If You Want Your Vehicle To Retain Its Resale Value, Choose This Color

A new study sheds some light on the best and worst colors for your vehicle’s resale value. The best colors vary by vehicle type.

A new study by our colleagues at iSeeCars has some helpful information for new car shoppers regarding color choice. If you want your vehicle to retain its value for a later trade-in or private sale, it is important to match its color to its vehicle style. In other words, the color choice needs to match the type of vehicle you buy.

To figure out which color brings the best return by vehicle type, iSeeCars analyzed over 1.6 million model year 2020 used cars from August 2022 through May 2023. The MSRP of each car was inflation-adjusted for the rapidly declining value of the dollar and then compared to the car’s list price. The data were then aggregated by researchers by car color and body style.

Brown and Resale Value
Brown is the very best vehicle color if you are one of the remaining sedan buyers left in America. Why, who knows? Perhaps it is because sedan buyers are conservative or grew up in a different age when brown was a desirable car color.

On the other hand, if you are buying an SUV, avoid brown at all costs. Brown turns out to be the second-worst color for resale value in the SUV category.

Yellow and Resale Value
Surprisingly, the color yellow is a safe bet. Of all colors listed, yellow brings the overall best rate of return on your vehicle. If you are buying a convertible or a coupe, buying yellow will bring you the greatest return on your money when it is time to sell. One reason for yellow’s high ranking may be that automakers don’t build a lot of yellow minivans or sedans. They understand that folks who want to be flashing and drive around in a banana-colored car are more likely to be in a coupe, convertible, or extreme off-roader. We think Yellow is actually an outlier here. The cars that are colored yellow tend to be flashy specialty vehicles like Corvettes, Jeep Wranglers, and muscle cars.

So what color do minivan drivers want? Green and brown top the chart. Earthy. Wholesome colors for folks with families to drive around.

If you would like to see where your vehicle ranks on iSeeCars color vs. resale value listing, check out the group’s full study summary page here.

John Goreham is an experienced New England Motor Press Association member and expert vehicle tester. John completed an engineering program with a focus on electric vehicles, followed by two decades of work in high-tech, biopharma, and the automotive supply chain before becoming a news contributor. In addition to his eleven years of work at Torque News, John has published thousands of articles and reviews at American news outlets. He is known for offering unfiltered opinions on vehicle topics. You can follow John on Twitter, and TikTok @ToknCars, and view his credentials at Linkedin

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