You sound like a brave man! Trying fool her indoors with maths would never work for me as she would smell a rat immediately! But, if they were all the same colour she would be non the wiser. With regard to your justification figures did you factor in car value depreciation?..
I did not bother including it in my e bike figure, because the additional 3000 miles makes no difference in my case. The car will do 25,000 mile a year in my hands, so the odd 1000 a year makes almost no difference to the resale value after 3 years.
I suppose that's one way of looking at it! I sold a 4 year old car to buy this one which lost £7500 of original £14500, not too bad but perhaps I should kept it and started playing out for repairs and stuff! Or I could have bought a cheaper one..Ouch! Could you drive it round the block a few times to increase you mileage and save yourself some money?
Personally, if I were only doing 4000 miles a year I'd run an older car. In your case, almost 70% of your motoring expense is depreciation.
The mistake with Phill's method is the service plan. Any modern car should run for at least 50,000 miles without attention other than oil, so a low mileage car shouldn't cost much to run. Long ago GM in the USA introduced two models with their first service at 100,000 miles.
You may be righter than you think.... One of the selling point was a free 5 year service plan, so now I am at 10 months the car tells me 400 days to next service.... Rung the dealer thinking it's a mistake and they told me the car decides when it wants servicing dependant on how it is being driven... So my free service plan isn't worth what I thought it was.
I think things have moved on a bit these days... On mine you just ask it to display service information and there is a reset option in there. Only thing is it doesn't understand my accent for anything but basic commands. Last time I asked it to change to radio 2 it rang my mother.If i remember rightly FLEC, you hold the two buttons in and turn the igniton key on and off three times to clear it, I to worked on the tools for years and what you said about a car service is correct,( NOT required) i only do repairs to mine as faults come up, most of these things are a way of selling people things that are not needed (ie plugs, oil , oil filters air filters )
