Yamaha C3 – One Year Numbers

Lets do math!  I’ve owned my Yamaha C3 for just over a year now.  I’ve put 4800 miles on it in that time.  Assumptions:

1. My car gets 30 mpg – I’ve been verifying this over the last few weeks.
2. The scooter gets 110 mpg – my mileage is slightly worse now that I have a shorter commute.
3. We’ll put the price of gas at $2.50 a gallon.  It was higher, it was lower, $2.50 is what it is now, seems like a good median.

The cost of gas for the scooter was 43.6 gallons * $2.50/gallon = $109.  The cost of driving the car would have been 160 gallons * $2.50 = $400, for a total savings of $291.  Not bad.  How about carbon dioxide?  If you accept the government’s numbers, then each gallon of gas burned releases 20 pounds of CO2 into the air, along with lots of other nasty stuff, so I’ve avoided releasing 2,328 pounds of CO2 – just over a ton.  Seems good, especially including the other pollutants that come from burning gas.

Interestingly, if you put in $4.00 as the cost of gas, the savings rises to $465 – almost one sixth of my total scooter cost.  If I had kept up my mileage rates up with the commute to Apex, lets say doing 10,000 miles instead of 4800 at $4/gallon, the savings would have been $970 – almost half the cost of the scooter itself, and 1/3rd my total costs (which were, as you may remember, about $2800).  It’s clear that the price of gas and how much you drive has a huge impact on the cost of operating both a scooter and a car, and it’s easy to see why scooters are much more popular in Europe, where gas is $5-6 a gallon.

But … I’m not saving that money – gas is no longer that expensive, and my commute is shorter with fewer highway miles.  Still, one of the best things about the scooter is that I know it will be easier to fuel and run it even if I lose my job and I’m just scraping by.  There’s no payments to make, the repair bills are low, and the bike has proven itself to be highly reliable and dependable.