How we calculate 1,00,000 km
cost of ownership

The horizon

Every figure on the site is the cost of running one car for 1,00,000 km at 12,000 km per year, which is 8.3 years of ownership. Change the distance on the site and every downstream cost — services, insurance renewals, tyres, tolls — recomputes against the new duration.

What is counted

• On-road price: ex-showroom, state RTO tax, registration and FASTag, first-year insurance, and 1% TCS above ₹10 lakh ex-showroom
• Fuel or electricity over the full distance, at real-world efficiency
• Scheduled services from the manufacturer's own interval table
• Unscheduled repairs and consumables
• Tyre replacements, by body type
• Insurance renewals for every year after the first
• 12V auxiliary battery replacements
• Highway tolls and FASTag, when enabled
• Minus resale value at the end of the period

What is not counted

• Parking, fines, and accident repairs — too site-specific to model honestly
• Loan interest, unless you switch financing on (default: off, so the headline figure is a cash purchase)
• Inflation and fuel-price drift. Every future cost is in today's rupees, which understates the true nominal spend

Real-world mileage

ARAI figures are certified numbers from a test cycle, not observations from a road. We apply a fuel-specific derate to get a usable figure. The ARAI number is certified; the real-world number is modelled. Where an owner-reported figure exists in our data we use that instead of the derate.

Electric range is derated the same way: the claimed range is multiplied by the EV factor, and charging losses are applied on top at 88% efficiency. Energy is priced on a 70/30 home-to-public-fast-charging split.

Resale — the assumption most worth arguing about

Resale is the single largest swing in the model, so here it is in full. The percentage below is retention against ex-showroom price at 1,00,000 km. Depreciation is then on-road price minus that resale value, which means the effective loss is larger than the percentage suggests, because taxes and insurance paid at purchase are never recovered.

Retention is set per model. 102 of 163 models here are computed from real used-car listings: listings bucketed by model year, median asking price taken against today's ex-showroom price, discounted for the gap between what a dealer asks and what a seller actually banks, then normalised to 1,00,000 km. The other 61 have no used market to measure — too new, or sold in too small numbers — and fall back to their brand's median, marked estimated below.

One thing worth being explicit about: retention here is against today's ex-showroom price, not what the car cost when it launched. Published figures almost always use the launch price, which quietly counts years of car-price inflation as value the owner retained. That is why those numbers look so much kinder than these.

These are model-level rates, not per-variant auction data. A well-kept car with full service history beats them; a car with four owners and no records does worse. You can switch depreciation off entirely on the site to see the pure running cost, which is the honest way to compare if you intend to keep the car for life.

Service and maintenance

Servicing is set per model, not per brand. Where a schedule is published we normalise it — the actual interval, the actual line items, corrected for what each dealer's quote includes. Models without a reachable schedule take the median of the schedules for their price band and fuel, and are marked estimated below.

On top of scheduled servicing we add a per-model reserve for unscheduled repairs and consumables — brake pads, bulbs, wipers, the things that are certain in aggregate and unpredictable individually. It runs from ₹0.10/km to ₹1.50/km by model; the median car reserves ₹45,120 over 1,00,000 km.

Tyres

Insurance, battery, tolls

Insurance. First-year comprehensive cover is part of the on-road price. Every subsequent year is charged at the variant's annual renewal estimate with a 0.92 factor applied, reflecting the no-claim discount most owners actually accumulate. Over 8.3 years that is the first year plus 7 renewals.

Auxiliary battery. The 12V battery is replaced every 4 years by default, at the variant's replacement cost.

Tolls and FASTag. ₹4,800 per year when enabled, scaled to the ownership duration. This is a toggle, not a constant — a city-only car should have it off, and turning it off lowers every figure accordingly.

Fuel and electricity prices

Prices are per city, not national averages, because state taxes move them materially. These are the rates the calculator is using right now:

Known limitations

• Real-world mileage is modelled, not measured, except where owner data exists
• Resale is model-level, not variant-level
• Costs are in today's rupees, with no inflation applied
• RTO tax uses published state slabs; individual RTOs occasionally differ
• A small number of expensive hybrids and EVs return a total below their on-road price. That is a real result, not an error — their resale recovery exceeds their running costs over 1,00,000 km