Riding a motorbike to work 50% cheaper than driving a car
At The Bike Insurer, we've been looking at the numbers of people that are now ditching their cars in favour of a motorbike for the daily commute to work.
We checked our stats for September 2007 against September 2008 and found that whilst 14% of riders selected that they wished to get their bike insurance with commuting cover included in 2007, so this figure jumped to 27% in 2008. Thats nearly a 100% increase.
We worked out that for the average commuter on the average bike the savings could be impressive. If you assume a typical car, lets say a Ford Mondeo, does 35 miles per gallon then assuming the typical commute is a 50 mile round trip per day the cost over 48 working weeks of the year comes to £1622. This is based on a typical gallon of petrol being £1.05 per litre.
However, compare this to the typical commuter bike, lets say a Suzuki GSF 600 Bandit, which achieves circa 70 mpg then the annual spend is just £811, exactly half the price of driving the Mondeo.This means an annual saving of £811 over 12 months.
We tried this one day this week by using a Ford Mondeo 2.0 which had an onboard computer. Because of the time of day, volume of traffic on the roads and the fact that we got stopped at every set of lights in the World, we only managed to get 32.2 mpg from the car on the way to the office. Our journey lasted 25 miles and started at 8am. At 5.30pm we drove back to where we started from. Overall we managed a combined MPG return of 33.1. Our total time was 1 hour 58 minutes. The next day I took the Bandit to work and overall got 67 mpg, with an overall journey time of one hour 12 minutes.
So based on riding the bike every day, as well as the extra £811 in my back pocket (will put that towards bailing out the government no doubt in tax rises) I could also save 192 hours over the year.
So then, given that our Winters are now much milder, we dont have snow anymore and we can all save a pile of cash, everyone should get a bike and get saving time and cash now. Thanks global warming, you've really helped me out!
Article by Dan.
