autocosts – car costs calculator
This calculator allows users to find the true cost of owning a car. It will normally give them a good estimate of what they really need to spend on car ownership. As car payments and expenses come due throughout the year, it's often difficult to really get a good understanding of total spending on a car. This calculator also provides to the user, optionally, the car's full Financial Effort considering the user's income, further providing also optionally the equivalent public transport costs (bus, train, UBER, etc.), considering the user doesn't own a car.
Try it on your machine
Install it and run it with the single command
npm i autocosts --production
it will open a http local server which you can access through http://localhost:3028
Website
https://autocosts.info
Playground
https://autocosts.info/XX
The list of available countries
https://autocosts.info/list
The translations are in corresponding json
files, namely in the folder src/countries/
.
The list of available countries is from the file src/countries/list.json
World statistics of Car Costs
https://autocosts.info/stats
How does it work?
Autocosts uses nodejs
, expressjs
and handlebarsjs
to supply a server application that renders a car costs calculator as a webpage loaded by any common browser.
The project is optimized for a web-based version, and for an APP developped in Apache Cordova. The 2 last letters on the URI stands for the 2-letter ISO country code, and not for the language, since for example United Kingdom and Australia have the same language but different realities concerning the taxes, the terms applied to automobile costs and the units for fuel efficiency. The translations/language files apply therefore only to the selected country.
The project already considers all the units and fuel efficiency cases, different in many countries. The variations for fuel efficiency are l/100km
, km/l
, mpg(US)
, mpg(imp)
and for distance are km
, miles
and mil
(Nordic mile=10km). More information can be found in the directory src/countries/
.
For more information regarding how the costs are calculated, you can check the src/client/core/
which is based on the 12 items that form the car costs for any given country. Namely they are:
- Standing costs
- Depreciation
- Car taxes
- Insurance
- Inspection
- Car finance
- Running costs
- Fuel
- Maintenance
- Repairs and Improvements
- Parking
- Tolls
- Fines
- Car washes
For more information see contributing.md
Aditional services
Autocosts supports the following additional services, which can be enabled or disabled (default).
After building with node build.js
, run node bin/server.js -h
for more information.
Database
Autocosts also supports code such that the user inputs might be stored into a mysql
database. With the data from said database, it is also possible to make several statisitcal analysis, namely the average costs for each country, said statistical analysis having outlier removal techniques, such that such outliers do not distort the average.
Uber
Autocosts may use the UBER API, such that at the final repport, the user calculations can be compared with the equivalents costs if the user would use just UBER or combined with public transports.
PDF
Autocosts also allows the final report to be printed into a PDF report. It makes use of pdfmake
npm package.
Credentials file
The credentials for the above services are in the JSON files stored in credentials/
API
Install the api with the following command, ensuring that no scripts are run
npm i autocosts --ignore-scripts
Now use the autocosts api
const autocosts = require('autocosts')
var userData = {
countryCode: 'US',
currency: 'USD',
depreciation: {
dateOfAcquisition: {
month: 5,
year: 2001,
valueOfTheVehicle: 25000
},
dateOfUserInput: {
month: 2,
year: 2020,
valueOfTheVehicle: 5000
}
},
insurance: {
amountPerPeriod: 200,
period: 'month'
},
credit: {
creditBool: true,
yesCredit: {
borrowedAmount: 15000,
numberInstallments: 48,
amountInstallment: 350,
residualValue: 0
}
},
inspection: {
averageInspectionCost: 120,
numberOfInspections: 15
},
roadTaxes: {
amountPerYear: 120
},
fuel: {
typeOfCalculation: 'distance',
currencyBased: {
amountPerPeriod: null,
period: null
},
distanceBased: {
considerCarToJob: true,
carToJob: {
daysPerWeek: 5,
distanceBetweenHomeAndJob: 15,
distanceDuringWeekends: 30,
distanceStandardUnit: 'mi'
},
noCarToJob: {
distancePerPeriod: null,
period: null,
distanceStandardUnit: null
},
fuelEfficiency: 25,
fuelEfficiencyStandard: 'mpg(US)',
fuelPrice: 2.5,
fuelPriceVolumeStandard: 'gal(US)'
}
},
maintenance: {
amountPerYear: 700
},
repairsImprovements: {
amountPerYear: 200
},
parking: {
amountPerMonth: 14
},
tolls: {
calculationBasedOnDay: true,
yesBasedOnDay: {
amountPerDay: 2.5,
daysPerMonth: 22
},
noBasedOnDay: {
amountPerPeriod: null,
period: null
}
},
fines: {
amountPerPeriod: 40,
period: 'year'
},
washing: {
amountPerPeriod: 110,
period: 'year'
},
}
var results = autocosts.calculate(userData)
console.log(results)
The object results
will be the following:
{
"countryCode": "US",
"currency": "USD",
"costs": {
"totalPerYear": 6595.880952380952,
"totalEver": 123672.76785714286,
"perMonth": {
"items": {
"depreciation": 88.88888888888889,
"insurance": 200,
"credit": 8,
"inspection": 8,
"roadTaxes": 10,
"fuel": 78.26785714285715,
"maintenance": 58.333333333333336,
"repairsImprovements": 16.666666666666668,
"parking": 14,
"tolls": 55,
"fines": 3.3333333333333335,
"washing": 9.166666666666666
},
"standingCosts": 344.0555555555556,
"runningCosts": 205.60119047619048,
"total": 549.656746031746
},
"perUnitDistance": {}
},
"standardUnits": {
"speed": "mi/h",
"distance": "mi",
"fuelEfficiency": "mpg(US)",
"fuelPriceVolume": "gal(US)"
}
}
The financial effort of the user and alternative costs considering public transports, uber and taxis included, are also optionally calculated. See the standard userData
object for more information.
Android APP
The Android APP can be found in Play Store. It uses Apache Cordova to convert JavaScript built code into APP built files (for example APK files in Android)
License
GNU GPLv3
Privacy
This calculator is and shall always be completely anonymous, as it doesn't request nor permanently store, any name, email, cookies, IP address nor any other personal information.