2011 Lowest True Cost To Own^®

Edmunds.com is pleased to present the 2011 True Cost to Own^® (TCO) Awards for model year 2011 vehicles. This annual award recognizes vehicles with the lowest overall cost of ownership in their respective segments. It builds on Edmunds' proprietary True Cost to Own^® (TCO^®) data, which since 2002 has informed car-shoppers about the total five-year cost of owning each new vehicle.

To develop this year's list of award-winning cars, we started by gathering all of the necessary data, and then applied our TCO^® algorithms to estimate the five-year cost of owning each model year 2011 new vehicle currently in the market. We compared TCO^® data for these vehicles for the period from July 29, 2010 to April 14, 2011 to reveal the value leaders. This list is similar to our monthly Lowest True Cost to Own^® (TCO^®) list. But in developing this annual list, we didn't just consider vehicles that have the lowest costs for any particular month. Instead, we identified those vehicles that have consistently maintained the lowest ownership costs.

The result is our list of vehicles with the lowest overall ownership cost in their respective segments. A model's competitive segment was determined by its body type and the sales-weighted average MSRP of all available styles (excluding destination charges) of that model's body type.

For more information on how we calculate TCO^®, and the assumptions that we use, see our About TCO article.

See our monthly Lowest True Cost to Own^®.