CarCalc, the EV calculator I wrote about a few days ago, just grew a second tab. The first tab answers "how much car can I afford, and which ones?" — it's all about your salary and the way you pay. This new Compare tab answers a different question: "between these specific cars, which is actually better?"
Specs, not salary
The deliberate thing about it is what it leaves out. Pick up to three cars and it lines them up side by side — but it costs nothing under a lease, a loan or cash, so nothing here depends on what you earn. It's the same dataset as the first tab, viewed as pure specifications. The two tabs even share the same drive-away figure under the hood, so they can never quietly disagree about the same car's price.
That split turned out to be freeing: the compare view can just be a clean table of facts, with no inputs to fill in first.
The best in each row, marked
Every row where "better" actually means something gets a winner, ticked and highlighted — and the tool knows which direction is good. Lower wins on price, energy use and insurance; higher wins on boot space, towing, range, battery and warranty. Rows where more isn't better — seats, body type, powertrain — are just stated, never scored. (Three cars with five seats each shouldn't have a "winner".)
The rows are grouped the way you'd actually weigh a car up:
- Price — list price, estimated Victorian drive-away, whether it sits under the $91,661 FBT threshold, and resale after five years.
- Practicality — body type, seats, boot space (seats up and down), braked towing.
- Energy — battery size, electric range, energy use, and — now that the dataset includes plug-in hybrids — total range and petrol use, which only appear when a PHEV is actually in the mix rather than printing a column of dashes.
- Ownership — warranty, estimated annual insurance, and the date each row's data was sourced.
A link you can share
The comparison lives in the URL, so any three-car match-up is a link you can send someone. Here's Kia EV5 vs BYD Sealion 7 vs Leapmotor C10 — open it and it loads with those three already picked.
The dataset has grown a fair bit too, to 35 brands, 87 models and 216 variants, now including PHEVs alongside the pure-electric cars. And it's all the same as before under the hood: everything is computed locally and deterministically, nothing calls a model, and it still never asks for your email.
Have a play at carcalc.nig.fm — and, as always, it's general information only, not financial advice.