Skip to footer

Top 10 cars with the best resale value

A new car starts depreciating the minute it's driven off the lot. According to a 2008 Edmunds survey, the average vehicle loses a third of its value in two years. But these 10 models get high marks for retaining their worth, making Kelley Blue Book’s Top 10 list of 2013 models with the best resale value. Can you guess which auto came out on top?

10. Scion tC

Scion Newsroom
The Scion tC is shown in this undated commercial file photo from Scion. The tC is the smallest car on Kelly's resale value list, and one of the cheapest.

MSRP (manufacturer's suggested retail price): $20,000

Resale value after 36 months: 60 percent of  price when new

After 60 months: 46.5 percent

The smallest car on the list, and one of the cheapest, the gasoline-powered, two-door tC is historically the Scion brand’s top-selling model.  It’s a solid performer in terms of gas mileage, too, averaging 31 miles per gallon (m.p.g.).

What makes for good resale value? Keeping your car in overall good shape, for one, and keeping the mileage low. Other factors can include brand (the more recognizable, the better), color (stick with neutral colors like black, white, and tan; hold off on the fiesta orange), and overall popularity.

The prices listed are mostly base prices for new automatic transmission vehicles, before any features are added on.  

1 of 10
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.