Marque

What a car really costs to own.

Buying a car turns on numbers nobody puts side by side. The sticker price is the one everybody argues about, and roughly the fourth most important. Over five years, what a car loses in value usually costs more than fuel, insurance and servicing put together — and it stays invisible until the day you sell it. Marque puts those numbers on one screen.

What it does

• Every car the EPA has ever rated. All 50,242 of them, model years 1984 to 2027, built into the app. Search "2015 tacoma" and get its eight trims. Filter to electric, 2020 or newer, over 100 MPGe and get 451 of them. No account and no signal required.
• What it really costs. Five years split into depreciation, fuel or charging, insurance, maintenance, repairs, taxes and loan interest.
• Your numbers, not defaults. Your mileage, your gas price, your home electricity rate, how much you charge in public, your APR and term. Change one and every figure in the app moves.
• Side by side. Up to four cars across twenty-odd rows with the best in each row marked. Rows where every car ties are left unmarked rather than inventing a winner.
• Fifty cars, judged. The ones most people are actually choosing between carry base price, cargo volume, towing, warranty terms, standard driver aids, and a plain verdict on what is good and what to weigh up.
• Federal crash ratings. NHTSA's five-star results, one row per tested body style. Configurations nobody has crashed are marked untested rather than scored zero.

What it doesn't do

It does not sell cars, and it is not connected to a dealer, a listings site or a finance company. Nothing in it is an offer or a quote.

It is also honest about what it cannot know. The EPA publishes fuel economy and emissions, not prices — so vehicles outside the curated fifty are costed for fuel only, and the app says so rather than inventing a number. Reliability, resale and servicing cost are graded judgements rather than measurements, and they are labelled as such wherever they appear. Incentives start at zero, because the rules change and depend on your income and the car.

Where the numbers come from

Fuel economy, engine, drivetrain and CO₂ figures come from the EPA's public fuel economy dataset, converted and shipped inside the app so it works with the radio off. Crash ratings come from the NHTSA Safety Ratings service, fetched when you open a car. Both are US government works in the public domain. Prices and the written verdicts are our own research and are marked as approximate on every screen that shows one.