How much does a lifetime of new cars cost in depreciation?
On one illustrative pattern — a R400,000 car, replaced every five years, worth 45% of its price at each replacement — forty driving years lose R1,760,000 to depreciation alone. That is eight cycles of R220,000, in today’s rand, and not one cent of it ever appears as a debit order.
Depreciation is usually the largest cost a car carries and the only one with no monthly line item. The instalment, the insurance and the fuel all announce themselves every month. The value the car quietly sheds is settled once, at trade-in, as the gap between what it fetches and what it cost.
The cost with no debit order
Every other cost of running a car bills you. Finance takes its instalment on a fixed date, the insurer collects its premium, the fuel is paid for at the pump, and the service is invoiced on the day. All of it is visible, and all of it lands in the budget because it has to.
Depreciation does none of that. A car loses value in the background, on days it is driven and days it stands still, and sends nothing. The bill arrives once — as a trade-in offer, or an insurance payout after a write-off — in the form of a number lower than the owner expected. By then the cost has already been incurred, quietly, over years.
That is why it tends to be left out of the conversation about what a car costs. Not because it is small. Because nothing ever asked for it.
The cycle maths
A single car’s depreciation is one number. A replacement habit turns it into a repeating one. Take a worked example built entirely on stated assumptions — a R400,000 car, replaced every five years, worth 45% of its price when it goes, across a 40-year driving life:
- Value kept at replacement: R400,000 × 45% = R180,000
- Value lost per cycle: R400,000 − R180,000 = R220,000
- Whole cycles in 40 driving years: 40 ÷ 5 = 8
- Lifetime depreciation: 8 × R220,000 = R1,760,000
- Spread across those 40 years: R1,760,000 ÷ 480 months ≈ R3,667 a month
Every figure there comes out of the four inputs above it. The 45% is an illustrative assumption, not a market figure — real retained value swings widely by model, mileage and condition — and the whole thing sits in today’s rand, with no inflation and no investment growth modelled anywhere.
The R3,667 is worth a second look, because it is the same cost expressed as something a budget would recognise. Nobody pays it monthly. On this pattern, it is still being incurred monthly.
What moves the number
Two inputs do nearly all the work, and they pull against each other.
The first is how long each car is kept. Depreciation is commonly described as a curve rather than a straight line — steepest in a car’s earliest years, flattening as it ages. The first owner therefore carries the largest share of it, and a short replacement cycle means only ever being the first owner. Stretching the cycle keeps each car through its flatter years, where the value it gives up per year is smaller.
The second is what the car is worth when it goes. Keep a car twice as long and it retains a smaller share of its price at handover — but that smaller share is spread over twice the years. Which pattern loses more in total is not obvious from the outside; it is arithmetic, and it turns on the numbers put into it.
On the calculator’s illustrative defaults, the two patterns land like this: the five-year cycle at 45% retained loses R1,760,000 across 40 years, while a ten-year cycle at 25% retained loses R300,000 per car over four cycles — R1,200,000, a difference of R560,000. Both are stated assumptions rather than observations, and both change the moment the inputs do.
Running it on your own numbers
The calculator on this page takes the four inputs as adjustable settings rather than fixed ones: the price of the kind of car in question, how often it gets replaced, how many driving years are left to run, and how much value is assumed to survive each replacement. It then runs the same pattern twice — the cycle set, and a slower one alongside it — so the two lifetime totals sit next to each other.
It counts whole cycles only. Seven years of driving on a five-year cycle counts as one replacement, not one-and-a-bit, because a car half-way through a cycle has not been sold yet.
Where this sits next to the other two numbers
Depreciation is one of three separate car numbers, and they do not overlap. The monthly running stack — instalment, insurance, fuel, upkeep — is set out in "What does a car really cost — instalment, insurance, fuel — as a share of income?". The lifetime instalment total, what an unbroken car payment adds up to over a driving career, is in "What does always having a car payment cost?". This page covers the third: what the metal itself gives up in value along the way.
Added together they describe the same object from three angles — what it takes each month, what it takes across a lifetime, and what it loses while you own it. All three are knowable before signing, and none of them is the number on the windscreen.
Try it with your own numbers
Set a typical car price, a replacement cycle, how many driving years are left and how much value survives each replacement, to see what a lifetime of that pattern loses in depreciation — with a slower replacement cycle run alongside it for comparison. Today’s rand, illustrative assumptions, no growth modelled. Inputs stay on your device.
Your numbers stay on your device — nothing you type here is sent or stored. This is a generic guideline calculation, not advice. For advice, speak to a vetted, FSCA-registered planner.
Terms used on this page
- depreciation
- The process of an asset losing its monetary value over time due to wear and tear, age, or becoming outdated.
Reviewed July 2026