Owning 8 cars sounds good in theory, but is almost entirely a bad idea. Not only is it tough to maintain a fleet of terrible old vehicles, I can only drive one at a time. Which means several of my cars didn’t move much in 2019. I ended up driving the boring one the most!
In the last couple years I’ve enjoyed the end-of-year driving summaries put together by fellow car hoarders enthusiasts Tyson Hugie and Jason Cammisa. Their diligent collection of data throughout each year leads to some interesting realizations. Tyson keeps track of cost per mile for his multi-car fleet, and Jason calculates MPG (among other things) for each of his vehicles.
I’m not nearly as organized! However, I did keep track of mileage for all of my cars, rental cars, borrowed cars, and press vehicles in 2019. Even with that small bit of data, I quickly realized that I need to drive my weird cars more, and my boring car less.
To be fair to the Prius, it’s been consistently delivering an average of 56mpg since we purchased it. Its primary usage is to cart our kid around, and I can’t quite easily fit a rear-facing car seat in my 944 Turbo. Excuses, excuses, I know!
I was quite surprised that I had only driven my favorite car, my ‘88 Chevrolet Nova Twin Cam, a mere 781 miles. It felt like more than that. Keeping track of yearly mileage totals was an easy exercise that I’ll likely continue in 2020, and hopefully I’ll next year see more than 0 miles on my ‘86 Stanza Wagon.
My 2019 mileage summary:
What did you drive most in 2019? In 2020 I may even keep track of costs per vehicle, even though that might make me cringe at the end of the year. On second thought, I’m just going to throw away every receipt.