Statistics

I keep track of all the cost of riding the Leo. I enter all the information in a Corel Quattro Pro spreadsheet. I divide the cost into four groups:

Purchases The purchase of the scooter and all accessories. That includes luggage rack, windscreen, locks, alarm, helmets and clothing.

I can of course not calculate an average of my purchases per km before I sell the Leo again, but I have tried to estimate the wear based on the a guess of the current value of the scooter (helmets etc are written off completely) should I choose to sell it.
Petrol That will only need a small explanation. I am always running on 95 octane which is the minimum requirement according to my use & maintenance manual. Note however that the there are different ways of measuring the octane rating. Basically there are the european way and the American way, and I think that 95 european is close to 91 American. In many country's there have instead a star rating or labels like super plus but I've never bothered to figure them out :-)
Insurance I have not owned a car or motorcycle before the Leo so I started at the bottom of the scale (My 50ccm Peugeot Speedfight didn't count since it was registered as a moped).In addition I choose an full insurance to get protection against theft. Protection against theft is almost only available as part of a full coverage here in Denmark. At the time I could only find a single insurance company the would insure it against liability, fire and theft and the cost of that was as high as my full coverage. So that is why my insurance has been so expensive for such a small scooter.

In 1998 and 1999 I had my scooter insured by TopDanmark and paid almost 5000kr/year. The excess was 2289kr, and the policy even had 20% excess by theft.

But I changed to GF from 1/8/2000, which is much cheaper (almost 1/3) and the excess is only 500kr for damage to third parties but still 3150kr if I use the full insurance. But one has to be 30 years old and member of one of the right organisations. I got in through my union (IDA).

The have decided to change to another insurance company from 1/1/2002 but I stay with GF since the new insurance would be much more expensive. The reason that GF is very competitive is that they have a special category for motorcycles less than 175ccm and most of the others mainly look at the original cost of the vehicle.

When calculating the insurance cost per km, the paid insurance is scaled with regard to the current day of a year. If I did not do that the cost/km would seems way to high just after the yearly payment.
Service & Spare Parts About half of these cost are hours from inspections (each 6000km). The rest is mostly spare part. Especially tyres and brake pads, but also road tax and other running costs

I'm beginning to list the used spares on the My Leo page but I usually also make a note in the Diary

Total cost

The bar graph shows my cost of ownership as a cost per km. The units is danish kroner. The first 4 bars are the cost per year while the last shows the sum for the time I've owned it. The wear is as stated an estimate so its the same on all bars. Its easy to see that wear and service are the major expenses and that my insurance has gotten a lot cheaper from the third year. It is not easy to see the exact values in the bar so here are the numbers.

2001/10/10 - 36131km kr/km Euro/km Usd/mile
Service & spare parts 0,90 0,12 0,07
Insurance 0,35 0,05 0,03
Petrol 0,36 0,05 0,03
Wear 1,02 0,14 0,08
Sum 2,64 0,36 0,20

But it is not all expenses. When I use the scooter for work I get a reimbursement of 2,76 kr/km. This is the official tarif in 2001. If my employer choose to give me more I would have to pay income tax of the whole amount. As of autumn 2001 I've done close too 9000km and have gotten 22000kr to show for it. Since my estimate of the actual cost of running the scooter is lower than official tarif I make a small profit on using it. The actual cost of my own riding is then 2,60 kr/km.

Petrol

My mileage varies a bit but I have concluded that the differences are mostly rigt hand induced :-). Highways two up at full throttle in headwind can give a mileage as low as 17km/l but as you can see below the leo often do much better. After I changed to a Bettella vario the fuel consumption has increased a bit but I still get around 20km/l

Because I enter all the data each time I refill the scooter I can calculate all kinds of statistics of which the mileage is the most interesting, but here a few more for the curious.

