Category
The all-in annual cost of owning and operating a car, per AAA — the bucket where Reality Index and CPI almost agree.
Transportation is the second-largest bucket in the Reality Index (17.3% weight). The all-in annual cost of vehicle ownership and operation — purchase, fuel, insurance, maintenance, finance, depreciation — has grown 3.92× from 1980 to 2025 per AAA's Your Driving Costs survey at 24,000 miles per year. That is almost exactly in line with CPI All Items at 3.91×.
The transportation story splits internally. Gasoline at the pump has underperformed CPI over 45 years (2.81× by 2023, the last EIA year we have). Vehicle prices, insurance, and maintenance combined — the AAA all-in cost — have approximately matched CPI. The headline transportation bucket uses the AAA composite because it captures everything families spend on getting around, not just fuel.
Each card below links to the full chart page for that item — including retail dollar series, BLS CPI subindex for that category, and the long-history backstop where available. Multiples shown are 1980-anchored unless the underlying data series doesn't extend that far back.
Composite construction. AAA "Your Driving Costs" per-mile composite × 24,000 miles per year. AAA's survey is the industry-standard reference for total household vehicle cost. It includes fuel, maintenance, repairs, tires, insurance, license/registration/taxes, depreciation, and finance charges. The result is the all-in dollar cost of owning and operating a single vehicle, year by year from 1980 to 2025.
What this doesn't include. Public transit, airline travel, ride-share. Each is either small enough (transit, ride-share) or volatile enough (airline) that AAA's vehicle composite is the best single proxy for what households spend on transportation. Airline industry has its own methodology issues (unbundled fees, capacity reductions, seat-pitch compression) that CPI doesn't capture — see "what we don't measure".
Why gasoline alone underperforms. Real-dollar gasoline prices peaked in 2008 ($3.30/gallon nominal, equivalent to ~$5 in 2024 dollars) and have generally trended below that peak since. Fuel efficiency gains and US shale production have helped keep US gasoline prices below their inflation-adjusted historical average. The story is different in vehicle prices (which rose post-2020 due to supply chain disruption) and especially insurance (which has accelerated dramatically post-2020).