Yeah, if you want to take it out past 5 years, you can make your own estimates. You just won't have the benefit of Edmunds' data. You are right that you will

Yeah, if you want to take it out past 5 years, you can make your own estimates. You just won't have the benefit of Edmunds' data. You are right that you will save on transaction costs if you do not buy a newer car every five years. You're also a bit of a special case in that it seems you only put about 5,000 miles per year on a car. I'd estimate your TCO on that car to be about $2K/year, which is pretty frugal. It wouldn't make sense for you to buy a new car, because you'd be losing depreciation to age faster than you'd be wearing the car out. At 20 years, you'd have only 100,000 miles on a car that would be essentially fully depreciated. It is pretty tough, though, to get the cost of ownership on a car driven 15,000 miles/year below about $3,500/year. By comparison a new compact will be $5k to $6K per year in total cost of ownership. So if you are wondering why gold doubloons are not accumulating in the chests in your basement that much faster than they are for the guy who drives a new Honda Civic, that's why!