Welcome to the latest installment of Fleet Data Depot, which provides snapshots of information, trends, and analysis relevant to the fleet market.

The total cost of ownership experts at Vincentric deliver another quarterly update on ownership costs for fleets. These fleet cost-per-mile calculations are for the second quarter of 2024.

This analysis is based on vehicles driven 20,000 miles per year for three years. As usual, Vincentric calculates its standard eight cost elements: depreciation, financing, fees and taxes, fuel, insurance, maintenance, opportunity cost, and repairs.

Ownership Costs Level Off in Q2

For the last 10 months, costs per mile in all vehicle categories rose at steady but uneven rates. From August 2023 to April 2024, costs per mile in the Pickup category rose 11.4%, Luxury SUVs 9.7%, SUVs 8.8%, and Luxury Cars 7.3%. Cars only experienced slight increases.

However, for the second quarter of 2024, ownership costs leveled off in most vehicle categories:

• Luxury Car: decreased by ~0.7%

• Luxury SUVs: No change

• Passenger Cars: No change

• Pickups: No change

• SUVs: increased by ~2.4%

This general leveling off occurred against significant increases across all vehicle categories in the fees & taxes cost category, from 2% to 29%.

These cost hikes are primarily a result of Vincentric removing the Commercial Clean Vehicle tax credit from the fees & taxes category, which affected about 800 MY22-MY24 vehicles in the U.S. Fleet database.

This tax credit has complex qualification criteria and does not always apply in every instance for each vehicle model.

Depreciation Shows Positive Trend

Additionally, Vincentric has started to receive MY-25 vehicles from its data provider since last quarter, affecting the costs for all vehicle categories. It generally follows that newer model years have slightly higher MSRPs than the previous year, along with higher residual values. 

For example, depreciation — the largest of the eight cost elements — improved by 4.8% for Luxury Cars, 3.3% for Luxury SUVs, and 2.2% for Passenger Cars.

These depreciation cost improvements mostly negated the fees & taxes cost increases, resulting in small, if any, fluctuations in overall cost per mile.