Every time I look at the cost of an e-bike, I cringe, yet I don't have this reaction to the running costs of my car. I probably should. I don't know if you all have looked at the news lately, but car juice is expensive. My last tank of gas cost about fifty bucks!

But that's not that much more than I was spending. Back in the winter, it was about $35. I'm very aware that I'm spending about 19 cents per mile now, but I never had an issue paying 13 cents up until a few months ago. Sure, that's a 50% increase; that's not insignificant. But fuel isn't the only cost, and it's never been the only cost. Cars are loaded with wear items—oil, tires, brake fluid, spark plugs, whatever—and all of those also have a cost per mile. They're just individually smaller over time and smeared out over tens of thousands of them so they're not as obvious until it comes time for service.

For example, my car calls for an oil change and tire rotation every 6000 miles. Oil and a filter cost about thirty bucks, and I screwed up my back so I paid somebody else another thirty bucks to rotate my tires for me. That's a whole extra penny worth of maintenance per mile. I didn't notice the cost of the oil change, though, because I still had one jug from the two-pack I bought the last time I did an oil change, and I bought a bulk pack of oil filters last time I ordered them. It was a "free" oil change in the sense that I didn't have to tap my card at a PoS.Piece of s— Sorry, point of sale. But I had spent the money previously. I used to have thirty dollars, and then I stopped having thirty dollars in exchange for the materials I used to change my oil.

That's the shorter-term maintenance. There's longer-term stuff like the cabin air filter and engine air filter. I forgot what exactly I paid, but combined, it's something like a third of a cent per mile? They're cheap. I paid to have my clutch and brake fluid changed at 30000 miles for $150, which works out to another half-cent per mile. We're up to 1.8 cents per mile in total, which is nearly 10% my current fuel costs and 15% my antebellum fuel costs.

I haven't needed new tires yet, but spitballing, it's going to be an optimistic $800 for an optimistic 60000 miles, so 1.3 cents per mile minimum? If they cost $1000 and I get 50000 miles, that immediately jumps to two cents, which, again, is about 10% my fuel costs. Let's split the difference and call it 1.7 cents. 3.5 cents per mile total so far. Spark plugs will need to be replaced eventually, and I have a Subaru, so labor ain't cheap if I don't swap them myself. Call it another penny per mile. 4.5 cents total. Oh, and I almost forgot! I have a direct injected motor! My intake valves are probably covered in a nice layer of crust, so I'll need to get those blasted with PEAPolyetheramine or walnut shells eventually. That'll probably be another cent per mile. The clutch will probably be at least a thousand bucks eventually, so that's another one or two cents per mile.

TL;DR: Cars Are Expensive but E-Bikes Are Basically Free

Just based on the maintenance that I can think of off the top of my head, my cost per mile was always about 19 cents if not more. Currently, it's probably sitting at at least a quarter. All of these costs other than fuel—and to some degree even fuel—are so infrequent that their existences are obscured. Before the war, a round trip to the coffee shop I go to too often cost $2 on top of the too-damn-much for drip coffee. Since the war started, it now costs $2.50. That's… actually not much worse! It's not 50% more; it's only 25% more.

And I pay it all guilt-free. At no point have I ever considered that my car has cost me in aggregate over a thousand dollars every time I change the oil. That totally ignores other costs of ownership including insurance, registration, and—for certain definitions of cost—depreciation. Those don't change that much if I trade in my car for a Prius.

I said my last tank of gas cost fifty bucks. Wanna guess how much it costs to charge an e-bike?

Five cents!

It's not literally free, but it might as well be. The ones I've looked at have battery capacities somewhere between 300 and 500 watt-hour. And, ok, sure, five cents is a little optimistic even with the smaller batteries, but like. Look. I spend at least ten minutes blowdrying my hair most days. That's the same energy usage as charging an e-bike. I spent two hours playing Halo with a friend the other night. My computer pulled an extra e-bike battery worth of energy from the wall to do so. It doesn't matter! And sure, the e-bike gets much less range on a charge than the car gets on a tank of gas, but we're still looking at something on the order of 1% the "fuel" cost per mile.

I've only taken a cursory look at maintenance costs, but they seem proportionally cheaper compared to a car. Which, yeah, that makes sense. Of course two bike tires are cheaper than four car tires! Of course a chain is cheaper than a transmission rebuild!

And yet, despite all of that, I cannot convince myself that it's ok to blow up to a thousand bucks on an e-bike. I have enough money in savings to cover it. I just cannot convince my brain to file it in the "transportation" category rather than the "toy" category. I have done the math! The e-bike becomes effectively free if I offset no more than 4000 car miles! The e-bike is a third of the cost of the sport trim I bought over the base trim I could have! The e-bike is [redacted] payments on a car loan I paid off a few years ago! I need a new bike anyway!

Everything about it makes sense. I'm still struggling to convince myself.