You will spend longer waiting on uber/lyft to show up than you will fueling once a week and getting an oil change every 3k miles. A full set of tires takes under (1)30 minutes.

Arkansas does not run any emissions checks outside of 2 counties. However when I lived in texas they did. The cost was state limited to $5/year. Falls under the category of maintenance.

As for accidents I have 2 on record. one at fault and one not. I am not running the cheapest insurance but I am insuring a 90s/2000s car. It is much less than full coverage on a newer one. If I had a new car that I could not afford to eat the replacement costs I would definitely run full coverage but as it sits it is better not to.

I do not drink or smoke. Driving sleepy something I rarely do although it happens sometimes. However if I nod at all Ill pull over and park it. Not worth the risk. As for drinking uber and lyft is by far better. I was never trying to argue against them when needed. But for an only vehicle it seems to be higher costs.

I do treat my cars as disposable. When a transmission goes out and I can get a better car all around for less than a transmission rebuild would cost I don't waste the money fixing what I already have. I usually get a new (to me) car ever 2-4 years. I put yearly in my calculations because buying a nicer $3000 car every 3 years averages out to the same cost.

If anything I over estimated the cost out here although I do admit that the big cost other keep mentioning is parking and nobody around here charges for parking outside of meters downtown. and those are 10c/12 minutes. But if you live were those are an issue the cost would be more.

(1)A bit off topic but it can vary widely. I have taken a single tire to walmart for work several times. Took up to 3 hours to get done and never under 1 hour. However we have had a Discount Tire (The actual name. The service is not discount) open up here recently and I have had 2 vehicles in and out. car one was 2 tires in 15 minutes and 3 (spare) in 20 minutes. Car two was a set of 4 in 22 minutes. At this point I would recommend my local one to just about anybody. It greatly suprised me how good the service could be.

You don't necessarily need to buy a junker to have an inexpensive car.

You can lease a Fiat 500e for $90/month in California (which is what I do).

That has the added benefit of removing fuel costs too.

Your lease includes fuel?

edit: Nevermind, the "e" in Fiat 500e stands for electric.

OK, but can you charge for free?

If you can charge at work then yes, but even if you charge at home it's extremely inexpensive to be almost free.

I think I worked it out once to around three cents a mile and I drive around eight to ten miles a day.

Just out of curiosity, what's the yearly milage limit on that lease?

10,000 miles - it was also $4000 down, but you get $2500 back from the California EV incentive program so it comes to $1500 down and $90/month for a three year lease.

You can get lucky and find deals where the money down is even lower. I missed one where it was $1500 down so CA was basically paying you $1000 to take the car (or if you factor in the monthly fee cost around $60 a month).

Part of the reason for this is that it's a compliance car. I think the way it works is CA requires the MPG of your fleet to meet some very high standard. In order to meet this manufacturers that want to sell in the state make an EV with a very high MPGe that helps the average. Then they have to sell a certain number of them (it can't exist in name only). You can end up getting lucky.

[Edit] Looks like my understanding of the compliance car bit was wrong, seems to be just a hard requirement to sell some amount of zero emissions vehicles: https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-a-compliance-car-85648

That won't be enough for most people - the average mileage driven per year for a male between 20 and 34 is almost $18,000.

https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm

I would guess it's enough when comparing to the people that are dropping car ownership for lyft or uber (especially considering that lyft and uber would be very expensive at those mileages).

While I don't disagree with you the context for this was "spending little on a car without driving a junker."

Uh... how? That seems improbably cheap.

They're inexpensive, you can usually just go to a dealer: http://autoweek.com/article/green-cars/smartphone-or-fiat-50...

FCA and other manufacturers sell or lease such vehicles at a loss purely to comply with arbitrary government requirements for zero emissions vehicles. So it isn't a sustainable situation, but in the short term there are great deals available to buyers in a few states.