Want Your Vehicle to Retain Its Value? Make Sure It's Big, or Bigger

Steph Willems
by Steph Willems

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]

Steph Willems
Steph Willems

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  • DenverMike DenverMike on Apr 16, 2016

    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.

  • Kmars2009 Kmars2009 on Apr 17, 2016

    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.

  • TheMrFreeze That new Ferrari looks nice but other than that, nothing.And VW having to put an air-cooled Beetle in its display to try and make the ID.Buzz look cool makes this classic VW owner sad 😢
  • Wolfwagen Is it me or have auto shows just turned to meh? To me, there isn't much excitement anymore. it's like we have hit a second malaise era. Every new vehicle is some cookie-cutter CUV. No cutting-edge designs. No talk of any great powertrains, or technological achievements. It's sort of expected with the push to EVs but there is no news on that front either. No new battery tech, no new charging tech. Nothing.
  • CanadaCraig You can just imagine how quickly the tires are going to wear out on a 5,800 lbs AWD 2024 Dodge Charger.
  • Luke42 I tried FSD for a month in December 2022 on my Model Y and wasn’t impressed.The building-blocks were amazing but sum of the all of those amazing parts was about as useful as Honda Sensing in terms of reducing the driver’s workload.I have a list of fixes I need to see in Autopilot before I blow another $200 renting FSD. But I will try it for free for a month.I would love it if FSD v12 lived up to the hype and my mind were changed. But I have no reason to believe I might be wrong at this point, based on the reviews I’ve read so far. [shrug]. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it once I get to test it.
  • FormerFF We bought three new and one used car last year, so we won't be visiting any showrooms this year unless a meteor hits one of them. Sorry to hear that Mini has terminated the manual transmission, a Mini could be a fun car to drive with a stick.It appears that 2025 is going to see a significant decrease in the number of models that can be had with a stick. The used car we bought is a Mk 7 GTI with a six speed manual, and my younger daughter and I are enjoying it quite a lot. We'll be hanging on to it for many years.
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