Van Replacement Timing Calculator

A thirty-two thousand van is cheapest to replace across years five and six, at about six thousand a year all in.

Running it to year eight costs four hundred and twenty pounds a year more.

Two costs move in opposite directions. Depreciation per year is enormous at first and falls away; repairs start small and climb. Add them and the total per year has a minimum somewhere in the middle. Both of the usual instincts are wrong: changing every two years pays the steep part of the depreciation over and over, and running it into the ground pays a garage instead of a dealer.

The bottom of that curve is usually flat, and that matters more than where it is. Here years five and six are within one per cent of each other, so the page gives you the range rather than naming a year to sound decisive. Push the repairs up and the minimum sharpens, and then it does name one.

The resale figures are guesses and they dominate the answer. Nobody knows what a van will fetch in year six. Move those numbers and watch the best year move with them — that spread is real, and a page that hid it behind a lookup table would be pretending to a precision that does not exist.

The table shows every year: depreciation to date, repairs to date, and the total per year, so the shape of the curve is something you can look at rather than something you have to be told.

Downtime is not in here. An older vehicle off the road costs you the work it was going to do that day, and that is a real cost this page does not price — which means the true best year is likely a little earlier than the one shown, not later. The page says so rather than letting the answer look more favourable to waiting than it is.

Leave a year blank and it is skipped, so it works just as well for five years of history as for eight.

Save as many versions as you like and put any two side by side, figure against figure, with the better one on each line marked and the difference in its own column. That screen is the one that decides things, and it is the part a free calculator cannot do at all. Two vehicles side by side is how a replacement policy stops being a feeling.

One HTML file. No account, no subscription, no internet needed. Opens on Windows, Mac and Android; the readme explains the extra step on iPhone and iPad, where Apple blocks JavaScript in downloaded files and every tool of this kind is affected.

Everything lives in your browser on your device. Nothing is uploaded, which is why it works offline and why nobody else can see your figures — and it also means clearing your browsing data deletes it. The tool does not pretend otherwise: the header shows how long since your last export at all times, turns amber after three days and red after seven, and export is one click that produces a plain file you keep.