DeelaryThe true cost of a car is never the purchase price
Published 21 September 2026
Ask a dealer what a car cost and you usually get one number: what they paid for it. That number is the least interesting one in the whole deal.
The interesting number is what the car costs by the day it drives away. It is almost always higher than people remember, and the gap is where thin months come from.
What actually goes into a car
A typical imported vehicle picks up costs in six places, and only the first one is obvious.
| Cost | Typical range | Easy to forget? |
|---|---|---|
| Purchase price | — | No |
| Transport and shipping | $300–1,200 | Sometimes |
| Duties, customs, auction fees | $200–2,000 | Often |
| Mechanical repairs | $0–2,500 | No |
| Detailing, paint, tyres | $80–600 | Yes |
| Listings and photos | $20–150 | Almost always |
The bottom three lines are the ones dealers skip when they do the sums in their head. Individually they look like rounding errors. Together they routinely add 8–15% on top of the purchase price — and margin on a used car is often only 12–20% to begin with.
A $500 detail and a $120 listing on a $9,000 car is not a rounding error. It is a third of your margin.
The cost nobody invoices you for
There is a seventh cost, and no one sends a bill for it: the money the car ties up while it waits for a buyer.
If $10,000 sits in a car for three months, that capital cannot buy the next one. For a dealer turning three or four cars a month, one slow vehicle is a missed purchase. That is real money, just invisible money.
You do not need a finance degree to account for it. Track the days each car has been in inventory and look at the list once a week. Anything past 60 days is telling you something about your pricing or your buying, and the sooner you hear it the cheaper the lesson.
How to count it properly
Three habits separate dealers who know their margin from dealers who hope for it.
1. Log the expense the day it happens
Not at month end, not when the accountant asks. The receipt in your pocket on Tuesday is the one you will have forgotten by Friday. Photograph it while you are still standing at the counter.
2. Attach every cost to a specific car
"$400 of tyres last month" tells you nothing. "$400 of tyres on the Passat" tells you the Passat earned $400 less than you thought. Costs that float free of a vehicle always end up understating the cars that actually consumed them.
3. Set the asking price from total cost, never from purchase price
Decide your target margin — say 15% — and apply it to the full figure. A car bought at $9,000 that took on $1,100 of costs needs about $11,600 to hit that target, not $10,350. Those $1,250 are the difference between a good month and a flat one.
What this looks like in practice
Take a real shape of deal. Purchase $12,500. Transport from Germany $500. Detailing $200. Listing $50. Total cost $13,250.
Ask $15,900 and the projected result is $2,650 — a margin of 16.7% on the sale price. Ask $14,500 because you only remembered the purchase price and "a bit of transport", and you have quietly given away half of the profit before a single customer has haggled.
The arithmetic is not hard. Remembering to do it on every car, for months on end, is the hard part. That is precisely why it belongs in software instead of in your head.
Deelary keeps total cost, asking price and projected margin on the same screen and updates them the second you add an expense. See how it works →