Predicting a given new vehicle’s eventual resale value down the road is a crapshoot in the best of times, but given the state of the used car market in recent years it’s become a far riskier bet.
That’s because the conventional wisdom that a car drops in value the moment it’s driven off a dealer’s lot and steadily continues to lose its worth literally to the moment it reaches the auto graveyard, has been, well, unconventional of late. Pandemic-related market forces and other factors combined to drive up pre-owned model prices up by a whopping 45% from June 2020 to June 2021. They rose to the point that some late model used cars in the greatest demand commanded nearly as much last year—in some cases more—than harder-to-find brand new versions.
