~$100,000 every 10 years is expensive, but I think even in a lot of countries with good public transport, there would be a large number of people who would consider paying $1,000 a month to be able to have a car if that was the only way to have one. It seems to me as though a lot families share a car quite widely too.

Even in countries without an expensive on-road tax, people do often choose to pay more than $10,000 a year in depreciation cost, rather than the option of buying a car that has already gone through the early, rapid depreciation. People also choose to get a car loan, again increasing the cost. I'm fairly uninformed whether the interest on those is significant.

Of course, the COE is in addition to depreciation and maintenance, and those are both also expensive in Singapore. Plus people buy the cars through loans. And, excluding everything I've said above, the cars themselves are very expensive to buy!

As an example, a 2.0L e:HEV Honda Civic is US$195,000 including the COE, so approximately US$90,000 without it. Looking on the US Honda site, it looks like the same car is under US$33,000. There must some on-road taxes in the US, and difference in specs, but that's a big difference in price, in addition to the ~$100,000 COE.

Even knowing they're expensive, there's something I still can't get over, seeing a 6-figure price across the windscreen of a base model (and knowing you don't get to take off any zeros when doing a currency conversion to what you're used to).

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shell0x 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

https://www.iras.gov.sg/taxes/individual-income-tax/basics-o...

If you're well paid expat, it might not be the worst as well. You save so much on income tax in Singapore, but consumption is expensive.

I'm sure for many Singapore still comes out ahead cost wise.

	▲	seanmcdirmid 4 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		If you are an American, you have to start looking into the housing deduction to make your taxes work since the foreign tax credit doesn’t go very far in Singapore (and you need the FTC after the foreign earned income credit caps).
	▲	eru an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> You save so much on income tax in Singapore, but consumption is expensive. It depends on what you are consuming. Sins like driving, alcohol, smoking and gambling are expensive. But the daily essentials aren't all that expensive, especially eating out starts very low.

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eru an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> People also choose to get a car loan, again increasing the cost.

Sorry, could you please explain how car loans increase the cost?

> Of course, the COE is in addition to depreciation and maintenance, and those are both also expensive in Singapore. Plus people buy the cars through loans. And, excluding everything I've said above, the cars themselves are very expensive to buy!

In a sense, all these other costs don't really matter: if they increased (or dropped) by a dollar, in equilibrium the winning CoE bid would drop (respectively increase) by a dollar.