How much does your car actually cost you (and why most people have no idea)
Ask any driver how much they spend on their car and you’ll almost always get the same answer: what they spend on fuel. Sometimes with insurance thrown in. And that’s it.
Everything else — the services, the tyres, the brake pads, that repair from two summers ago, the vehicle inspection, the cabin filter the mechanic swapped out while they were at it — doesn’t make it into any calculation. Not because it doesn’t matter, but because nobody wrote it down anywhere.
The result is that most drivers genuinely don’t know what their car costs them. And that’s a problem, because without that number, some decisions are impossible to make with a clear head.
The costs you never add up
Car spending comes in layers. The most visible is fuel: you pay it every week, you see it on every receipt. Easy to estimate.
Then there’s insurance, paid once or twice a year, which usually fits into the household budget without too much drama.
But after that comes a third category that most people never track: periodic maintenance and repairs. Oil changes. Filters. Tyres every few years. Brake pads. Batteries. Shock absorbers. The occasional snapped belt. A breakdown that wasn’t in the plan.
Each of those costs, on its own, seems manageable. The problem is that when you add them all up over a year, they’re usually quite a bit more than you expected. And because they arrive spread out, you never put them all in the same column.
What’s a “normal” amount to spend?
It depends a lot on the car, how old it is and how many miles you do — but there’s a useful benchmark: total cost of ownership studies consistently put maintenance and repairs at between €800 and €1,500 per year for an average mid-range car with some years on it. For older vehicles or higher mileage, the figure can be considerably higher.
Add fuel and insurance, and the real annual cost of owning a car is comfortably between €3,000 and €6,000 for most drivers. Not a number that tends to be front of mind for anyone.
Why that number changes an important decision
Tracking your car expenses isn’t just about being organised. At some point, almost every driver ends up facing the same question: is it worth keeping this car repaired, or is it time to replace it?
It’s a hard decision to make well without data. If you’ve been paying for repairs one at a time without recording them, you have no way of knowing how much you’ve spent on the car over the last couple of years. And without that figure, comparing it against the cost of financing a new car is little more than a gut feeling.
But if you have an organised history of repairs and costs, the question becomes much more concrete: “Over the last 24 months I’ve spent X on this car. How much longer does it have? What would it cost to replace it?” That’s a decision you can actually make with your head, not just your heart.
How to start tracking
You don’t need a complicated system. What you do need is consistency: logging each job when it happens, before the invoice ends up in a drawer and the memory fades.
The details worth recording for each expense are minimal: the date, the car’s mileage at the time, what was done, and how much it cost. If you can attach the invoice, even better.
With that information built up over a few months, you have something genuinely useful: a real repair history with costs attached, telling you the state of the car and what it’s actually costing you to keep it on the road.
OwnAutoCare is built for exactly this. You log each service or repair with all the relevant details, attach the invoice if you have it, and the app builds your history automatically. Your data is stored in your own Google Drive — always available, completely yours.
It won’t tell you whether you should change your car. That’s your call. But it will give you the number you need to make that call with a clear head.