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THE DEAL WITH DEPRECIATION HOW DOES CAR COLOUR A F F E C T R E S A L E VA L U E?
BY ALLISON ROGERS
W
hat’s the difference between yellow and gold cars? Thousands of dollars, apparently. When sprayed on a vehicle, one of these colours holds its value a lot better than the other—and the result may surprise you. iSeeCars, a car research company and search site designed for car-buying consumers, recently collected a slew of data on how the colour of car can impact its resale value. Through an analysis of 1.6 million 2020 model year used car listings, the company comprised a list of colours holding the best (and worst) resale values.
Don’t go for the gold when it comes to cars, says the report—gold vehicles see a 25 percent drop in value after three years. That’s a whopping $11,000 difference between MSRP and potential resale price in today’s market. Yellow cars, on the other hand, only depreciate by about 13.5 percent after three model years. On average, that’s about a $6,500 gap between the MSRP and resale value three years later. “Yellow cars represent the greatest disparity between how many are produced and how many people want one,” said Karl Brauer, an
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analyst with iSeeCars. “Not many people want a yellow car, [but] there are clearly more people who want one than [there are] vehicles [that] exist, which explains why yellow performs so well on the second market. “The same can be said for orange and green—colours we don’t see often but are obviously higher in demand than in supply.” Orange and green claim the third- and fourth-best depreciation scores: orange cars lose about 18.4 percent ($7,000) of their MSRP after four years, while green vehicles see resale values drop by an average of 19.2 percent ($8,700).