Trickle chargers, tyre flat spots, a dehumidifier with its own subscription app — three months of not driving the car turned out to have its own line item in the budget.
The trickle charger was the easy part: plug it in, forget about it, the battery’s fine in spring. The tyres were the surprise. Leaving a car on the same four contact patches for months flat-spots them enough that you feel it on the first drive out, a faint thud at low speed that goes away once they warm through — or doesn’t, if you’ve left it long enough that it’s permanent. I now move the car a few feet every few weeks, which feels absurd and also completely necessary.
The dehumidifier is the bit nobody warns you about. A single-car garage that isn’t obviously damp can still be damp enough to matter to a car that spends three months completely still. Mine came with an app that emails me a humidity report, which is either very sensible or a sign I’ve lost the plot slightly.
Storage insurance saved me about a third of what a full policy would have cost over the same period, on the condition the car doesn’t move at all. Worth doing the maths on your own mileage before you assume it’s the right call — if you’re the sort of owner who can’t resist a clear Sunday morning, it isn’t.