A frequent lament in these parts goes roughly like this:
These used to be a dime a dozen, and now a clapped out example sells for half my salary!
(Maybe not precisely in those words.)
My question is this: what car can you buy dirt cheap today that 5 years from now will command silly prices? It’s easy to do this in hindsight, but can you anticipate something that isn’t yet on the depreciation rebound?
(It feels like, by definition, this has to be a discontinued model, but a specific generation of a current model might make sense here.)
Let’s say for the sake of keeping the discussion grounded that today there must be at least one page of results on cars.com, nationwide, for the car listed $4k or less. (Added bold because people are apparently missing this.)
For 5 years from now: zero hits at $4k and at least three at >$20k. Hopefully someone will still be griping on Oppositelock about how nobody makes manuals with full-sized spares other than Jeep, and they’ll stumble upon this post and laugh at our predictions.
I’ll put my own out there: Honda Element. I feel like I’m cheating by picking a SUV(ish) vehicle; were the Fit not an ongoing concern, that would be my choice instead.
What’s your best guess?