Running a private car in Singapore quietly burns somewhere north of $2,100 a month before you deliver a single parcel, and depreciation alone eats more than half of it whether you drive to Tuas or leave the car parked. The petrol you notice at the pump is the smallest line on the bill.
Depreciation is the cost you never feel until you sell
The car you already own feels free. It is not.
Depreciation is the single largest cost of running a car in Singapore, and it makes up well over half of a typical $2,100-a-month ownership cost (MoneySmart, 2026). A brand-new mass-market car sheds roughly $10,000 a year, and older models on sgCarMart routinely show $14,910 to $18,040 a year (AsiaOne, 2026).
Every kilometre you add doing deliveries pulls resale value forward. You will not see it on a receipt. You will see it the day you trade the car in and the offer comes back lower than you hoped. When you use your own car for business runs, you are not saving on transport. You are converting your car's future resale value into today's delivery, at a terrible exchange rate.
A voided insurance claim can wipe out a year of "savings"
This is the one that ends businesses.
A standard private car policy in Singapore covers private use. Using that insured car for hire, reward or commercial purposes voids your coverage, and if you have an accident while making deliveries, the claim gets denied (eazy Insurance, 2026). Insurers reject these claims all the time. Owners only find out at the worst possible moment.
Do the math on the downside.
One denied claim, one bad afternoon
- Third-party vehicle damage: $8,000 to $40,000+
- Your own car repair: fully out of pocket
- Insurance saved by not going commercial: $0
- Net position: catastrophic
You would need years of "free" delivery runs to break even against a single uncovered collision. Proper commercial vehicle insurance exists precisely because private cover is not built for this, and the gap is not a technicality. It is the whole point of the policy.
Fuel, ERP and parking add up faster than you think
The pump price is where most people stop counting. It should be where they start.
RON 95 sits around $3.37 a litre in 2026, with RON 98 near $3.89 (Motorist Singapore, 2026). A car driven 15,000 to 18,000 km a year burns roughly $3,500 to $5,000 in fuel alone (MoneySmart, 2026). Delivery driving inflates that fast, because you idle, you detour, and you crawl through the CBD at the worst times.
Then the extras stack on.
What a day of CBD deliveries really adds
- ERP per gantry at peak: $0.50 to $6.00
- A regular CBD commuter's ERP: $200 to $400 a month
- Season parking, HDB: $100 to $150 a month
- Season parking, CBD office building: $600+ a month
- Ad-hoc loading and short-term parking: extra, every single stop
Every drop-off in town is a parking hunt, a gantry, and a few more litres. None of it shows up when you tell yourself "I already have the car." All of it shows up in your bank balance.
Wear-and-tear and your own time are the silent invoices
Two costs never get billed to you, so you pretend they are zero.
The first is wear-and-tear. Tyres, brake pads, servicing intervals, clutch, suspension. Delivery use is stop-start, loaded, and high-mileage, which is the hardest kind of driving on a car. Running costs like fuel, parking, ERP and maintenance already run $550 to $1,350 a month for ordinary use (MoneySmart, 2026). Push the mileage up with business runs and the servicing bills follow.
The second is your time, and it is the biggest one nobody prices. If you are a Carousell seller or a Shopee shop owner driving your own deliveries, every hour behind the wheel is an hour not spent sourcing stock, replying to buyers, or closing sales. That is the real cost. An hour driving to Woodlands and back is an hour your business stops growing. If we compared a van to hiring your own driver, the time trade-off would be just as stark, which is exactly the ground we cover in man and van versus an in-house driver.
The legal risk: your private car is not a goods vehicle
Here is the part most people never check.
In Singapore, only vehicles registered as goods vehicles can carry goods for business. A regular private car that is not registered as a goods vehicle cannot legally be used to carry goods for commercial or business use under the Road Traffic Act (OneMotoring / LTA, 2026). Commercial vehicles carry a G-plate for exactly this reason. Your private plate does not.
So the "free" delivery in your own car is not free and not clearly legal. It is depreciation you cannot feel, an insurance policy that may not pay, fuel and ERP you undercount, wear-and-tear you defer, and your own time you value at zero. Stacked together, that is a genuinely expensive way to move a box.
What to do instead: pay only for the trips you make
The fix is simple. Stop turning your personal car into an unlicensed, underinsured delivery van, and pay for transport only when you actually need it.
With BoxPls, a Man & Van from $165 per half-day and $299 per full-day gives you a proper commercial vehicle and driver for the hours you book, with no depreciation, no ERP hunting, and no voided-claim risk landing on you. For one-off drops, multi-stop delivery starts from $9 per stop with an instant quote and the exact price shown before you book. There is no platform service fee. You skip every hidden cost above and keep your car for your life, not your logistics.
Work out the honest cost of your next delivery run, then compare it to a booking that comes with insurance, a driver, and a fixed price.
