About two weeks ago a coworker of mine at UNIQA Raiffeisen Software Service, Liviu has appeared at work with an Excel sheet that calculated the running costs of his car including devaluation, taxes and so on. We immediately made the calculations for our own vehicles and started comparing the results. I thought that it was a great idea, that could come handy in several situations, but it wasn’t quite user-friendly.
Because recently I have been offered several AngularJS developer positions, and in the near future I would like to get more involved with this technology, I thought that it would be a good exercise to develop a small application that does the calculations we did in Excel, but in a more user-friendly way, maybe spice it up with a few exciting features. So Car Running Costs Calculator is a simple JavaScript application based on AngularJS and Bootstrap. At the moment it does not require any backend service, so I thought it was easier to publish on Chrome Web Store as a Chrome Extension than hosting it myself.
Currently it is able to break down the devaluation of the vehicle to different periods of time or per kilometers. It does the same for fuel costs and costs related to taxes and services. In the end it sums up how much did our vehicle cost us in total, per year, per month and per kilometer. The latter is probably the most interesting result, as it could tell us if it is worth owning a vehicle or we should simply rent a car whenever we go to a longer trip or get a cab when needing transportation in the city.
At the moment the application is quite simple, but I have quite a few ideas to implement in the future, I just hope to find some more spare time 🙂
Chrome Web Store: Car Running Costs Calculator
GitHub repository: Car Running Costs Calculator (Source Code)
Changelog
0.3.0 (2015.09.18)
- Added support to Save/Load/Reset form data
- Added vertical scrollbar and smaller UI improvements