Want Your Vehicle to Retain Its Value? Make Sure It's Big, or Bigger
If you’re looking to get the most money back when you drop your car onto the used market in five years, better get into something large and utilitarian.
Large and midsize trucks and SUVs grab the top five-year resale values in Edmund’s 2016 Retained Value Awards, with conventional and luxury midsize and large cars depreciating the most.
The biggest winner at trade-in time is the Jeep Wrangler, which muscles out competitors like the Toyota 4Runner to capture the traditional midsize SUV crown. Retaining 62.7 percent of its value in five years, the Wrangler tops the category’s already lofty 62-percent average.
Toyota’s Tacoma bested the midsize truck category with a 66-percent retained value, while the automaker’s Tundra accepted the large truck crown by holding on to 58.6 percent of its value.
The rest of the five top categories saw the Ram 2500 take the heavy-duty prize (58.6 percent) and the GMC Yukon win for large traditional SUV (52.6 percent).
Worse-performing categories favored Japanese and European automakers. The Subaru WRX was tops among compact cars (58.3 percent, though the category retained only 47.6 percent of its value), while the law of Heaven and Earth again made the Toyota Camry numero uno among midsize cars (48.1 percent).
Okay, so bigger is better for average resale values, but what about high-tech options and neat-o gadgets? That’s gotta mean something to a used car buyer, right?
Not so fast. More tech could net you a higher price if you were bartering a one-year-old model in your driveway after losing a poker game, but those options will be as dated as parachute pants and cassette tapes in five years.
“Shoppers interested in technology are probably going to gravitate toward new or near-new cars,” Edmunds’ features editor Carroll Lachnit told Extremetech.
Backup cameras, adaptive cruise control, blind-spot monitoring and high-end infotainment systems are rapidly becoming the norm even on entry-level models. In five years, there’ll be far more choice than today, and that could water down the impact such technology could exert over the price of a five-year-old model.
h/t Vipul Singh
[Image: © 2015 Kamil Kaluski/The Truth About Cars]
More by Steph Willems
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When resale value is ludicrous and stup!d high, it screams of "poor value proposition", when brand new. So this leads to thin showroom traffic for new ones, and too many waiting patiently and wringing their hands for clean a 3+ year old examples.
American tastes are weird. They value big trucks and SUVs, more than German luxury sedans. That's fine with me. Nothing sweeter than a 3-5 year old S Class at a FRACTION of it's original SRP. They are great cars, and people who buy them new, usually take great care of them.