Lowest True Cost to Own Awards

Published: 05/19/2010

Since 2002 we have published our proprietary True Cost to Own^® (TCO^®) data to tell you the total five-year cost of owning each new vehicle.

Now, for the first time, we present our Annual True Cost to Own^® (TCO^®) Awards (for model year 2010 vehicles).

We started by gathering all of the necessary data, and then applied our TCO^® algorithms to estimate the five-year cost of owning each model year 2010 new vehicle currently in the market. We compared TCO^® data for these vehicles over the past ten months, from July 2009 thru April 2010, to reveal the value leaders over that period. While similar to our monthly Lowest True Cost to Own^® (TCO^®) list, we didn't just consider vehicles that have the lowest costs for any particular month, but instead identified those that have consistently maintained the lowest ownership costs.

The result is our list of vehicles with the lowest overall ownership cost in their respective segments. A model's competitive segment was determined by (i) its body type, and (ii) the sales-weighted average MSRP of all available styles (excluding destination charges) of that model's body type.

For more information on how we calculate TCO^®, and the assumptions that we use, see our About TCO article.