What a car costs to run: building the honest annual total

Every car in this catalogue carries a monthly running cost. Across the 101 European cars they run from €72 to €265, with a median of €195. That figure is energy — petrol, diesel or electricity — plus tyres, servicing and an insurance-shaped allowance for the ordinary costs of keeping a car on the road.

It does not include the purchase price. It does not include depreciation. It does not include your country’s tax, and it cannot include your insurance premium, because that depends far more on you than on the car. It is a modelled figure built on ordinary annual mileage and an ordinary driver, useful for comparing one car against another and not useful as a budget on its own.

A car’s true annual cost has five lines. Most people count two of them.

1. Value lost. Either depreciation, or the purchase price divided by the years you will keep it — never both. Depreciation explained sets out which of the two applies to you.
2. Energy. Petrol, diesel or electricity. The only line that scales more or less directly with the distance you drive.
3. Wear and service. Tyres, brakes, scheduled servicing, the annual roadworthiness test wherever you live, and the repair you did not plan for.
4. Insurance. Yours, from a real quote, on the exact car and specification.
5. Tax and charges. Registration, annual tax, tolls, city access charges, a residents’ parking permit. All country-specific and none of them small.

There is a sixth line that almost nobody counts, and it is not a trick: the money sitting in the car is money not earning anything anywhere else. Whatever your savings would have paid on €34,000 is a real cost of owning the car. That rate is yours, not ours, so it is left out of the arithmetic below — add it if it is material to you.

Take the catalogue median throughout: a €34,000 car, depreciating at 13 per cent a year, with a €195 monthly running cost, kept for five years and then sold.

€479 a month, before any tax, against the €195 the spec sheet quotes. As a rule of thumb for a median new car held five years, the monthly running cost figure is about 40 per cent of the truth. It is the right number for comparing two cars and the wrong number for planning a budget.

The most common mistake in this arithmetic is adding the purchase price and the depreciation. Spreading €34,000 over five years gives €6,800 a year, which is almost double the depreciation line above — because it quietly assumes the car is worth nothing at the end. It will be worth €16,946.

• If you will sell it, depreciation is the cost. The rest of the purchase price comes back to you.
• If you will run it until it is scrap, the whole purchase price is the cost, divided by the years. Use that instead of a depreciation rate, not as well as one.
• If you financed it, add the interest on top of whichever of the two you used. Interest is a separate cost and it is not depreciation.

The running-cost range alone is worth real money. €72 a month is €864 a year; €265 is €3,180. Over five years that is €4,320 against €15,900 — a difference of €11,580, which is roughly the same size as the €10,554 that the depreciation range moves on a median car. Neither line decides ownership cost by itself. Together they decide most of it.

Pushing both to their limits shows the size of the question. The cheapest car here, at the best depreciation rate and the lowest running cost, comes to about €9,900 over five years — €1,990 a year. The dearest, at the worst of both, comes to about €71,300, or €14,250 a year. No single car in the catalogue sits at every extreme at once, so read those as the outer edges of the arithmetic rather than as two real cars.

The practical lesson is that purchase price is a poor proxy for cost. A cheaper car usually is cheaper to own, because it depreciates on a smaller number and uses less of everything — but the ordering is not guaranteed, and it can reverse between two cars within €10,000 of each other. The finder asks you to weigh cost against performance for exactly this reason, and the prepared answers are grouped by budget so you can see the crossover.

• Distance. Energy is the only line that scales with it. Everything else is roughly fixed, which is why a low-mileage driver should weight purchase price and depreciation heavily and a high-mileage one should weight energy.
• Charging access. An electric car charged at home overnight sits near the bottom of that €72 figure. The same car living on public rapid chargers does not. This is the single biggest swing in the whole table for an electric car — charging explained has the arithmetic.
• Wheel size. Bigger wheels mean wider, lower-profile and more expensive tyres, for the whole life of the car. Ordering 19-inch wheels instead of 17-inch ones is a running-cost decision made at the configurator.
• Power and weight. Catalogue power runs from 65 to 378 hp with a median of 156. Everything about the top of that range costs more to run: tyres, brakes, energy and, usually, the insurance band.
• Age. Running cost is lowest while a car is new and rises as it ages. A five-year budget built on the first year’s bills is optimistic by a margin that grows every year.

These are the lines this site deliberately leaves blank, because filling them in would mean inventing a number. They vary by country, and within a country they vary by you.

Vehicle tax across Europe is charged on some mix of CO2, engine size, power, weight and price, and countries differ on whether the charge falls at purchase, annually, or both. The catalogue’s CO2 figures run from 0 to 230 g/km with a median of 118, which is enough to tell you where a car sits in the pack — but a car that is cheap to tax in one country can be expensive two borders away. Check your own national schedule before you treat any total here as final.

Insurance depends on your age, address, licence history and claims record more than it depends on the car. Get two quotes on your shortlist before you commit, not after. For a young or newly licensed driver the premium can exceed the depreciation on an inexpensive car, which changes the whole ranking — and no catalogue can predict that for you.