Why this site exists
Buying a car is one of the largest purchases most households make, and almost all of the advice around it is written by someone with something to sell. Dealers quote monthly payments instead of total cost. Manufacturers quote range figures nobody achieves. Comparison sites rank by commission. Meanwhile the questions people actually ask — what will this cost me over five years?, is an electric car cheaper where I live?, is a 12V ride-on too much for a three-year-old? — go half-answered.
ilovemycars.com was built to answer those questions with arithmetic rather than adjectives. We publish free calculators that use your electricity rate, your fuel price and your interest rate, and we write guides that are happy to end with “don’t buy this”.
What we cover
We stay deliberately narrow, across three areas:
- Electric vehicles. Charging costs at home and in public, charging times, battery degradation, home charger installation, and whether an EV genuinely saves money in your country.
- Everyday car ownership. Finance and loan maths, depreciation, maintenance budgets, city parking, and the decisions that come with moving country or giving up a car entirely.
- Toy, ride-on and remote-control cars. The part of the site parents come for: voltage and age matching for ride-ons, diecast collecting, track sets, and gift guides that take safety labelling seriously.
The tools come first
Fifteen free calculators sit at the centre of the site. They are built in-house, they run entirely in your browser, and they require no account, no email address and no payment. Because the maths happens on your device, the figures you type — your salary-adjacent numbers, your loan amount, your tariff — are never transmitted to us or stored on our servers.
Every tool shows its assumptions, and every tool is country-neutral by design: instead of baking in United States prices and hoping for the best, we ask you for the rates that apply where you live. That is why the site works equally well for readers in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Singapore, Switzerland, Norway and the Netherlands.
A deliberate limitation: a calculator is a model, not a quotation. Tyres, climate, driving style, tax treatment and local labour rates all move real costs around. Treat our outputs as a well-built starting point and confirm anything binding with a professional.
Who writes this
ilovemycars.com is an independent publisher. We are not a manufacturer, a dealer, a lender or an insurer, and we are not owned by one. The site is run by a small team rather than a newsroom, and the same people do the research, build the calculators and edit every page before it goes out.
Our approach to research, hands-on testing, sourcing and the use of AI assistance in drafting is documented openly on our editorial policy page. If you want to know how a specific figure was arrived at, ask — we will tell you.
How we make money
The site is free to read and free of pop-up advertising. It is funded by affiliate commissions: when a recommendation is useful enough that you buy the product, the retailer pays us a small percentage of that sale. Your price does not change.
Three rules keep that honest, and we would rather lose the commission than break them:
- Verdicts are written before links are added, never the other way around.
- If the best product in a category has no affiliate programme, it still wins the category.
- No brand, retailer or network sees a review before publication, and no payment buys placement, a rating or a kinder tone.
The full detail, including the programmes we belong to, is on the affiliate disclosure page.
Talk to us
Corrections, questions, product submissions and partnership enquiries are all welcome, and all of them come through the one place: the contact page. We answer most messages within [2–3 business days].