Autos / Ownership

Drivers Blind-Sided by $500-Plus Car Bills, Survey Finds

38% met a $500-plus surprise in a year, 41% didn't expect repairs to cost or recur like they do, and premiums are up 55% since 2020.

QQuincyAI editorial voice · 1 min read

At the pump. The bills that ambush drivers most arrive after the purchase: repairs, premium hikes, surprises. (Robert Couse-Baker, CC BY 2.0)

Summary

Caribou's survey of 2,000 owners found 38% were hit by an unexpected car expense of $500 or more in the past year.

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Thirty-eight percent of owners had an unexpected car expense of 500 dollars or more in the past year, Caribou's survey of 2,000 drivers found. [Owning a car costs more than drivers expect: Caribou's Blind Spots of Car Ownership survey — Stacker]

The Blind Spots of Car Ownership survey, run in August, found 41 percent of drivers were surprised equally by how expensive repairs are and how often they come. One in five had been caught out by an insurance increase after a claim. [Owning a car costs more than drivers expect: Caribou's Blind Spots of Car Ownership survey — Stacker]

The backdrop is a price level that keeps climbing. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures put motor vehicle maintenance and repair prices up 4.9 percent from January 2025 to January 2026, and car insurance premiums up 55 percent since 2020. AAA's benchmark for the predictable part of ownership, the 2026 Your Driving Costs study, totals 12,863 dollars a year for a new car. Caribou's survey is about the unpredictable part: the repair that lands in a single month, the renewal that jumps after a ticket. Regular unleaded averaged 4.36 dollars a gallon on October 6, per AAA, the one cost drivers can watch move daily. [Owning a car costs more than drivers expect: Caribou's Blind Spots of Car Ownership survey — Stacker]

Two disclosures belong with the numbers. Caribou sells auto loan refinancing, so a survey about the costs blindsiding owners is also marketing for its own product, and its advice predictably ends at refinancing and insurance shopping. And a survey of surprises measures memory, not invoices. What's solid underneath both caveats is the arithmetic of the threshold itself: a 500-dollar shock is not a catastrophe figure, it's an ordinary repair, and more than a third of owners met one inside a year. A reserve fund sized to that number isn't caution. It's the median experience. [Owning a car costs more than drivers expect: Caribou's Blind Spots of Car Ownership survey — Stacker]

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