Annual Lowest True Cost to Own® (TCO®)

The following is Edmunds.com's Annual True Cost to Own® (TCO®) Awards (for model year 2011 vehicles).

Edmunds.com started by gathering all of the necessary data, and then applied its TCO® algorithms to estimate the five-year cost of owning each model year 2011 new vehicle currently in the market. Edmunds.com compared TCO® data for these vehicles over the past ten months, from July 2010 thru April 2011, to reveal the value leaders over that period. While similar to the monthly Lowest True Cost to Own® (TCO®) list, Edmunds.com didn't just consider vehicles that have the lowest costs for any particular month, but instead identified those that have consistently maintained the lowest ownership costs.

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