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The Street

Samanda Dorger

30 Cars With the Cheapest Gas and Insurance Costs

Insurance Honda Hyundai Toyota Nissan United States Mazda Subaru Ford Mitsubishi

The U.S. is a land of cars, but cars have become an expensive necessity with loads of financial liability.

The average new car in America sold for a record high $49,507 in December, according to Kelley Blue Book, and that price is just shy of what the median American worker brings home in a year: about $54,132.

The average monthly car loan payment in the U.S. hovers around $700-$748 for new vehicles -- depending on whom you ask, and $525 for used ones, and interest rates have been creeping up.

The price of a car is just the beginning. From there, cars lose value and they keep asking you to spend more money on them. You have to pay to insure them, pay to fuel them, and pay to keep them running.

This list looks at the cost of insurance and gas for some of America’s most popular cars. They range in price from $16,645 to around $35,400 for gas cars.

But these days, the choices for inexpensive cars are fewer. Two of the lowest-cost cars on the top of this list are no longer in production, the Honda Fit and the Toyota Yaris. These subcompact workhorses were low-priced and got good mileage, and are among the cheapest cars to operate.

To compile this list of cheapest cars to run, Zutobi, an online driver-education resource for new drivers, used a variety of sources to find the most popular vehicles, cost of gas per mile, average miles driven per year, and average insurance rates for each vehicle.

There are five electric cars at the end of this list, ranging in starting prices from $25,600 and up to $46,895. Zutobi used the same calculators for the EVs, except instead of the gas cost they used ChooseEV’s EV Savings Calculator to find the car’s Utility kWh rate for the estimated costs per mile.

Averages are based on a 40-year-old male driver who commutes 12 miles to work, with policy limits of $100,000 for injury liability for one person, $300,000 for all injuries and $50,000 for property damage in an accident, and a $500 deductible on collision and comprehensive insurance, and uninsured-motorist coverage. Rates were averaged across multiple ZIP codes and insurance companies, so your own rates can be much different depending on a variety of factors.

The gas cost is based on the U.S. average of 12,724 miles a year.

Based on Zutobi’s research, here are 25 of the cheapest cars to run, followed by the five EVs.