A second car that mostly runs errands can cost more than the rides it replaces. AAA’s 2026 figures put a new car’s depreciation, interest, insurance, and registration near $700 a month, driven or not. Log a month of second-car trips and price them in a rideshare app before you buy or keep one.
Most of what a car costs has nothing to do with how far it goes. That’s bad news for a second car that sits in the driveway most of the week.
AAA’s 2026 driving-cost study prices owning and driving a new car 15,000 miles a year at $12,863. Depreciation, the value the car loses, is the biggest line at $4,422. Add $1,184 in loan interest, $2,098 for insurance, and $802 for license, registration, and taxes. Those fixed costs, the ones you pay whether or not you drive, total $8,506, or about $709 a month by our math. Gas and maintenance add only about 29 cents a mile, and parking costs extra where you pay for it.
Rides cost less than that for light use. Gridwise, which tracks gig-app data, found the average Uber or Lyft trip cost $23.66 at the end of 2025. At four rides a week, enough for two errands there and back, that’s about $410 a month. Budget another $150 to $200 for surge pricing and last-minute trips. The rides still come in $100 to $150 a month under the new car’s fixed costs alone, before gas, maintenance, or parking. An older, paid-off car changes the result. With little value left to lose and no loan interest, selling it saves mostly insurance, registration, and upkeep. At AAA’s new-car rates, insurance and registration come to about $240 a month, so four rides a week, about $410 before any cushion, cost more than keeping it unless its gas and upkeep top $170 a month.
Run your own numbers before you buy, replace, or keep one. For 30 days, log every trip your household needs a second car for. Then price each trip in Uber or Lyft, which both show a price estimate before you book, and set the total beside the car’s real monthly cost: insurance, registration, loan interest, depreciation, gas, maintenance, and parking.
Divide the car’s monthly cost by $24, the average ride. If the second car makes fewer one-way trips than that, by a comfortable margin, the rides win.
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