Want your car to retain its value? Buy a yellow one
When it comes to reselling your car, its color can have a big impact on its resale value, according to a report from iSeeCars.com. But the colors that most help you get more money for your old vehicle may surprise you.
iSeeCars looked at 650,000 vehicles that were recently sold and were all three years old. It then compared the vehicles’ depreciation value. What it found was that the most popular colors of new vehicles — white, black and silver — didn’t help in making the value of the vehicles depreciate any less, but some of the least popular colors of new vehicles — like yellow and orange — made the vehicles retain more of their value when being sold on to another owner.
The top five vehicle colors that depreciated the least are:
Yellow: 4.5% three-year depreciation
Orange: 10.7% three-year depreciation
Purple: 13.9% three-year depreciation
Red: 14% three-year depreciation
Green: 14% three-year depreciation Overall, the average three-year depreciation for vehicles was 15% — so you can see just how well yellow and orange vehicles performed above the average when it comes to depreciation.
Silver vehicles depreciated just a hair better than the average, at 14.8%, and white and black vehicles depreciated worse than the average, at 15.5% and 16.1% respectively.
“Yellow is among the least popular car colors with the lowest vehicle share, and is commonly a color for sports cars and other low-volume vehicles that hold their value relatively well,” iSeeCars executive analyst Karl Brauer said of the findings. “Because yellow vehicles are so novel in the secondhand marketplace, people are willing to pay a premium for them.”