If you want your car to retain its value longer, yellow is your color.
The old axiom says if you want to get a speeding ticket, own a red car, however, new research shows if your vehicle to retain its value, buy a yellow one.
ISeeCars.com analyzed the sale of more than 2.1 million vehicles sales from the 2014 model year and discovered that yellow cars held their value the best, depreciating only 27% after three years. The average rate of depreciation of 33.1% for all vehicles.
Other vehicles that held their value well were orange and green vehicles, which posted depreciation rates of 30.6% and 30.9% after three years.
The most popular or common colors, which are typically white, black and gray or silver, paced the average rate of depreciation, the website noted.
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The colors that lost the most value? Beige, purple and gold, all outpaced the average depreciation rate by at least 10%. In 2014, the site found that the most common colors as the worst depreciators and gold and beige just under the average rate.
The brighter colors that retained their value are also more uncommon than most colors, accounting for just 1.2% of the cars, is likely to drive up the value, the site noted.
Then again, the three worst-performing colors were even more rare, accounting for just a 0.7% share. Gold cars had the worst depreciation rates among SUVs, the second-worst among sedans and among the worst depreciation rates across nearly every body style, ISeeCars said.
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Gold-painted cars also transcended measures of mileage on the odometer, depreciating heavily even when the cars evaluated had relatively low mileage.
“We speculate that mileage alone can’t explain the color depreciation pattern, and that gold’s near-universally poor depreciation may reflect lower consumer demand for the color — given the choice, consumers may just prefer the more common colors or flashier colors,” says Phong Ly, the site’s CEO, in a release.
A car’s color may tell you how much of its value it will retain, it won’t tell you how long it will take to sell it if you’re looking to move on. They may hold their value best, but yellow cars — at 41.5 days — take longer to sell than both gold (34.3 days) and the average car (36.5).
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But green cars, another of the lowest-depreciating colors, were close to the average at 36.2 days, while beige cars took an average 46.6 days to move.