If you’re a fan of vans, the Dodge Grand Caravan is likely on the list of vehicles you’d like to have, or at least admire. It’s one of the company’s best-selling vehicles and is a highly competitive van on the market. However, like many vans, it hides a steep cost of over $1,200 per year in maintenance and fuel costs.
The Caravan is known for eating away at your gas tank, which means that you can expect to find yourself at a gas station more often than you’d probably like to. It’s a highly reliable, safe, and spacious van, but some owners complain about several minor electrical problems with the windows and switches. Still, it’s a competitive van, and that’s highly respectable.
BMW Z4
BMW’s Z4 model is what happens when you take an extremely powerful German engine, and put it on one tiny vehicle. The result is a fast, sleek, and aggressive vehicle, which happens to also be a convertible. The base cost of the Z4 is around $50,000, which keeps it as a vehicle for mostly upper-middle-class Americans living in wealthy neighborhoods.
The first drawback to the Z4 is its less-than-stellar gas mileage. You’d expect a car this small to drink much less fuel than it does considering its size. Additionally, its convertible soft-top can break down over time, which will result in one extremely costly repair. Still, by taking one look at the car, you can imagine how all of this can easily escape consumers' minds.
Chevrolet Impala
While Chevrolet often likes to brag about the several reliability reports it has won over the years, these reports were mostly self-paid and were created by the brand itself. Furthermore, Chevys aren’t as reliable as they might want you to believe, which is one of the reasons that the company is discontinuing its popular Impala model in 2020.
Owning one of these will set you back around $13,000 or more over a full decade, and that’s just for the costs of maintenance. The car is known for having various issues with transmission pressure failure and various reports of keys that get stuck in the car’s ignition. Now that's not very reliable at all.
BMW M5
We just covered the BMW M6, one of the baddest vehicles you’ll find on the road. But what about its young brother, the BMW M5? When we compare them in terms of performance, both run exceptionally well. The M5 is somewhat cheaper but is still incredibly well-made. However, this is a costly car to own, and let’s not even get started on its incredible repair costs.
The M5 has very bad gas mileage, which makes it a huge drain on your wallet when it comes to fuel costs. However, we promised not to get into the details of just how expensive its repairs were, but let’s just say you’re better off buying a few new iPhones when you consider just how pricey some of these repairs are.
Chevrolet Corvette
The Corvette is one of the world’s most recognized and beloved supercars. It’s extremely fast and beautiful and it makes one of the most aggressive engine noises you can find on the market. The supercar is also extremely affordable relative to its performance and status, as a new model will cost you around $55,000 at base cost. When you’re actually careful not to crash this monster into oblivion, annual upkeep costs are surprisingly low.
You can expect to pay around $1,200 annually for maintaining the Corvette, including various frequent visits for oil changes and other minor repairs. What really costs a lot of money is having to replace your clutch and other parts, which is often caused by overusing the Corvette. These repairs and fixes will likely end up costing you thousands of dollars on average.