Do you include the difference in speed, and the work expanded by the driver, in the price ?

Nope and those are, of course, highly relevant factors (especially considering the contra-flow nightmare that is the autobahn between Stuttgart and Munich just now).

Price for the car should also include a mileage rate (which will be significantly more than the marginal expense of the fuel) and there are also accommodation costs along the way (I suppose it's possible to do London-Munich in one massive leg, but I wouldn't want to be sharing the road with you in the latter portion of the journey - in our case we turned the need for an overnight stop into a virtue and had a sight-seeing day in Trier on the way back).

Once you factor all those elements in then the car isn't actually a low cost option at all - but I don't think these sorts of marginal and ancilliary costs feed in to the 'purchasing decision' in many cases.

You can do London-Munich on low speed trains, too, and then consumption becomes much better for the train (the old, ordinary lines are waaay less expensive to make)

True that, and we did London-Munich via Eurostar and the sleeper service out of Paris last summer which was great. I'm keen to try the high speed option however, with the new high-speed Paris to Munich service that's just started I reckon it's possible for us to do the trip door-to-door in about 10-11 hours. This is about twice the time it would take by air - which, given how god awful the flying experience is these days, makes the train a very competitive option for us even without taking carbon into consideration.

Regards
Luke

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