Jeffrey Escobar Drove 500 Miles in Three Months. Now He’s Doing the Math on Selling the Car.

What a car costs when you barely use it

AAA has published its Your Driving Costs study every year since 1950. The 2025 edition puts the total cost of owning and operating a new vehicle at $11,577 a year, or $964.78 a month, down $719 from 2024 on softer depreciation, cheaper fuel, and lower finance charges.

The detail almost everyone skips: that figure assumes 15,000 miles a year over a five-year hold. At that mileage it works out to about 77 cents a mile.

Here is the 2025 breakdown, and what happens to it at Escobar’s mileage.

“Driving 87% less doesn’t make the car 87% cheaper,” Escobar says. “It makes it about 27% cheaper, because the expensive parts have nothing to do with driving.”

Cost per mile goes up 5.5x. Every mile costs roughly $4.23.

“A round trip to Brickell and back costs more in true ownership terms than the dinner does.”

Depreciation is the quiet killer. AAA found vehicles in the 2025 study lose an average of $4,334 in value per year, the single largest ownership expense, and that clock runs whether the car moves or not.

Two caveats before anyone screenshots the table. AAA models a new, financed, mid-priced vehicle. Paid off? Delete the $1,131 finance line. Older car? Lower depreciation, higher maintenance. Run your own row.

“The structure holds even when the numbers move,” Escobar says. “Fixed costs dominate, and low-mileage drivers pay the worst rate in the market.”

The part that is not about money

“If it were only $8,000 a year I’d keep it and stop talking about it.”

What actually drives the reconsideration is attention.

“Driving is the one activity I can’t stack anything on top of. I can’t take a call from Berlin and merge onto I-95 at the same time. I can’t dictate a spec at 70 miles an hour. Driving demands the exact resource that’s scarcest right now.”

In a rideshare, he works the whole way.

When selling is the wrong call

He has not sold it, and is clear about why.

Miami is not a transit city. “Public transportation here doesn’t meaningfully replace a car. My fallback isn’t a train. It’s surge pricing.”

Hurricane season is real. June through November, coastal county, evacuation orders issued with hours of notice. “When everyone needs a ride at once, nobody gets a ride. That’s not theoretical here. That’s a Tuesday in September.”

Re-entry is expensive. Selling is one transaction. Buying back is sales tax, registration, and a fresh depreciation curve. A gap in insurance coverage is also something carriers price against you later.

Optionality does not show up per mile. “The car isn’t just transportation. It’s the ability to leave at 3 a.m. without asking anybody.”

The framework

For anyone running this themselves, Escobar gives four questions.

1. What is your real annual mileage? Not the estimate. Check the odometer against a dated service record.
2. What are your fixed costs? Insurance, registration, financing, depreciation. That is what you pay to own, before you drive anywhere.
3. What did rideshare actually cost you? Pull 90 days of receipts from the apps and multiply by four. “Most people guess high and get shocked by the real number.”
4. What is your worst realistic week? Storm, medical emergency, airport at 4 a.m. “If a car is the only thing that solves it, that’s not a cost problem. That’s an insurance problem, and you keep the car.”

“I’m still on four,” he says. “Living in a hurricane state is a real answer to a spreadsheet.”

The actual point

“It was never about the car. It’s that most people have never audited what their default setup costs them.”

He lays it out: “You don’t question the commute because everyone commutes. You don’t question the car because everyone has a car. Then you find out the car is $965 a month and the commute is 226 hours a year, and those were both choices you never actually made. You inherited them.”

He includes himself.