Cost of owning a car in Ontario, by model

An advertised MSRP is not what leaves your account. Freight, pre-delivery inspection, the federal air conditioning excise tax, HST and your plates all land on top of it, and on these 23 nameplates that takes the cheapest way in from $28,884 for the Hyundai Elantra to $66,965 for the GMC Sierra. Each page below works out what the car then costs a month to actually own.

A model appears here only where every trim price, fee and paint colour could be read off a published Canadian page and dated. Each figure carries its own source and its own confidence on the model’s page, because a nameplate can mix a manufacturer price for the base trim with a third-party price for the rest and you are entitled to see which is which.

These are new-car prices from the manufacturer. For what a car costs to run in a particular place, insurance and all, the city cost pages hold the same question one Ontario city at a time.

Drive-away is the manufacturer’s asking price with Ontario tax and plate and permit issuance added by the same engine that runs the calculator. It excludes the dealer administration fee and the Ontario tire stewardship levy, both of which Ontario’s all-in advertising rule already puts inside a dealer’s advertised price, and any incentive or negotiation. A dealer’s written quote is the number that counts.