Maintenance Cost of Cars

Continuing on with last week’s post about on how much does Vancouver cost, I came home this weekend and took a look at the automotive records for our family’s car. We have two cars, a 2003 Mazda Protege bought used in 2007 with 84,000 KM and a 2006 Mazda 5 bought new in 2006.

Our family is very good at keeping all the records together and we have a binder with every maintenance bill. I flipped through 8 years of records and recorded the date, milage and cost in an excel sheet. The intent was to figure out how much it costs to maintain each car and if the maintenance costs are increasing sharply enough that we should look at buying a new vehicle.

This graph shows when we made maintenance payments over the last 8 years. As you can see both vehicles have expensive repairs that cost more than 1000$. Generally, the 2003 Mazda Protege repairs are between 400 and 1000$ and come at somewhat regular intervals. The Mazda 5 is more irregular. It is in the shop more frequently for low cost scheduled maintenance as well as expensive repairs. That’s why the red graph spikes up and down. It also had a chipped windshield replaced but that was covered by insurance (negative portion of graph). The more frequent maintenance on the 2003 Mazda 5 could be attributed being used more frequently as the travel car for taking trips to Vancouver and Victoria but it is also a newer vehicle.

Is the 2003 Mazda 5 more expensive because it’s been driven more? The cars were bought roughly 9 months but as of today, June 29th, the milage on each car is 235,000 and 244,000 KM, so they’ve been driven the same amount.

So rather than looking at when payments were made in time to make repairs, we can graph the data against the milage on the car to see how much it cost to drive each kilometre.

What this graph does is plot the cumulative sum of all payments made to car repairs against the distance driven on the odometer. The Mazda 2003 Protege starts at 84,000km because it was purchased used. We expect the maintenance fees of a car to increase over time and so the question is 1) at what rate is acceptable and 2) when is the total amount of money put towards repairs ridiculous enough that a new vehicle should be purchased

From the slope of the graph we see that the Mazda 5 is pretty is only increasing a little for the first 100,000km and then is suddenly starts to increase rapidly. Is this because the warranty ended? The Mazda 5 now costs about 5.7 cents per kilometre in repairs to drive where as the Mazda Protege is just 3.0 cents per kilometre. The newer car is nearly double!

This increased cost is reflected in the total amount of money spent on repairs. We’ve spent 7,250$ on the 2003 Mazda Protege and a whooping 13,300$ on the 2006 Mazda 5 even though it’s newer vehicle.

So why is the newer vehicle more expensive? One reason might be because 2006 was the first year the Mazda 5 ever existed. It was the first production model for that vehicle and maybe Mazda hadn’t worked out all of the bugs. Another reason is that it generally seems like a worse build quality. It follows the trent of motor vehicles for the past several years to use cheaper plastics and feel slimed down to the barest essentials to turn the most profit.

Is it time to replace the Mazda 5? Maybe. I don’t have enough experience with vehicles to know if we’ve put too much into it but my feeling is that it’s got a few more years left in it. The 2006 Mazda 5 isn’t worth very much so we’re not in a hurry to sell it. It has depreciated so much that it’s only worth a couple thousand. So it’s probably worth more to keep and drive into the ground with limited repairs than sell and have to buy a new car.

2003 Mazda Protégé 2006 Mazda 5 Days owned 2552 2832 Age (years) 6.99 7.76 Total amount of repairs $7,247 $13,329 Cost per km $0.03 $0.06 Cost per day $2.84 $2.51 Cost per year $1,036.56 $915.80

Another way to think about the cost is in this table which shows that owning a car costs about 1,000$ a year in maintenance. And it costs between 3 and 6 cents per km driven. With fuel and insurance, I estimate it to be about 20–25 cents per km. People keep asking Yuki and I when we’ll get a car. I think this speaks for the savings we accumulate by biking to work. Transits not that cheap, but it is cheaper for where we live in Vancouver.

In summary, the findings of this study are:

1. The Mazda Protege is a better made car,
2. After 100,000km is when major repairs begin with successive big repairs every 50,000 km and,
3. It costs 3–5 cents per km in repairs to drive a vehicle and probably around 20–25 cents per km total with fuel and insurance.
4. The Mazda 5 will probably have major repairs at 250,000km and 300,000km which is a good time to re-evaluate it’s value compared to a new vehicle.