I own a car. There's no easy way to say it, especially when you're writing about consumerism and trying to live more sustainably. When I did my budget at the start of the year, I discovered that it costs me just over £20 a week, before I put any petrol in it.
I bought my car (second hand) 6 years ago, when I started my first job in Bristol. The office I worked at was on the outskirts of Bristol, and the public transport was... well... non-existent. I lift shared for the 3 years that I worked there, but my car was pretty necessary. When I finished that job, I went back to studying for a Masters, and just never got rid of my car.
With my current job, I have to have a car. I do home visits, presentations and training around the Bristol area, and there's no feasible way to do it without driving. On average I use my car once or twice a week, plus probably one weekend a month. Obviously this isn't ideal though as it spends a majority of its time sat parked outside my house.
Earlier this year I thought my car had died, and I looked into car clubs. However, with the amount that I use the car, it didn't work out any cheaper than owning my car, and since my car turned out to not be as broken as expected, I decided to keep hold of it. Instead I decided that car sharing my car with a couple of friends would be a better option. My insurance renewal is the start of July, so I put off doing anything about it until mid June.
I'd spoken to three friends about the idea, who were all keen, so I started to look into it more seriously. My insurance last year was with Sheila's Wheels and I wanted to stay with them - partly because they were top on the Ethical Consumer list, and also because their quote was a good couple of hundred pounds cheaper than anywhere else. All was looking good - between the four of us, the car was going to be used a lot more, and hopefully I'd save some money along the way.
In terms of the practicalities, we laid down some ground rules that we would sign - we decided it would be a good idea to get things down in writing so it wouldn't be possible to argue to get confused about anything in the future. As well as working out things like what happens if someone has an accident, who's responsible for paying for what, and where the car lives, we also worked out how the costs would work. In the end, we decided that I would keep ownership of the car and would be responsible for the insurance, tax, MOT, breakdown cover and servicing. All the other drivers would be responsible for paying the extra on my insurance, and then pay me 45p a mile for using the car (which includes petrol costs and a contribution to the other costs).
And then I hit some snags. The first was that Sheila's Wheels won't insure anyone other than the main driver for business use. As one of the people was primarily going to be using it for work, that ruled her out. The second problem was that it was going to cost another of my friends about £150 to be added to my insurance, due to (a) being male and (b) having had an accident in the last 5 years. So in the end, I only managed to add one person to the insurance, which is a bit of a shame.
I'm hoping I'll be able to find a few more people who'd be interested by the end of the year though, meaning the car will be used more and my costs will go down further.
For now, I'll be interested to see how it all works in practice...
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