather than what you\u2019d like it to cost you, is the first step to making a sensible decision about it.<\/p>\n

Turns out, for once, I was one of the lucky ones who wasn\u2019t kidding himself.<\/p>\n

I wouldn\u2019t bet on that being true for most people reading this.<\/p>\n

Paddy Comyn is the head of automotive content and communications with DoneDeal Cars. He has been involved in the Irish motor industry for more than 25 years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I\u2019VE SPENT THE guts of 25 years in and around the Irish motor industry, and if there\u2019s one…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":629613,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[72,3013,267284,61,60,6395,102068],"class_list":["post-629612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-cars","tag-cost-of-driving","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-motoring","tag-paddy-comyn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=629612"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629612\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/629613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=629612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=629612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=629612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}