I’VE SPENT THE guts of 25 years in and around the Irish motor industry, and if there’s one question I get asked more than any other at family gatherings, it’s some version of “what should I buy?”

What I almost never get asked, oddly, is “what will it actually cost me?”

That’s a pity, because a report out this week suggests most of us haven’t a clue, and the gap between what we think our cars cost and what they actually cost is bigger than most people would be comfortable admitting to their bank manager.

The research comes from the ESRI, funded by the Department of Transport. They took a nationally representative sample of more than 800 drivers, asked them to estimate their annual motoring costs, then walked each person through a full breakdown of what actually goes into keeping a car on the road.

Seven in ten underestimated, and not by a little. The median guess was around €2,000 a year. The real figure came in closer to €3,000, roughly 50 per cent higher than expected, and that’s before you’ve even paid for the car or watched it lose value on the drive.

Fuel was the single biggest reported expense at a median €1,560 a year, which tracks, since it’s the cost we all notice every time we’re standing at a pump watching the numbers climb.

We didn’t just take the ESRI’s word for it. At DoneDeal Cars we ran our own rough sums too, working from typical 2021 model year cars, the sort of ordinary secondhand cars people are actually buying right now rather than theoretical averages, and using the same real-world annual mileage the CSO uses.

By our estimates, a........

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