Insurance & Finance on Car Things

The Real 5-Year Cost of Owning India's Best-Selling Cars

contact@carthings.in (Satish Kumar) — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Most people choose a car by two numbers: the price and the mileage. Both are the wrong place to look. The real cost of a car is what it loses in value while you own it, plus what you spend keeping it running. When you add those up, the ranking flips: the cheapest car to buy is often not the cheapest to own.

We ran the numbers on 14 of India’s best-selling cars over a typical 5-year, 60,000 km ownership, and found the single biggest cost is not fuel at all. It is depreciation, which works out to around 65% of the total on average. Here is the full study, with the cars that quietly cost you the least, and the ones that drain far more than their sticker price suggests.

Road Tax by State in India: Where the Same Car Costs ₹1 Lakh More

contact@carthings.in (Satish Kumar) — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 06:00:00 +0000

Two people buy the exact same car, at the same ex-showroom price. One lives in Himachal Pradesh, the other in Karnataka. The Karnataka buyer pays about ₹1.15 lakh more to put that car on the road, on a ₹10 lakh car, purely because of state road tax. Nothing about the car is different. Only the state is.

We pulled the road tax rate for all 36 states and union territories and worked out what the same car actually costs to register in each one. This is data most buyers never see in one place, because dealers only ever quote your own city. Here is the full picture, ranked cheapest to most expensive, plus the fuel twist that lets EV buyers skip road tax almost everywhere.