2001/10/10 - 36131km Average Max Min Median
Km/litre 20,90 25,31 16,77 20,91
Litre/100km 4,79 5,96 3,95 4,78
Litre 8,00 9,30 3,66 8,17
Distance between refills 167 215 72 171

The tank on the leo is supposed to be 9,5 litre, but I've not been able to squeeze more than 9,3 litre into it - and at that refill I was so close to being out of gas that the engine was beginning to misfire. On a few occasions I've also had to refill a half full tank or else i wasn't sure that I could get to the next gas station. When you see a sign with "104km to next gas station" you can't be sure to make it on a half tank.

I've also tried to visualize the data a bit. The first plot shows 3 things in the same chart. The red dots are my mileage of a tank of gas, which I calculate after each refill. The blue line is the overall mileage. One can see that its around 21km/l but slighty descending because my current mileages are around 19-20km/l. The last yellow line is the odometer. When one compares that with the red dots of a refill it become clear that I get the lowest mileage on the longest trips, where I'm riding a tank at a time at full throttle (the line goes almost vertical and there are red refill dots of low mileage just above each other) .

Plot showing distance and fuel economy

My best mileage so far is 25km/l (with passenger), which I achieved on a 100km trip along the eastern coast of Sjælland to Helsingør (and back) on 1999/10/17 (One of my collegaues had entered the Helsingør Marathon, so it was a good excuse for a ride. He finished in ~2:55). The speed limit was between 50 and 70 km/h on most of the trip, and there is always a lot of traffic. So since I was riding with a passenger, I just took it easy and followed the traffic (most of the time anyway :-).

The next graph is a histogram showing how the fuel economy varies according to the season. The plot shows the mileage I got from each refill. I suspected that there was a difference with regard to the season, but it looks random on the graphic

Plot showing fuel economy

The next picture is the least interesting. It shows the rice in gas price since I bought the scooter (1$ ~ 8kr, 1/1/2001). The price has increased almost 30% but for the last year it has settled just above 1$/litre (And you Americans don't want to now much that will be for a gallon). Unfortunately that is a typical price in many european countries :-(

Gas price

The last plot I've made from the data is a plot that shows when I ride my scooter. Its a plot of the time of year for refills. On average I refill once or twice a week, but from the holes one can see that in there is long between refill in the middle of the year. That is because I don't use it in my summer holiday. The summer of 1999 we were camping with tents and bicycles and rode more than 1000km. That was also the plan for 2000, but I was sick just up to the holiday so we didn't ride long (but we had the bicycles with us hanging on the rear of the car for 14 days :-). We got a son in January 2001 and we didn't think it would be much fun having such a small child along camping, so we spent the holiday in a borrowed house in Blåvand (on the west coast of Jutland)

But besides summer holidays one can also see when it has been waiting for service. Looking at the dots from this year (from ~3000km)one can se all the holes in the 1.st quarter and that wasn't a planned service...

But that aside i can see that i rode most in the warmest half of the year. For those that know the danish season that can not be a surprise. When the weather forecast promises 5°C and all day rain I'm not so tempted to ride a scenic route home.

Odometer

Service

Aprilia suggest that the Leonardo needs a service once every 6000km. Given that the engine only holds 1 litre of oil that seems to be almost a stretch since other manufactures suggest service once every 4000 or even 3000km. But since I've has it serviced at official Aprilia dealers I've sticken to the once every 6000km and mostly just let them do and replace what they have suggested.

At the top of this page I've shown the cost of ownership with regard to the year after my purchase so as it follows the payments for insurance and road tax. But one could also look at the coast with regard to the service interval.

2001/09/30 - 35800km   6000km   12000km   18000km   24000km   30000km   36000km
Kr 5654,24 3495,08 6755,88 4950,42 7549,76 3834,87
Kr/km 0,94 0,58 1,13 0,83 1,26 0,64

One can say that the Leonardo has been expensive to service right from the beginning.

Luckily there are not that many things that needs replacement on a regular basis. The two major ones are brake pads and tyres. So there is not much evidence on other parts to make any statistics on, but look in the Diary and/or the My Leo page. There you can read when I changed brake disc, exhaust and vario etc.

Last edited: 2002/06/04 Back to main index