Compare cars
Compare cars on what they actually cost
Most comparisons stop at horsepower and a starting price. Neither one is what you pay. Pick two or three vehicles and we will line up estimated price, payment, fuel at your actual commute, resale strength and five-year cost to own — then say which one we would buy and who the other one is for.
Your side-by-side shows up here
You'll get price, payment, yearly fuel, five-year cost to own, seats, cargo and towing — with a winner in every row and a verdict at the end.
How to read a comparison
Horsepower is trivia. Cost to own is the decision.
Five-year cost to own is the real comparison
Two crossovers can sit within a few hundred dollars of each other on the sticker and be thousands apart after five years. The gap comes from depreciation and fuel, not features, and almost nobody compares it before signing.
We add depreciation from our resale curve, fuel or energy at your commute, and routine maintenance scaled to size and price. It is an estimate, and it is the single most useful line on the page.
Resale strength is a hidden cost
The brands that hold value cost more to buy and less to own. The brands that depreciate hard are cheap used bargains and expensive new purchases. Same car, opposite advice, depending on which side of the depreciation you are standing on.
That is why the results change when you switch between new and used pricing. It is not a bug — it is the whole point.
- Buying used, weak resale is your friend: someone else paid for the depreciation.
- Buying new and keeping it five years, strong resale returns money at trade-in.
- Leasing flips it again: strong residuals lower the payment, weak ones raise it.
What we will not pretend to know
We do not publish reliability scores, crash ratings or awards we did not earn the data for, and we do not quote live listing prices. Every figure here traces back to our published model or to a specification anyone can verify.
Where a vehicle has a known pattern worth checking — an engine history, a transmission service interval — we say so as something to check by VIN and in the service records, not as a verdict on the car in front of you.
Not sure what to compare? Start with the Car FinderWork out what to pay for the winner
Questions we get
Straight answers about comparing two cars.
Where do the comparison numbers come from?
Specifications such as seating, cargo volume, towing and combined MPG are from the manufacturer's published figures for recent model years. Prices, payments, depreciation and five-year cost to own are estimates from the published Car Dogs benchmark, not a market-data feed.
Why does the winner change when I change the commute miles?
Because fuel cost is real money. At a 20-mile daily round trip, a five-MPG difference is noise. At 90 miles a day it is over a thousand dollars a year, which is enough to flip the five-year cost to own between two otherwise similar vehicles.
Can I compare specific trims or VINs?
This page compares models, because that is the decision most people are actually making. Once you are down to a specific car, run its VIN through the Car Dogs Score for a price verdict and the VIN Check for open recalls and red flags.
Is the winner a paid placement?
No. The category winners are decided by the math on the page, and the written verdict is generated from those same figures. No manufacturer or dealer pays to win a comparison on this site.
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