The cost of owning a car rose on all fronts for 2012 after dipping the year before, according to AAA’s annual Your Driving Costs study. Motorists paid more for auto insurance, gas, maintenance and tires.
The total annual cost of owning a sedan is $8,946 yearly, or 59.6 cents per mile, while SUV ownership rose to $11,360 yearly, 75.7 cents per mile based on driving 15,000 miles per year.
“The average driving cost for 2012 is up due to relatively large increases in fuel and tire costs, and more moderate increases in other areas,” said John Nielsen, AAA director of automotive engineering and repair in a press release. “Those increases were offset by a decrease in depreciation resulting in an overall increase of 1.9 percent.”
While that 1.9 percent figure is for ownership costs overall, the cost of insurance for sedans rose 3.4 percent to $1,001 per year on average after dropping in 2011, assuming a low-risk driver with a clean driving record. Large cars had the biggest increase.
Michael Calkins, AAA’s manager of approved auto repair, said that in 2011 some automakers chose to include certain maintenance services in the cost of their vehicles. Maintenance costs rose this year with automakers requiring the use of more expensive semi-synthetic motor oils and the labor times for some routine services increased as a result of added vehicle inspection requirements.
Calkins said the insurance cost estimate can fluctuate based on many factors including the driver, the loss experience of the companies quoting the policy and the overall size of the survey’s sample. He said AAA’s sampling model also uses a very specific driver definition and a relatively small group of selected insurance companies, so anyone seeking a rate quote could find prices higher or lower than the study indicates.
“In 2011, this calculation model found that insurance costs were down 6.11 percent, while this year costs are back up 3.4 percent. Unfortunately, without intimate knowledge of how the insurance companies involved arrived at their rates, it is impossible to assign a precise cause to these rate variations,” Calkins said.
Maintenance costs fell the previous year, by 2.2 percent, to 4.44 cents per mile on average for sedans.
