Comment Re:$30 (Score 3, Interesting) 515
Finance charges means interest on debt. Most people buy automobiles on credit. You either get artificially low interest from an auto company, which means you paid too much for the car and the interest is hidden, or you get it from a credit union, a bank, or one of those non-bank debtors. It's a significant amount.
The rate of depreciation is connected with the resale price of the automobile rather than its service life. That is the book value of the property - what you would get for it if you sold it. You might keep it for 24 years and drive it 250K miles, but most of its resale value is gone long before then, and thus the depreciation schedule should be relatively short.
This illustrates a problem. Most people don't fully apprehend what their real costs are concerning something like an automobile. Most people are bored by accounting, after all. They would not, without a long walk through numbers and principles, make a well informed decision about something like rail vs. car.