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About this tool
Estimate yearly savings from moving to a smaller car or a single-vehicle household, including fuel, insurance, depreciation and payback.
This calculator compares the full annual cost of running your vehicles today against running one smaller vehicle instead, and reports the yearly saving, the fuel and CO2 avoided, and how long the switch takes to pay for itself. Each vehicle is costed the way a total-cost-of-ownership model does it: fuel from distance divided by fuel economy, plus insurance, maintenance, parking and depreciation charged on the vehicle's current market value rather than its original price. The trips that lose a vehicle are priced too, through an added cab or public-transport line, so the saving is not flattered by pretending they disappear.
Open Vehicle Downsizing Savings on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Enter the values you already know.
Fine-tune the options to match your scenario.
Read the result and use it in your planning or reporting.
The largest cost of owning a car is charged on today's market value, not ignored.
An added cab and transit line stops the saving from being overstated.
Shows the break-even month alongside litres and kilograms of CO2 avoided.
Even a lightly used second car carries its fixed costs in full: insurance, road-side annual maintenance, parking, and depreciation of roughly 10-15% of its current value each year. A car worth ₹6 lakh losing 12% a year is shedding ₹72,000 in value before a single litre of fuel is burnt, which is usually far more than the fuel it saves.
No. If the smaller car is bought new at a high price, its depreciation can exceed the fuel, insurance and servicing it saves — a newer vehicle loses more rupees per year than an older one even at the same percentage. Downsizing saves most when the replacement is already owned, or is bought used at a price close to what the outgoing car sells for.
Add fuel, insurance, maintenance, parking and annual depreciation for the year, then divide by the kilometres driven in that year. Low-mileage vehicles look expensive on this measure because the fixed costs spread over few kilometres, which is exactly why a car driven under about 5,000 km a year is often cheaper to replace with cabs.
Burning a litre of petrol releases about 2.31 kg of CO2 and a litre of diesel about 2.68 kg, so the saving is the litres avoided multiplied by that factor. Cutting 250 litres a year of petrol avoids roughly 578 kg of CO2 — tank-to-wheel only, excluding the emissions from producing and delivering the fuel.
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