How we calculate cost to own

What “cost to own” means

Cost to own is the total monthly cost of keeping a car on the road, made up of five parts: fuel, insurance, maintenance, licence disc, and depreciation. The first four are cash you actually spend each month. Depreciation is the value the car loses over time — real money, but not cash that leaves your account monthly, which is why we show it as a separate line labelled “value lost, not cash spent.” All calculations assume 15,000 km per year unless stated otherwise.

Fuel

We take each vehicle’s manufacturer-claimed fuel consumption (litres per 100 km) and multiply it by 15,000 km per year and the current SA fuel price. Diesel vehicles use the diesel price; petrol and hybrid vehicles use the petrol price; electric vehicles are shown as R0 fuel. Current prices used: 95 ULP R26.63/litre and diesel R27.93/litre, updated monthly from published South African fuel prices.

Note: manufacturer consumption figures are measured under ideal conditions and real-world use is usually higher, especially in stop-start city driving. Treat fuel as a fair baseline, not a guarantee.

Depreciation

Cars lose value fastest when new and more slowly as they age. We use a declining-balance method: each year’s value loss is calculated on the car’s current (already-depreciated) value, not its original price — so an older car correctly shows a lower monthly depreciation than a new one. A residual floor prevents very old vehicles from showing an unrealistically tiny figure. South African vehicles typically lose roughly 15–20% in the first year and around half their value over five years, which this model reflects.

Honest limitation: depreciation rates are currently applied at a segment level rather than per individual variant. This is the area we are working to improve with licensed valuation data. It is an estimate, and we label it as one.

Insurance

Insurance is estimated at approximately 2.1% of the vehicle’s value per year, divided into a monthly figure. This is an actuarial baseline, not a personal quote — your actual premium depends on your age, location, driving history, claims record and chosen excess. For an exact figure you would need a quote from an insurer.

Maintenance

Each vehicle carries a maintenance score reflecting how cheap or expensive it tends to be to service and repair. A higher score means lower running costs. We translate that score into a monthly maintenance estimate, grounded in South African vehicle operating-cost benchmarks. A vehicle that is cheap to maintain lands near the bottom of the range; a costlier one sits higher.

This is a modelled estimate based on each vehicle’s class and characteristics, not a quote from a specific dealer’s service menu.

Licence disc

South African licence fees are based on a vehicle’s tare (kerb) weight and vary by province. Our dataset does not yet carry tare weight for every vehicle, so we estimate the licence fee using body type as a proxy for size — a hatchback pays less than a double cab, which pays less than a truck. This is a deliberate approximation and one of the inputs we plan to make precise with weight-and-province-based data.

Drive Score

The Drive Score rates how a vehicle stacks up against others in its own segment (SUVs against SUVs, hatchbacks against hatchbacks, and so on). It combines four equally-weighted sub-scores, each ranked within the segment:

• Value — monthly cost to own versus segment peers.
• Efficiency — fuel consumption and CO₂ versus the segment.
• Reliability — based on the maintenance score.
• Practicality — seats and drivetrain.

A score of 50 is roughly average for the segment; higher is better. Segments need a minimum number of vehicles to be scored fairly, so a small handful of niche vehicles do not carry a Drive Score. We currently exclude resale from the score because our depreciation data is not yet precise enough to rank individual vehicles on it fairly — we would rather omit a number than publish one we cannot stand behind.

Sources & updates

Fuel prices are refreshed monthly from published South African fuel-price data. Vehicle specifications come from manufacturer figures. Insurance, maintenance, licence and depreciation use the transparent models described above. We are actively working to replace our estimated inputs — particularly depreciation and licence fees — with licensed South African valuation and regulatory data, so that more of these figures move from “reasonable estimate” to “sourced fact.”