@Anonymous wrote:
I have this same question, I am going to buy a car to "review" for my youtube channel, what do I expense?
You really need professional tax advice. The standard answer will be "almost nothing." There may be a way that a professional can structure it for a larger benefit to you.
Under ordinary rules, when you purchase a personal vehicle and also use it for business purposes, you can deduct your actual expenses, or the standard mileage amount which is 57.5 cents per mile. But only for business use, not personal use, and not split use. If you buy a car to review it and drive it 100 miles for a road test, that a $57 deduction. If you drive it another 1000 miles around town on your usual work commute and errands, that is personal travel and never deductible even if it has a dual business purpose. You could take a 10,000 mile cross country trip, and if any part of that trip is a personal vacation, the entire trip is disallowed as a business expense.
Then, when you sell the car, you have a capital loss, but capital losses on personal property are not deductible.
Now, suppose you form a business of some kind, and the business buys the car. The business can still only deduct actual expenses or the standard mileage rate, and only for business-only travel, not personal or mixed travel. The business may have a deduction for depreciation too, but only if it owns the car longer than a year. When the business sells the car, the business may have a capital loss. What happens to that capital loss depends on how much income the business has (Youtube ads?) and what kind of business it is. The business could be an LLC, an S-corp, or a C-corp, and the tax rules for losses and how they pass through to the owner are different for each type and very complicated.
(Understand that when someone like Motor Trend buys a car and tests it, those are expenses for the business. And they can deduct capital losses in a way that you as an individual can't. And if they give the car to an employee to use on the employee's family road trip, the value of that car usage is taxable income to the employee, unless the trip is purely business only.)
I think it will be very difficult to meaningfully deduct your car expenses as a business expense, and anything you can get will require the help of a really talented tax professional.
