Birmingham tops the charts as the most expensive city to own a car // AD

A collaborative post

If you live in or around Birmingham, it may come as no surprise that the city has recently topped the charts as the most expensive city in the UK to own a car. Kwik Fit, the leading fast-fit supplier of tyres in the country, recently carried out a survey to find out which city in the UK did it cost the most to own and run a car. The research listed 20 cities throughout the UK and ranked them on cost according to average annual spend on fuel, average annual spend on parking, residents permit costs and the cost of annual insurance.

Birmingham tops the chart

According to the research carried out by Consumer Intelligence in January 2020 for Kwik Fit, Birmingham was named as the most expensive city to own a car. The average annual spend on fuel for the city was £1,189.76 (£99.14 per month) which I think is relatively cheap. I’m assuming this would take into account that someone living in the city would use public transport rather than their own car for work and perhaps use their car for evenings and weekends.

The average annual spend on parking was £226.20 which is incredibly cheap and further supports my idea that they don’t use their car for work purposes. I always find parking in Birmingham really expensive, unless the locals know where to park for free! The highest cost for a residents permit was in Birmingham and costs £785.00 per year. That’s a lot of money to park your own car outside your house!

The typical insurance cost to cover a car in Birmingham was £1,125.91 which seems expensive. There are lots of different factors with car insurance so I would like to dive deeper into this to find out why it’s so expensive. Is this due to levels of crime? Parking on the road? If you want to own and run a car in Brum, it’s going to cost you!

The cheapest city to use a car is..

Exeter. I am not surprised by this at all. The least expensive city in the UK from the results of the survey is Exeter in Devon. With averagely low cost for fuel, parking and residential parking permits, Exeter is a relatively cheap place to own and use a car. On average, drivers in Exeter will pay less than £560, compared to nearly £1,500 in London

The research from Kwik Fit is most definitely eye-opening. I would have thought that cities such as Manchester and London would have topped the list before Birmingham. Surprisingly, Manchester comes in second place and London in third. Another eyebrow raising city which is expensive to own a car in is Preston. Is this because of the high numbers of students? The rate of crime? Having lived in Preston for three years as a student back in the early 00s, I would imagine this is due to the sheer number of cars commuting into Manchester and Liverpool from the city and the large number of students living in the city with cars.

To find out if your city is included in the list of the UK’s most expensive cities in which to own a car, head over to the Kwik Fit website to find out more. Do the results surprise you?