SEMA research has shown that 83% of new-vehicle buyers agree that their vehicles should represent good investments. Consumers want their vehicles to retain value and may make their future purchase decisions partly based on this factor. With this in mind, 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.