Maybe you’re driving your dream car or maybe you don’t even like cars, either way with a bit of top-level analysis and a few tools at your disposal you’ll at least know which car is right for you.

As a starting point, we should consider the difference between price and cost. Price is what you pay for an item and the cost is what it well, costs to keep it going.

“Exposing the true cost to own” as Edmunds puts it is drug out into the light through there cost analysis tool found at this link: Edmunds Tool

Edmunds’ True Cost to own (TCO) section gives a summary of the true cost to own for 5 years broken down by year into the following categories:

• Depreciation
• taxes & fees
• maintenance
• repairs
• financing
• insurance
• fuel

And summarized into these categories:

• True cost to own
• total cash price
• average cost per mile

Not to be outdone, AOL offers a snazzy tool with the same idea that compares up to five vehicles at a time. AOL Tool

For we visual types that like colors and graphs there’s Yahoo’s version: Yahoo! Tool

Run some numbers through these tools and see what your current car is costing you versus potential cars; it might be interesting to see which vehicles are in reach that you might never have considered.