Ask an operator what a bus costs and most will tell you the purchase price. It is the number on the invoice, it is the number the bank cares about, and it is the number everybody compares. It is also, over ten years, one of the smaller components of what the vehicle will actually cost you.

The five numbers that matter

Purchase price, less what you get back at the end. Fuel or energy. Scheduled servicing and the parts that go with it. Tyres. And the cost of the bus not being available when you needed it.

The last one is the hardest to quantify and the one operators consistently underestimate. A bus off the road on a school contract does not just stop earning; it means a replacement, a rearranged run, and a conversation with the department.

Fuel is usually the biggest single item

A coach running 60,000 kilometres a year at 35 litres per hundred kilometres uses about 21,000 litres. At two dollars a litre that is $42,000 a year, or $420,000 over ten years. On a bus that cost $300,000 to buy.

That is why a difference of two or three litres per hundred kilometres between two vehicles matters more than a $20,000 difference in purchase price. It is also why any supplier quoting you a fuel figure should be asked what duty cycle it was measured on.

Servicing intervals are not all equal

Two buses with the same list price can have quite different service schedules. Ask for the interval, the labour hours at each service, and the parts list. Multiply it out over your annual kilometres. The answer is sometimes surprising.

Residual value is a guess, and should be treated as one

Nobody knows what a bus will be worth in ten years. Emissions rules change, contracts change, and a technology that looks current now may not be. Any supplier who gives you a confident residual figure is guessing, and so is anyone who tells you otherwise.

What you can do is look at what similar vehicles are selling for today at that age, and be honest that it is an indication rather than a forecast.

Working it out for your own operation

The figures above are illustrative. Yours will be different, because they depend on your kilometres, your fuel price, your terrain and how long you keep a vehicle.

We will build the comparison with you using your numbers, and show every assumption in it. If our bus is not the cheapest to run over ten years, you will see that in the same table.

Try the running cost calculator