on used vehicles.TIP: If reliability is really important to you, go Asian—especially^
FUEL ECONOMY
Fuel costs are roughly one quarter of total CPM on newer cars; on oldervehicles that aren’t depreciating much, they’re obviously a greater
percentage of the whole. But I’ve seen people make incredibly shortsighteddecisions to either buy or sell based on the cost of gasoline. While it is
shocking to pump $100 into your tank when fuel prices spike, it is critical tofigure out how much extra per year that gas is costing you, especially
before you take thousands of dollars less on trade for your SUV or pickup.Here’s a quick calculation you can do:
__miles driven per month ÷ miles per gallon x cost per gallon = totalfuel cost per month.
Multiply by 12 for annual numbers. You can use this two ways: First, tocompare how much more fuel is costing you as pump prices increase; and (^)
secondly, to see how much more or less different vehicles will really costyou to run. You will often find that a “gas guzzler” will only cost $30 or $40 (^)
more per month than a vehicle that gets better real-world mileage—meaning you’d be foolish to trade it in and loose thousands of dollars. A
great source to compare both government data and those from real peoplecan be found at fueleconomy.gov.