Car Gurus Lists The Top and Worst Vehicle Retail Retention Rates
CarGurus, a leading online automotive community, today announced its new "Web Price Index," an online automotive pricing guide unique to the auto industry because it incorporates only price points crawled from around the web. Unlike the leading price guides, CarGurus' new Web Price Index does not collect pricing data submitted by dealers or wholesale auctions, providing more of a democratic index driven by the actual listing prices of a given car collected from the web.
The leading car price guides survey dealerships and gather price data from offline wholesale auctions. In some cases, these dealers and wholesale auctions have commercial relationships with these same pricing guides. CarGurus' Web Price Index avoids these dealer and wholesaler relationships, indexing only online auctions and listing sites where pricing data represents the actual "retail" listing price of the car. As online auction and listing sites have a mix of both dealer and consumer-to-consumer listings, indexing numerous online sites provides an unbiased picture of the "retail" value of a used car.
CarGurus' Web Price Index gathers data from multiple online data sources. By indexing different data sources, CarGurus is able to aggregate pricing information from around the web, giving consumers a more comprehensive picture of a car's worth. Consumers on CarGurus.com can look up any car from 1964 to 2008 and get pricing information for that car broken down by car trim and mileage.
"Until now there has not been an auto pricing guide focused solely on web pricing," said Langley Steinert, Founder and CEO of CarGurus. "We believe that the democracy of the web is a better indicator of a car's true value. We search the web, find real-time dealer and consumer listings from many different sources, and simply report what we find. In the long run we believe this is a more accurate way to value a used car."
Announcing the Top 10 Value Retaining Cars for 2007
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 % of MSRP retained over 5 years and 65k miles).
Study findings included:
2007 Top 10 Value Retaining Cars:
- The 2007 Jeep Wrangler took the top spot, having retained 73% of its value over a 5 year/65,000 mile period
- Five of the Top 15 Value Retaining cars were Toyotas
- Surprisingly, sports cars like the Ford Mustang and Porsche 911 were both on the list of Top 15 Value Retaining Cars.
2007 Top 10 Value Losing Cars:
- The 2007 Lincoln Town Car took the top spot for losing the most value, by retaining only 29% of its value over the 5 year/65,000 mile period.
- The first five of the Top 15 Value Losing cars were from the Ford Motor Company.
The Top 10 2007 Cars as measured by historic value retention %
1. 73.49% 2007 Jeep Wrangler
2. 63.88% 2007 Chevrolet Suburban
3. 63.49% 2007 Honda Accord
4. 61.49% 2007 Honda CR-V
5. 60.92% 2007 Toyota Corolla
6. 60.40% 2007 Chrysler PT Cruiser
7. 59.41% 2007 Ford Mustang
8. 58.32% 2007 Toyota Sequoia
9. 58.28% 2007 Toyota Camry Solara
10.58.10% 2007 BMW X5
The Worst 10 2007 Cars as measured by historic value retention %
1. 28.56% 2007 Lincoln Town Car
2. 33.56% 2007 Jaguar S-Type
3. 35.84% 2007 Volvo S80
4. 35.84% 2007 Mercury Grand Marquis
5. 35.90% 2007 Ford Explorer
6. 36.57% 2007 Chrysler Town & Country
7. 38.19% 2007 Pontiac Grand Prix
8. 39.55% 2007 Kia Optima
9. 40.25% 2007 Chevrolet Malibu
10.40.62% 2007 Dodge Caravan
Methodology for 2007 Best/Worst Value Holding Cars 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: PRNewswire