Who would have thought that consumers don’t want to lose money. Yet we buy super expensive vehicles only to see our hard earned money go down the tubes the second we leave the stealership. I found this article on vehicles with the best return on them. Surprisingly the Jeep Wrangler took top honors, but I guess when it only gets updated every fifteen years it never goes out of style. This news helps me out since I have been trying to figure out how to get some money out of my current truck to go buy a new JK. Now I have the excuse to tell the wife that it is the best vehicle investment I can make. We’ll see how that goes…

CarGurus (www.cargurus.com), an automotive community offering consumers pricing information on new vehicles, assembled its list of the 10 best and 10 worst vehicles in terms of retention value.

Using its Web Price Index, CarGurus, assembled lists of the popular 2007 cars that have historically had the best and worst value retention in the past (as measured by the percent of MSRP retained over five years and 65,000 miles). Study findings included that:

The 2007 Jeep Wrangler took the top spot, having retained 73% of its value over a five-year/65,000-mile period
Five of the Top 15 value-retaining cars were Toyotas
Surprisingly, sports cars such as the Ford Mustang and Porsche 911 were both on the list of Top 15 value-retaining cars, as shown in the table below:

CarGurus took the 250 most popular cars as measured by sales volume and selected cars shipping in 2007 that had similar trims shipping in 2001. CarGurus then measured the value of a used 2001 version of the car with 65k miles (in today’s dollars) versus the original MSRP (from 2001) to measure “value retention.”

Source: CarGurus. (June 5, 2007). “CarGurus Releases Auto Industry’s First and Only ‘Web Price Index’—Pricing From the Democracy of the Web.” CarGurus press release courtesy of PR Newswire