Help! I am being audited. Our friends at the IRS - all hardworking, under- appreciated patriots, selflessly bearing the brunt of an unpopular but vital job, need me to show what the value of a 1997 car was in 1999. Is there an on-line site that would give me 1999 values? -
Ideally, your local library might still have an old 1999-edition blue book mouldering away on a shelf somewhere. Otherwise you can call KBB and have them look it up for you, although this is pretty absurdly expensive for something that probably takes them about 30 seconds to do: Kelley Blue Book | FAQ page | Used Car
Roughly, a car loses half its value the first year, so that’d be a good back-of-the-envelope estimate.
That’s way off. Go look at the Kelly Blue Book values for pretty much any used car and you’ll see that cars generally lose only about 10-20% in the first year.
What car and model exactly. I have my old consumer reports from that time and they’ll at least give an upper limit. Also, how many miles did it have on it in 1999, and what was the general condition.
From the Chevrolet site:
2011 Chevrolet Impala: $25215
From KBB, well-optioned 2009 Impala, 30K miles, private party sale value: $11560
A 2009 Impala with 30K miles on it is two years older than a new 2011, with two years worth of driving on it.
A brief survey of three different cars.
Car : 2011 new price, KBB Excellent condition 2010 model w/ 15K miles
Honda Civic DX : $15805, $12780 (-19%)
Lexus ES : $35525, $32585 (-8.5%)
Cadillac Escalade Hybrid : $74790, $61585 (-18%)
I picked those cars as randomly as they popped into my head. Three different makers, three different price points. I didn’t look up a bunch and only show you the cheap ones, or anything. Those are the first three I thought of. If somebody wants to expand the survey, adding a truck, a minivan, and a hatchback would be good next steps.
You can argue a few percentage points by using the “good” price instead of the excellent, but I don’t think that’s expected. What did you do to it in a year of ownership that it’s not excellent condition?
Even then, the prices above are MSRP. Any fool should be able to get a few percentage points off of that without being a master negotiator. And these are MSRP for this year, not last year. Given standard feature bloat, the prices for the previous year were probably a bit lower.
All KBB prices determined by selecting the trim level, putting in 15K miles, and leaving the options as selected (since I assume KBB uses the default options).