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Two Cars to One: Savings Calculator
The short answer
Dropping a second car removes its insurance, registration, depreciation, and most of its fuel and maintenance, all of which continue whether you drive it or not. What you add back are the replacements: an e-bike, some transit, occasional rideshare, and a few rentals a year. Enter both sides below and see the net.
Run your numbers
What dropping the second car saves
Annual figures. Use your real numbers wherever you can.
Second car costs you now
Per year, including the costs that continue when it sits still.
What replaces it
E-bike cost is spread over its life, so enter price divided by years you expect to keep it.
Second car costs$0
Replacements cost$0
Net saving per year
$0
An estimate for comparison, not financial advice. Does not include the one-time proceeds from selling the car, which are a separate windfall.
Getting the inputs right
- Depreciation is the one people omit, and it is often the largest cost. A rough approach: estimate what the car is worth now and what it will be worth in a year. The gap is this year's depreciation. For an old car near the bottom of its curve this may genuinely be small.
- Use your real insurance figure, and call your insurer to ask what removing the vehicle actually saves. It is not always a simple division, since multi-car discounts can shift.
- Spread the e-bike over its life. A $1,750 setup kept for five years is $350 a year, which is what the default assumes.
- Be generous with the replacement costs. If the result still favours dropping the car after you have been pessimistic, you can trust it.
- The sale proceeds are a bonus, not an annual saving, so we deliberately leave them out of the yearly figure.