TOTAL Cost Calc?

[ember1205]

Why does Fuelly allow me to enter costs for maintenance and such but does not factor these into the total cost calculations? What's the point of putting this information in there if it isn't used for anything? Similarly, there should be an area to add ALL costs related to a vehicle, including purchase price, sales tax, excise / property tax, registration, insurance, violations, etc. and then also have a place to enter a "selling price" for when you get rid of a vehicle.

There's too much emphasis on only certain areas of expense and we should be able to add in whatever related expenses we deem are necessary in order to truly understand what the total cost of OWNING and operating a vehicle is, at least for ourselves (this could be private data that only we see for our vehicles with the fuel costs only being shown publicly).

[Draigflag]

Fuelly was only really designed for people who want to track thier fuel economy and costs accordingly, so other people can research and compare data. Total cost of ownership is complex and is affected by too many factors in my opinion.

[ember1205]

I don't disagree that it's complex and that there are a lot of variables. That is why I believe that it would be perfectly reasonable to ONLY show the total costs to the owner of the car. And, the owner would only enter that information with costs that they wanted to track as part of that total.

For the "general public" that is interested in researching information about a vehicle's fuel usage, they would only see the fuel-related costs like they do today.

[JockoT]

Stick it all in a spreadsheet, as I do.

[ember1205]

Originally Posted by JockoT

Stick it all in a spreadsheet, as I do.

If I wanted to track everything in a spreadsheet, I wouldn't use Fuelly in the first place.

[LDB]

I won't say it well I'm sure but it's probably a case of the limitation of resources available to create and maintain the site vs. the content and benefit of the site. They focus on what is equally beneficial to the owner and the overall public. It would take too much away from the site overall to create another whole system that is only visible to and beneficial to the owner. They want to make it as universally beneficial as possible.

[ember1205]

Originally Posted by LDB

I won't say it well I'm sure but it's probably a case of the limitation of resources available to create and maintain the site vs. the content and benefit of the site. They focus on what is equally beneficial to the owner and the overall public. It would take too much away from the site overall to create another whole system that is only visible to and beneficial to the owner. They want to make it as universally beneficial as possible.

I agree that they have to ensure that the site owner is getting benefit or they can't continue to operate. And, without users, there's no need for the site. So, they have to be accommodated as well.

The problem is this: They are already allowing us to enter this data into the system. So, it isn't a case of whether or not it would have implications on storage (if they were ADDING the ability to collect and store this info, it would increase storage requirements because there would be so much additional data, but that isn't the case.

Additionally, each "note" has the ability to show whether it is to be private or not. Some simple coding of the pages of the site would be able to add a second calculation area using ALL data (not just public data, or MPG data, like is already there).

Honestly - this isn't much work to the code of the site and very straight-forward using data fields that are already present.

The ONE impact it would have for the site owner is that it would increase the load on the database server(s) because more data would be retrieved when the individual vehicle owner opened the vehicle's page, and there would also be a slight uptick in load on the web server as well for the same reason. But, this is likely negligible load since so many folks do NOT access the individual page of their vehicle to view its stats (from a computer) anywhere NEAR the amount of times that they access the more limited pages to enter fill-up data.

[JockoT]

Originally Posted by JockoT

Stick it all in a spreadsheet, as I do.

Well, why use it?