Hidden Costs

The first time I bought a brand-new sports car, the salesman said, "Congratulations on your new Porsche! Anytime you need routine service or maintenance, call us and we'll send a flatbed truck to pick up and return your car. It's free. Here's my card!"

Not exactly. A routine oil-and-filter change on a car like a new 911 can easily cost $600, in part because that "free" trucking has to be amortized. Buy an upscale sports car and you are entering a world of concierge-scheduled boutique servicing. Depending on your point of view, it can be either a delightfully painless experience or an introduction to shop costs totally out of line with anything you've experienced at the Ford or Toyota dealer.

Aluminum-bodied exotics like the Aston Martin Vanquish S can be expensive to insure. + enlarge image  |  view gallery >

Tires might be another surprise. A high-performance sports car carries at least $1,000 worth of rubber. A nice sedan needs four $100 tires every 40,000 miles or so, but an aggressively driven Viper, Corvette or Porsche Turbo can go through an expensive set of skins in one-quarter of the time. High-performance tires are extremely grippy for increased road holding, but that means they're eraser-soft and quick to wear away.
Many people assume that high-performance cars are more expensive to insure than the average vehicle, but that isn't necessarily true. Insurance rates for nonclassic cars are based largely on driver age, driving record and the market you're in.

A $50,000 Corvette will cost more to insure than a $50,000 Volvo because historical data shows that the Corvette is much more likely to be involved in an accident, but the premium usually isn't so high as to dissuade people from buying the Corvette, says Robert Hartwig, an economist at the Insurance Information Institute.

• See why the Cadillac XLR is among the Most Expensive Vehicles To Insure. • Read about how you can minimize insurance cost in our Insurance ABCs feature.

Where you live dictates your insurance rate more than what you drive. “Somebody who parks their car on the street in an urban area is going to pay much more than somebody in a suburb who parks it in a garage,” Hartwig says. Not only are theft rates higher in urban areas, but there are more accidents because there's more traffic. "And medical expenses are much higher in an urban area, so liability costs are much higher whether you’re driving a Corvette or a Hyundai," he says. "But driving experience is the most dramatic factor in terms of the cost of coverage.”

Repair costs can also be a big factor — an aluminum car is more expensive to fix than one made of steel.

Each insurance company has its own way of determining rates, so you best check with your insurance broker before committing to an extreme buy. This precaution isn't crucial if you have your eye on an MX-5 or a Boxster, assuming your citation record is clean. But if you lust after a Ferrari F430, you may be surprised to find that it's on a list of cars your insurance company simply refuses to cover.

A word to the wary: More so than with a shiny Lexus or Cadillac sedan, the sheer frivolity of sports cars can bring out a destructive form of envy called "keying" — a parking-lot passer-by surreptitiously running the sharp point of a key down the length of a bright paint job. Sometimes it's inevitable, but it doesn't help if you have an arrogant vanity plate, like the EXPENSV we recently saw on a 911. An out-of-work blue-collar guy doesn't need to be reminded of that.

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