Cost of ownership calculator

How this works

The arithmetic is deliberately simple enough to check by hand. Total cost is energy plus maintenance plus insurance plus depreciation plus any upfront extras, over the period you choose.

• Energy — total miles divided by fuel economy, times fuel price. For electric, miles divided by 100, times kWh per 100 miles, times your electricity rate.
• Depreciation — purchase price minus what you expect to sell it for. This is usually the largest single line and the one most comparisons leave out.
• Maintenance — a per-mile figure covering servicing, brakes and tyres. Electric vehicles are generally lower here, though not as much lower on a heavy work vehicle as on a car, because tyres and brakes still wear and a loaded vehicle wears them faster.

The starting numbers are plausible placeholders for a Southern California work vehicle, nothing more. They are not researched figures for any specific model, and they are not advice. The calculator is only as good as what you put into it, which is why every field is editable and why we would rather you changed all of them.

What this deliberately does not include

A calculator that pretends to model everything produces a confident number that is wrong in ways you cannot see. These are the things we have left out on purpose, and they matter.

Downtime

Frequently the largest real cost of a work vehicle and the hardest to model. A truck off the road stops a crew earning, and that figure is specific to your business — a two-day wait for a part costs a mobile mechanic something quite different from what it costs a landscaping crew with a spare vehicle.

Financing

This compares cash cost. If you are financing, the interest is real money and belongs in your own calculation, and it weighs against the more expensive vehicle regardless of what the running costs say.

Tax treatment

Depreciation schedules, deductions and any incentives you qualify for can move the answer substantially, and they depend on your business rather than on the vehicle. Ask your accountant before treating any comparison as final.

Charging practicalities

The electricity price field assumes you can charge where and when you need to. If your vehicles park somewhere without power, or your duty cycle needs a midday top-up at public rates, the electric case changes completely.

The upfit

A service body, dump or refrigeration unit carries its own cost, its own maintenance and its own effect on energy use. Use the upfront field for the difference between builds, and raise the maintenance figure if the body needs regular servicing.

Payload consequences

Battery weight reduces what an electric vehicle can carry. If that pushes you up a weight class, the comparison is no longer like for like and the cost difference is not the whole story.

How to read the answer

The useful output is not which column is lowest. It is how far apart they are and which assumption is doing the work. If petrol and electric come out within a few thousand dollars over five years, the decision is not really about cost — it is about charging access, payload, and whether a given vehicle exists in the configuration you need.

Change one number at a time and watch what moves. Annual mileage and fuel price are usually the two that flip the answer, which is why a business running 30,000 miles a year reaches a different conclusion from one running 8,000 — and why a comparison copied from someone else’s fleet tells you almost nothing about your own.