Diesel vs. Gasoline: Cost Comparison (Articles)

Periodically, industry publications release cost comparisons between selected diesel and gasoline-powered passenger cars, some more popular than others.
In this process, known taxes, insurance costs, depreciation, consumption, fuel prices, etc., are all added up and translated into a purchase recommendation.

Recent recommendations have often suggested opting for a gasoline-powered vehicle, partly because the fuel consumption and prices per liter of gasoline and diesel have become increasingly similar.
It is often overlooked that fuel prices will continue to rise, and therefore each liter saved (by diesel drivers) will increasingly influence the cost comparison in the future – even if diesel and gasoline were ever to be equally expensive.
The fuel prices, and therefore the calculations used for the comparison, are usually already outdated by the time the magazine is fresh off the newsstand or in the subscriber's mailbox...

A much more significant limitation of the published comparisons is the transferability of the standardized figures to the specific circumstances of each individual interested party, particularly:
-> Individualized insurance rates and no-claims bonus classes shift the cost balance.
-> Service packages reduce costs for workshop customers.
-> For frequent "fuel tourists," the overall cost shifts due to lower fuel expenses.
-> The depreciation of young used cars is significantly lower than that of new cars.
Deviations from the standard cycle or test report can result in significantly different fuel consumption figures.
etc. etc.

And what does someone do whose target vehicle types haven't appeared in any of the tests yet?


With the attachment, you can create a cost comparison between two vehicles by entering the annual mileage and up to 11 additional individual (instead of standardized!) data points per vehicle being compared. Simply overwrite the data in the blue fields.
The current vehicle tax rates can be found, for example, at http://www.steuer.niedersachsen.de/Service/Kfz.htm.

To obtain the most realistic consumption data, you should consider which of the three standard values for comparable vehicles (city/urban, rural/extra-urban, and combined) best reflects your own driving profile, or enter an appropriate intermediate value.

Any change to an input value for a vehicle shifts the break-even mileage, which is (of course) calculated independently of the entered annual mileage.
The development of fuel prices can also be estimated by increasing the input values for the price per liter accordingly.

Sure, here is the translation of the text from German to English:

"Note:"
The calculation formula for the break-even distance does not work if the product of consumption and price per liter is exactly the same for both vehicles; in that case, it will display "#DIV/0!".
In this case, it is sufficient to minimally modify one of the four values. For example, instead of entering a fuel consumption value of 5.3 l / 100km, you could enter 5.3001. This will not significantly distort the calculation.