This Is the Most Expensive State to Own a Car

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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This Is the Most Expensive State to Own a Car

© smontgom65 / iStock Editorial via Getty Images

The price of cars, both new and used, has risen at an unprecedented rate for well over a year. There are several reasons for this.

The primary reason for the new car price surge is simply a shortage of cars, due largely to a shortage of the microchips used in car electronic and infotainment systems. Many semiconductors come from Taiwan. No one in the auto industry believes this problem will improve until next year.

Supply chain shortages have shut down manufacturer assembly lines. Many car companies have had to deal with a drop in revenue. This has occurred at the same time they have started multi-billion-dollar investments in electronic and autonomous vehicles. The resulting financial squeeze has become considerable.

As new car prices have risen, people have turned their focus to used cars. Increasing demand has resulted in a shortage of used cars. The consumer price index shows that used car prices rank among the fastest rising items people can buy, based on costs year over year.
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These shortages have encouraged people to keep their own cars longer for financial reasons. The average age of a car on the American road has increased to over 12 years, which is an all-time high. Another reason people can own older cars is their durability, which outpaces that of cars over a decade old.

The price to own a car goes beyond the price to buy it. The Car Repair Hotspots: The U.S. States With The Cheapest Car Maintenance and Repair Costs study from coupon code provider DealA included the average cost of insurance and repairs, as well as safety inspection and oil change prices. The index these create is the “total repair and maintenance costs.”

Ironically, the state with the highest price is home to the birth of mass-produced cars in America. The top state for high costs is Michigan with a total of $4,644. That puts it well ahead of second-place Louisiana at $3,850.

These are the 10 most expensive states in which to own a car:

State Overall Cost Insurance
Michigan $4,664 $3,466
Louisiana $3,850 $2,608
Nevada $3,706 $2,486
Kentucky $3,614 $2,358
California $3,457 $2,135
Florida $3,409 $2,178
Rhode Island $3,385 $2,092
New Jersey $3,312 $2,001
New York $3,306 $2,081
Colorado $3,328 $1,973

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Click here to see which are the most expensive cars in America.

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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