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Big Money

The family car costs more than €10,000 a year to run

A new study by the AA finds that, despite a slight decrease, the cost of running a family car remains high.

FAMILIES WILL CONTINUE to shell out more then €10,000 a year on running a car.

The average cost of running a family car in the ‘Band B’ category this year is put at €10,571.20.

However, despite the high figure, there has been a slight decrease from last year of 0.71%. This means customer savings of €75.12 a year. This plays out to savings of €6.26 a month.

This comes as part of a study by the AA on the cost of motoring over the past 12 months. It was also found that the cost of new cars was down 3% in the past year.

Motorists can expect to have these savings offset by sharp increases in insurance premiums. On average they are up 8.5% on this time last year. On buying car insurance, the AA, said:

There’s a hefty hike across the board but it is not distributed evenly so you really have to shop around. Some insurers had well-documented problems last year and we know that there were more accidents; the sad road safety data tells us that.

The cost of running a car is calculated across a range of charges to the user including fuel, insurance, servicing and replacement components. The calculation also includes depreciation in the value of the vehicle.

Over the past year fuel prices saw a marginal decrease. The price of a litre of unleaded fuel moved from €1.576 in July 2013 to €1.574 last month.

The cost of a litre of diesel decreased from €1.476 last year to €1.469.

The report was based on a average motorist buying a car and retaining it for eight years and doing an average annual mileage of 16,000 km a year.

The ‘Band B’ car is being taken as the new standard by the AA. In previous years it had been ‘Band C’ cars.

This is a measure of the amount of emissions given off by the car. The measurment for ‘Band B’ is 120-140g/km per kilometre driven.

Read: Expect (some) good news at the fuel pumps later this year

More: AA Roadwatch presenter raps the traffic news

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