That's the thing, it's bullshit designed to make the other car look good. I estimate, for the car I drive daily, I spend 250-300 a month on maintenance, fuel, tires, etc. That's everything, amortized to a monthly amount. I drive a lot, and the car gets a lot of things most people would simply ignore, so my number is high. A new vehicle shouldn't cost any more than tires, oil, and gasoline for the first 100,000 miles of it's life. I have nothing against hybrid vehicles, and think that they should be the way we go forward until we can come up with a better energy storage technology than go-boom-boxes that electric cars currently are. It's just the Prius gave them all a pretentious stigma, and manufacturers are buying whole hog into the electric fallacy.