Pre-owned is right road to travel
The average price of a new vehicle in 2016 was $34,449, according to the National Automobile Dealers Association.
Despite the high average price tag, Americans purchased a record number of new vehicles last year, nearly 17.5 million. It was the sixth straight year of growth.
And though sales are up, the $34,449 average is probably why 40 million American buyers every year elect to buy used ... ahem, “pre-owned” vehicles.
NADA says the average price there is still a hefty $19,866.
There are about 264 million cars on the road in the United States. The average age of those vehicles is 11.6 years.
And because a new car becomes a used car the second it is driven off the lot, we're clearly a nation of used cars.
For those of you in the market for a used vehicle, the Cambridge-based automotive research site, CarGurus.com, has sorted through its massive datasets to create its first Best Used Car Awards.
“CarGurus is both a datadriven and transparent company,” CarGurus.com editor Matt Smith said. “And we wanted our inaugural awards to reflect both of those values. So, we balanced hard data such as value retention, with the insights of our expert test drive reviewers and the feedback we've received from millions of users. The 12-year value retention let us see how much of a buyer's initial investment would be returned to them when it came time to sell the car and move on again.”
Smith said CarGurus looks at “a wide range of criteria when evaluating cars, from look and feel to performance, form and function, and cost-effectiveness.”
“CarGurus also puts a lot of value in our users' opinions,” he said, “their reviews provided us with a mass-market opinion of each car, which is unique to our site.”
Many automotive research sites release similar “best-of” lists in multiple categories, but CarGurus only chose seven categories.
“We did not want to tie these awards in with sales numbers, because these awards are not about how many cars are on the road,” Smith said. “Instead, this is more about informing used car shoppers which models are likely to hold their value and also be enjoyable to drive. We only considered segments which we had enough data to support a competitive field of nominees.”
Fair enough: There's not a large enough market for used luxury supercars, so why include them? But there are no coupe results, for example. Smith said if there's ever enough data to create a sound list for other segments, they'll evaluate them for inclusion.
The list features late-model cars originally available for sale in the U.S. Criteria included CarGurus user reviews, professional Test Drive Reviews and projected 12-year depreciation. The model with the highest overall score was determined to be the winner for each category.
The rankings: