Old cars, friends and family

[Jarf]

I'll buy that excuse.

May also have been a side effect of "insufficientfishingness" syndrome.
Partially cured by recent forays into paradise.

My apologies to all.
The 40% comments were uncalled for and were only quoting the oddest of the odd, in the weirdest of circumstances and not relevant in anyway.
The graph is much more telling of reality, and even with those far more realistic numbers it's still sufficient to depict the high cost of depreciation.

[Petros]

even so, it appears that even the vehicles that hold their value best (trucks and the camry, I am sure there are others) are at about half their value in about 7 years (both charts show that). So our cars new were in the 8k to 9k range, and a nice clean one now can bring about $3000-3500 after 30 years. Though some of that might be an increase in value due to the value of the dollar, and that it has reached "classic" or vintage status. That is the point where they start climbing back up in value. I notices that about 10 years ago you could buy running T4wd, with a few problems but drivable, for $100-200, now non-runners are going for about 3 times that much.

So where does the typical car "bottom out" in terms of value. When I was restoring a '62 Porsche I noticed that a new Porsche would go down in value about 6 years, would stay there for another 5 years, and than start going up in value. There were two factors, they never made large numbers of any one model, and the new Porsche they introduced each year kept going up in price, driving up the value of the old ones.

Of course there are some old cars that were never worth much, even when new.