Buying a Car by the Numbers: Total Cost of Ownership, Loan vs Lease & Resale Value

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Build the value curve of a new hybrid car with a steep first year and a declining-balance rate after it, then read off the resale value after five years and what the car loses per month while Nadia owns it.
• Price the dealer's 60-month loan with PMT, find what the loan costs in interest, split the first year's payments into interest and principal with IPMT and PPMT, and work out what Nadia still owes after twelve months.
• Rebuild the dealer's lease quote from the residual value and the money factor, price Nadia's extra kilometres and decide with one IF whether she should buy the car or hand it back at the end.
• Put three ways of getting the same car on one footing: what Nadia pays, what she owes or gets back after three years, and the interest her savings would have earned, then pick the cheapest option.
• Turn consumption, energy prices, charging losses and tyre life into a cost per 100 km and a yearly running cost for each of the three cars.
• Combine depreciation, financing and running costs into the total cost of ownership of each car over five years, then express it per month and per kilometre to see which car is really cheapest for Nadia.
• Split each car's cost into a fixed part per year and a variable part per km, solve for the distance at which the cheaper petrol car and the efficient electric car cost the same, and let an IF name the winner at Nadia's distance.
• Price one more year with Nadia's old wagon – lost value, expected repairs, fuel and fixed costs – against the first year of the new hybrid, then chart a five-year outlook to see when switching starts to pay.