Owning a car is a big deal for all of us that grew up with car magazines and websites, but also for the average person who needs to travel for work or leisure. Most of us know the feeling of saving money in order to buy a car while calculating all of the expenses associated with its use and maintenance. But which is the cheapest country to own a car? Well, according to a new study by scrapcarcomparison, this title goes to Australia, leaving the US in second place and Denmark in third.
For more realistic insights, the study didn’t only include the average price of cars, but also the cost of insurance, repairs, and fuel, in order to see the difference in the total cost of ownership. Then, they compared this cost with the average yearly salary of each country to see how affordable a car could be for the average individual.
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The results show that Australia is quite the perfect place for automotive enthusiasts, with only 49.48% of the annual salary needed to own and run a car. The United States comes second with 54.87% of the yearly income needed for an average car, followed by Denmark (60.34%), Canada (64.40%), and Sweden (75.84%) rounding up the top 5 places. Further down the list, we find Germany (78.44%), the Netherlands (84.65%), France (87.00%), the United Kingdom (89.36%), and Finland (91.58%).
As you can see, the difference between the first and the last country in the top 10 list is quite impressive, showing how lucky Australians and Americans are compared to the rest of the world in terms of car ownership. However, before making assumptions you have to see the other end of the spectrum, with the 10 most expensive countries to own a car.
The worst results come from Turkey, where you need 652.29% of the yearly income to own and use a car. This makes it 13 times more expensive than Australia. Surprisingly, Turkey has an annual production of more than 100,000 passenger cars per month, with local factories from Fiat, Renault, Toyota, Honda, etc. A total of 21 million vehicles are driven on the Turkish roads from a population of 82 million people.
The second most expensive country concerning car ownership is Argentina (515.77%) followed by Columbia (508.93%), Uruguay (443.68%), and Brazil (441.89%). This means that 4 out of 5 worst countries to own a car are located in South America. From the sixth to the tenth place we have Ukraine (413.78%), Guatemala (355.94%), Russia (290.04%), Mexico (285.20%), and Costa Rica (269.83%).
While the results are interesting, we should take them with a pinch of salt. Firstly, the study included only 40 out of the 195 countries in the world because of poor data availability. Secondly, the calculations are based on the cost of a brand new Volkswagen Golf and a Toyota Corolla, without taking into consideration the cost of used cars in each market which could significantly alter the results. Lastly, the average salary could be significantly higher than the minimum wage of each country which would probably be a better indicator for this study.
