Automakers are increasingly obsessed with turning everything into a subscription service in a bid to boost quarterly returns. We’ve noted how BMW has embraced making heated seats and other fea…
Did you know a Stadler 4-unit FLIRT train costs $12,500,000 and has a capacity of 420 people? Let’s just say that we’re using a badly designed public transit system and the train only moves these same 420 people around for its lifetime and compare to how they’d do with a car. I’m not going to get into maintenance, because it would really be overkill.
So, cost per person to acquire transport:
-FLIRT: $12,500,000 / 420 people = $29,761/person
-Cars: according to KBB, the average cost of a new car in the US in 2023 is $48,008, so ~$48,008/person. That’s a total of $20,163,360, if you were wondering.
The cost of car ownership is nearly double, and that figure gets much, much worse if we gave the FLIRT realistic ridership numbers. So, now let’s talk about cost over service life:
Average car service life: 12 years. $48,008/person/12 years works out to $4000/year/person
Average electric train (and apparent FLIRT) service life: about 30 years, give or take. At $29,761/person/30 years, that’s just $900/person/year.
BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!
Those life spans weren’t equal. Let’s fix that. The car user ends up buying at least one more car over the train’s lifespan (30/12=2.5), so let’s compare apples to apples. Let’s take that $4000/person/year figure and hit it with that 2.5 cars to see what it really costs. That’s $4000/person/year x 30 years for $120,000, then multiply it back by 420 people for a total of $50.4 million spent just on buying cars over the train’s lifespan by just enough people to fill it to capacity once. You could buy four four-car Stadler FLIRTs for that price and still have some cash for hookers and blow.
Again, the gulf between these figures gets a lot more brutal with realistic ridership figures. So, public transit is cheaper. It requires a larger up front investment, and in the US we need better urbanism to support it, but it’s cheaper. Not only that, but public transit won’t double dip by selling your private details to advertisers to satisfy their hungry, hungry investors. If we added the value that auto makers extract in terms of selling your data and selling subscriptions, I think these numbers would just be a fucking bloodbath, and that’s before we even get into the other costs of car ownership.
Hey, kids, math is fun.
Did you know a Stadler 4-unit FLIRT train costs $12,500,000 and has a capacity of 420 people? Let’s just say that we’re using a badly designed public transit system and the train only moves these same 420 people around for its lifetime and compare to how they’d do with a car. I’m not going to get into maintenance, because it would really be overkill.
So, cost per person to acquire transport:
-FLIRT: $12,500,000 / 420 people = $29,761/person
-Cars: according to KBB, the average cost of a new car in the US in 2023 is $48,008, so ~$48,008/person. That’s a total of $20,163,360, if you were wondering.
The cost of car ownership is nearly double, and that figure gets much, much worse if we gave the FLIRT realistic ridership numbers. So, now let’s talk about cost over service life:
Average car service life: 12 years. $48,008/person/12 years works out to $4000/year/person
Average electric train (and apparent FLIRT) service life: about 30 years, give or take. At $29,761/person/30 years, that’s just $900/person/year.
BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!
Those life spans weren’t equal. Let’s fix that. The car user ends up buying at least one more car over the train’s lifespan (30/12=2.5), so let’s compare apples to apples. Let’s take that $4000/person/year figure and hit it with that 2.5 cars to see what it really costs. That’s $4000/person/year x 30 years for $120,000, then multiply it back by 420 people for a total of $50.4 million spent just on buying cars over the train’s lifespan by just enough people to fill it to capacity once. You could buy four four-car Stadler FLIRTs for that price and still have some cash for hookers and blow.
Again, the gulf between these figures gets a lot more brutal with realistic ridership figures. So, public transit is cheaper. It requires a larger up front investment, and in the US we need better urbanism to support it, but it’s cheaper. Not only that, but public transit won’t double dip by selling your private details to advertisers to satisfy their hungry, hungry investors. If we added the value that auto makers extract in terms of selling your data and selling subscriptions, I think these numbers would just be a fucking bloodbath, and that’s before we even get into the other costs of car ownership.
Reject subscriptions, embrace train supremacy.