How We Calculate Maintenance Costs

1. Routine service. Each vehicle page lists its routine services with a typical cost and interval. Intervals come from manufacturer maintenance schedules (Toyota's 10,000-mile oil interval, Honda's ~7,500-mile Maintenance Minder cadence, Tesla's official schedule of tire rotations every 6,250 miles, a cabin filter every 2 years and a brake-fluid check every 4). Pricing assumes an independent shop at the national midpoint of AAA's 2026 labor-rate survey (roughly $80–130/hour; dealers typically run $20–40 more). Each service is amortized per mile — cost ÷ interval × 12,000 miles/year — plus a $40/year floor for wipers, bulbs and top-offs.

2. Factory maintenance plans. Years covered by ToyotaCare (2 years/25,000 miles) or BMW Ultimate Care (3 years/36,000 miles) subtract the covered items — which is why new-Toyota curves start near zero and BMW curves stay artificially low until year 4.

3. Repairs by age. An age ramp adds expected out-of-warranty repair spend, near zero inside typical 3-year/36,000-mile bumper-to-bumper coverage and rising each year after. The ramp scales with each vehicle's major-repair probability, a parts-cost multiplier for luxury brands, and a 30% discount for EVs (fewer mechanical systems; batteries and drive units carry 8-year federal-mandated warranties).

The model is literally public: it runs as a script in this site's repository, and re-running it reproduces every figure on every page. The calculator then scales results by your mileage (wear factor 0.6 + 0.4 × miles ÷ 12,000) and shop choice (independent ×1.0, dealership ×1.3, DIY-leaning ×0.75).

The benchmark we check ourselves against is AAA's Your Driving Costs 2025, which puts maintenance, repair and tires at 11.04¢/mile averaged across 45 top-selling models (10.23¢ for small sedans up to 11.91¢ for medium sedans). ACI five-year totals deliberately land at roughly 25–45% of AAA's, for three reasons you should know about: AAA prices a comprehensive extended warranty into its figure (we model expected repairs instead), AAA assumes retail/dealer rates (we assume independent shops), and AAA assumes 15,000 miles/year against our 12,000 baseline. Neither number is "wrong" — AAA describes a fully-warrantied, dealer-serviced new car; ACI describes what a typical owner at an independent shop should budget. If you want the conservative end, AAA's figure is the ceiling.

Insurance context lines use the same study's national full-coverage average — $1,694/year for AAA's good-driver profile — scaled by a per-vehicle risk factor for segment, performance and parts cost. Market-wide averages from rate-comparison sites run higher (~$2,400–2,600/year) because they include riskier driver profiles; our per-vehicle figures are estimates for context, not quotes.

Included: scheduled maintenance, wear items (tires amortized per mile, brakes, filters, fluids), and expected age-related repairs. Excluded: fuel and charging, insurance premiums, collision damage, recalls and warranty work (no cost to the owner — check any vehicle's open recalls at NHTSA.gov), parking, tolls, taxes, and registration.

These are modeled estimates, not measurements of repair invoices. Per-vehicle differences within a segment rest on service-schedule facts and documented reliability patterns, but the dollar precision is the model's, not an audit's — treat $647 vs $654 as "about the same," not a real gap. Regional labor rates vary roughly ±25% around the national baseline. Documented-issue notes describe widely-reported patterns (service bulletins, recalls, extended warranties) and can be cross-checked at NHTSA; they are not predictions about any individual car. If your invoice history disagrees with our curve, your history wins. We do not copy figures from other cost websites — where our numbers differ from theirs, the difference is the method, which is why the method is public.