DEPRECIATION DEBUNKED
The cars to buy, and avoid, if you pockeytcare about your hip
Want to know how much your new car really costs?
THE PRICES listed in Showroom from page 136 are what you’ll need to outlay to park a given model in your garage, but they are not the cost of owning that car, as our annual Gold Star Value awards reveal starting on page 104.
Running costs such as fuel, insurance and servicing contribute significantly to the cost of ownership. However for most models the cost of depreciation by far outweighs these expenses.
Spoiler alert: the Kia Picanto S won the Gold Star Value City Cars category and, with a top score of 93.3 out of 100, it could be considered the overall Gold Star Value Awards winner too.
The $14,190 Kia is cheaper to own than the vast majority of new cars, and its 46 percent Glass’s three-year resale is pretty good by class standards. Yes, losing more than half its value is considered a decent result as depreciation goes.
This means the Picanto will lose 54 percent of its value in the first three years, or around $7663. In the same time, the average Australian driver will spend about $2243 fuelling the Kia, $1860 on insurance, and $969 on three services, according to Kia’s cappedprice scheme. That’s $5072 in total – a figure that the depreciation over the same period tops by around 50 percent. So the real cost of owning the Kia for the first three years isn’t $14,190, it’s $12,734, or $4245 per year (without factoring in incidentals, such as tyre wear) which almost makes us want to go and buy an Opal/myki card…
This is the cost for someone who has bought the car outright. If there’s a car loan, any nondeductible interest payments should be added too, which can increase overall cost considerably.
In a popular medium SUV such as 2017’s $45K category-winning Kia Sportage GT Line, the costs of fuel, insurance and servicing rise to about $7000 over three years, but depreciation based on the Kia’s 53 percent three-year resale figure skyrockets to $21,615.30. The total three-year ownership cost of the Kia is about $30K. And remember, this is for a reasonably priced family wagon that our analysis indicates is the best in its class in terms of minimising your cost of ownership. We hate to say it, but a Goget is starting to sound ideal.
The panels to the right provide the best- and worst-case scenarios of all the cars put through our Gold Star Value analysis, in terms of resale and the dollar cost of depreciation. In the first three years, the best of them will shed roughly the value of a good, used small car, while the worst will burn the equivalent of a house deposit… in Sydney.