STUDY: What A Lifetime of Car Ownership Costs — And Who Pays

The average motorist will pay a whopping $650,000 on the low end to own a car over his or her lifetime, and society will pick up over 40 percent of the tab, a new study finds — and because those numbers are based on German travel behaviors, costs are likely even higher in America.

In a new study in Ecological Economics, an international team of researchers comprehensively modeled the costs of automobile ownership over 50 years, accounting not just for the price the driver pays to keep the car running, but the cost that society pays as a direct result of that driver’s choice of mode.

Both categories, unsurprisingly, were pretty expensive. With fuel, insurance, repair, the price of the vehicle itself, its depreciation over time, and even occasional costs like car washes, licensing fees, and parking fees, the average German driver can expect to pay about $404,375 for a lifetime of driving — provided she sticks to small models like the Opel Corsa (an economy-class electric hatchback that’s around the same price and length of a Mini Cooper SE) and drives it less than 9,320 miles per year, which is roughly the German average.

That same drivers’ neighbors, though, will collectively have to pay about $245,600 in public subsidies over the course of that driver’s life, between the costs of building and maintaining autocentric infrastructure, public health costs for which the driver is not directly responsible — think uncompensated crash damages, air pollution, and noise pollution — the rising costs of climate change, and, of course, free parking. And again: these estimates are based on an electric car.