For the business types, this is called total cost of ownership.

Between depreciation of resale value, the costs for fuel, maintenance, storage, insurance, etc. The actual cost of owning a car is significantly higher than what it says on the sticker.

I’m not a business type, but I took classes about it in college and some of the stuff I read was specifically saying that vehicles were easily one of the biggest cost sinks out of everything you will ever own. Aka, they have the most significant unrecoverable costs associated with them.

If you think about it for even a few seconds, that’s absolutely true, the vehicle loses a large portion of its value simply by being used at all. The fuel doesn’t add value to the investment, the maintenance doesn’t either. With another large investment, such as a house/real estate, if you do upgrades/maintenance/whatever to the property, the value of the house generally increases, the property generally doesn’t lose value over time, though it’s widely considered one of the worst types of investments to hold property for capital gains in the value of the property, it’s at least moving in the right direction. Install/repair the HVAC in a car, bfd. No significant change in value. Repair/upgrade the HVAC in a house, you can recover most of that cost if you need to sell the house.

Vehicles suck.

I wouldn’t own one except that I live in the middle of fucking nowhere. We neither have bus, train, nor taxi service where I live, and the Uber/Lyft/whatever ride apps might as well laugh in my face when I load them.

If you live anywhere with a functional transit system, buying a car is generally a bad move, financially.

Probably the only cost I would consider worse than a car is renting a place to live, unfortunately, many don’t have the choice of owning their living space, and since everyone needs somewhere to call home, you don’t really have a choice. With a vehicle, you don’t have to own one, as long as you live somewhere with alternatives available.