Customer Reviews

Kelley Blue Book Used Car Guide: Private Party, Trade-In, Retail Values, 1987-2001 Used Car and Truck, July-December 2002

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Hard copies of used car pricing guides may be nice souvenirs of a bygone era, but they are useless for pricing vehicles. The "book value" of used vehicles represents an estimate based on the current wholesale market value as determined by the prices vehicles are bringing at closed dealer auctions. These values change from week to week, so the tools that car dealers use to estimate market values have to change just as frequently. With SmartPhones now ubiquitous, dealers have abandoned the printed versions of valuation guides to gain access to real-time data from the primary valuation services: Black Book, Edmunds, Kelley (Blue Book), NADA Guides (Yellow Book), and Galves (in the Northeast).

The hard copy presented in this listing is from ten years ago, none of the values in the book are applicable to current vehicles.

Moreover, used vehicle values presented in any of the books represent an average value for similar vehicles with no consideration for the specific characteristics of an individual used car. For example, the "book value" of a 3-year-old Nissan Altima may be $11,500, but that just means the average of the 100 or so 3-yr-old Nissan Altima's that went through dealer auction lanes last week was $10,000. The books then add an estimated dealer gross up to cover the profit they would expect a car dealer to try and make on an average car deal. Some of those 100 3-yr-old Altimas would have been wrecks while others would have been well maintained one owner vehicles. You, as a consumer, should not pay $11,500 for a car that has had multiple owners, or been a rental car, or had many accidents, or never had an oil change. On the other hand, you would be getting a great deal if you only paid $11,500 for a perfectly maintained one-owner vehicle with no accidents. These "category averages" in the books are a useful tool to help you understand the types of cars you might consider when shopping, but when you get on a specific vehicle, you should check the vehicle history to understand fair value for a specific car.