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The Street

Samanda Dorger

24 Vehicles With the Highest Resale Values

Toyota SUV Ford Honda Luxury Chevrolet Kelley Blue Book Lexus KBB Kia

Do Americans spend too much money on cars? There’s a school of thought out there that says a car will take you on the road to financial ruin.

Cars have become more expensive than ever. They require costly insurance, maintenance and repairs, and they depreciate in value rapidly.

A car is “basically a miniature Venezuelan economy on wheels, rapidly depreciating with no end in sight,” writes Eben Weiss for Outside Magazine, “and as soon as you’re dependent on one to get anywhere, you’ll be indentured to it for the rest of your life.”

Buying too much car is one of the easiest and biggest financial mistakes someone can make, says Sam Dogen, who writes about how to attain financial independence at the Financial Samurai.

For many, a car may be the only way to get to work to make money in the first place. But for those who seek financial freedom (or at least avoid financial ruin) should consider spending as little a possible on a car.

Consider the 10% rule to determine how much car you can afford. Brace yourself. The rule states that you should spend no more than 1/10th your gross annual income on the purchase price of a car, according to Financial Samurai. To be clear, that's purchase price, not annual expenditure.

That means that someone making $100,000 a year would buy a $10,000 car. Stop laughing. Or, someone making $176,000 would buy a Kia Rio.

The average price of a new car in January 2023 was $48,094, according to Kelley Blue Book: based on the 10% rule, you’d need to make a half million a year to get that average car. Only 1% of Americans make more than $500,000, according to the World Economic Forum.

The average used car price in Jan. 2023 was about $26,510 -- so you’d need to make more than a quarter million a year to buy that car, using the 10% rule.

In any case, if a $5,000-$10,000 car sounds to you like it might be unsafe or incur high maintenance costs, to live by this rule as best as you can, you’ll want to buy a low-priced car and keep it for a very long time and when you do strike it rich, it will have good resale value.

Kelley Blue Book, a company whose stock and trade has always been vehicle valuation, compiles an annual list of vehicles that have the best resale value after five years.

Their resale values are established by automotive analysts who review the output from statistical models built upon millions of transactions. Vehicles that earn the highest 5-year residual values, expressed as a percentage of their original sticker price, are selected for the resale value awards. Low-volume vehicles are excluded, except in the electric, luxury, and sports car categories.

These are the cars, trucks, EVs and SUVs given Kelley Blue Book’s best resale value awards, plus the brands that took the crown.