Reducing Your Car Costs

Is there a way to reduce my car costs?

There are loads of ways to reduce your car costs. For start, you could take a bicycle instead of a car. If you insist on driving, clear out all that old rubbish in your car boot, take off the luggage racks, close the windows when you drive and don't drive with the air conditioning on. All these make your petrol go considerably further, reducing your car costs. Don't buy your next car, try leasing it instead. You'll get a better deal for the same money and you get a newer car and save money on maintenance too. When you're renewing your car insurance, use an insurance broker rather than a comparison service to cut costs, because brokers often know car insurance deals that are not available to the general public and they'll help you fill out the forms more effectively too. If you have a second car, or a car for a person under 21, try to give it up because that will save a lot of money, even if you have to give a person under 21 money for cabs. That will work out cheaper. If two people share a car and one is a man, insure it with the woman as the main driver; this cuts costs because you'll find that rates for women tend to be cheaper. If you drive a diesel car you could investigate courses via the Centre for Alternative Technology in North Wales on how you can reduce costs by adapting your car engine to run partly or wholly on cooking oil. You can use a government grant to convert your car to liquid petroleum gas. This costs half the price of diesel or petrol and you may save money through exemption from the congestion charge in London. Car conversion can cost $2000 but you can get a grant.

What are the most cost-efficient cars?

If you want a cost-efficient car, perhaps you should try a green car. I don't mean a car that's green. I mean a car that runs on green fuels, like bio-ethanol, bio-diesel, liquid petroleum gases (LPGs), or natural gas. There are also green cars, which use rechargeable batteries to store electricity like giant robots, hybrid electric cars (which also use conventional fuel), fuel cell electric cars (which have no engines), and petrol and diesel cars with just excellent fuel economy. You can save road tax, a congestion charge, and a lot of insurance by driving one of these green cars. Just type in green car to your search engine on your computer and see what you can find.

What are 'car sharing schemes'?

You can save money by car sharing, or even just lift sharing or journey sharing to specific locations, like festivals or parties. There are various schemes you can join. With car sharing, you book and pay a per-hour rate for your car from full power that covers everything - fuel, insurance, everything. You can let the car at a certain point that you've agreed, and you leave it for the next person at a certain point. Lift sharing involves using your own, or another driver's, car and sharing the cost of the regular or occasional journey, perhaps to work or perhaps somewhere special. You just agree the cost between yourselves.