It would be a mistake to think that the German tank "Tiger" was considered a useless, forever breaking and not effectively absorbing resources "toy". After the Tigers appeared on the eastern front, everyone wept with them. First, the Red Army, and then the Allied armies, who met with the "Tigers" much later on other fronts. But how expensive was this tank to manufacture and maintain?
Until 1945, this German tank was an alpha predator on the battlefields, including because the German command tried not to plant "anyone" in the "Tigers". For example, on the Second Front, all the crews of these armored "cats" were veteran tankers from the eastern front. Largely due to this, after the Second World War, the myth of tank aces on the Tigers was formed in Western culture. Most often, the crews were not aces, but nevertheless they had solid combat experience by 1944 on other vehicles.
The main problem of all German tanks in comparison with Soviet and American ones is their extremely low manufacturability. More precisely, manufacturability. The figures for the required man-hours spent on the production of one tank speak for themselves. PzKpfw III and PzKpfw IV, for example, took 55 and 75-80 thousand man-hours of work, respectively. For comparison, the T-34 took about 17.6 thousand man-hours. Approximately the same amount of labor was spent on American Shermans. And these are machines with comparable characteristics. And now to the main thing: one "Tiger" in 1944 took almost 500 thousand man-hours of labor. The car turned out to be fierce, but in this particular case, history proved that the number beats the class.
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Another problem is the cost of production. German tanks were noticeably more expensive than the allied ones. So, for the cost of one PzKpfw IV, about 1.3 T-34 tanks could be produced in 1945. For one "Panther" in 1945, about two 34s could be made. But one "Tiger" cost as much as four T-34s produced in 1945. And after the release of Soviet tanks, you would still have money left for paint and ice cream. In Reichsmarks, the "Tiger" was estimated at about 250 thousand. It is not at all correct to recalculate the course for modern ones, but today it would be about 61.5 million Russian rubles. For comparison, the modern T-90AM tank costs the budget 338 million rubles.
It is impossible not to recall that the "Tigers" "ate" noticeably more than other tanks of the Second World War. For an 80 km march along the highway, the car needed about 520 liters of fuel. These are 27 cans of 20 liters. With each regular oil change, 28 liters of engine oil also had to be poured into the Tiger. Another 30 liters in the gearbox. Another 5 liters of oil to the turret slewing mechanism and 7 liters to the motor fan. The water radiator was filled with 120 liters of water. According to the regulations, all this water-oil wealth should be changed every 5 thousand kilometers when driving through the city square. In the field, the replacement of technical fluids had to be done every 500 km, and even more often with stably contaminated air filters. After 1943, the technical manual for the "Tiger" for new crews began with a phrase about how much this tank costs and how much money the Nazi Motherland spends on its maintenance.
If you want to know even more interesting things, then you should read about what were the disadvantages of the Soviet tank IS-2, and in what he was inferior to German tanks.
Source: https://novate.ru/blogs/270122/61965/