A car costs more than its price tag
What will a used car cost you, not just to buy, but to own?
Every price on this site adds up the same way a real receipt would: what you pay, minus what you get back when you sell, plus fuel, tax and repairs in between. Here is one real example, using our data for a Peugeot 108 first registered 2020-2022.
Find your budget ↓Peugeot 108, 2020-2022
- Buy at 2020-2022
- 36.831 kr
- Sell 6 years later, you get back
- +30.822 kr
- Value lost
- 6.009 kr
- Fuel, 6 years
- 50.576 kr
- Ownership tax, 6 years
- 7.680 kr
- Repairs, 6 years
- 5.699 kr
- Total, 6 years
- 69.963 kr
- Per year
- 11.661 kr/year
How we got here
We turned two large public datasets into one number per car
- 1
Started from 1.778.307 Danish cars
We pulled the Danish Motor Registry's public vehicle data, kept petrol, diesel and hybrid passenger cars first registered between 2010 and 2022, and matched 245 models against UK MOT test records to measure how often each one breaks down.
- 2
48.220.796 MOT tests, mined for failure patterns
Reliability comes from the UK's public MOT test archive, adjusted so a heavily-driven car isn't unfairly compared to a lightly-driven one of the same age.
- 3
Priced each car and checked it against the Danish market
We built a price estimate for each model at four different ages, then checked it against asking prices we looked up on Danish listing sites by hand and corrected for the gap. Full pricing method
- 4
What you'd pay, once fuel, tax and repairs are added up
Fuel cost, Danish ownership tax and an estimated repair cost combine with resale value to give one total cost of ownership per car. Cars are grouped into five price brackets and ranked inside each one, so you're only ever comparing cars you could afford.
What the numbers say
Among the best-ranked cars in each bracket, Up to 50,000 DKK has the lowest cost per year to own, about 16.415 kr a year. Cheap can mean cheap to buy. Here, it also means cheap to keep.
Find your budget
Pick a price bracket
Each bracket ranks cars you could buy for that budget, best value first.
Or ignore the price tag
Some cars cost more to buy but pay part of it back every year in fuel and tax. See every car ranked by running cost alone