Hey Cool Car Fans,
I really enjoy driving European and other luxury brand vehicles, such as Audi, BMW, Mercedes Benz and other high-end cars. Who doesn’t? They often have great technology, handle extremely well on the road and have fantastic performance. However, everyone knows that there is a cost involved in driving these vehicles and so once they are out of warranty they tend to depreciate like a rock.
THE TOYOTA RAV4 VS THE BMW X5
The other day I had a client call me about consigning his 2011 Toyota RAV4 LE, so a base model vehicle with a sunroof, and it had out 60,000 miles on it. I looked up what the trade value would be on his vehicle if we didn’t consign it and I just sent it to the dealer auction. It was $10,000 based on what they have been selling for at auction.
As the conversation progressed, he said that he was thinking that he might want to also get out of his 2010 BMW X5 with the 4.8l motor that was pretty hard loaded. It had more miles than the Toyota RAV4 with around 94,000 miles on the odometer. I looked that one up for him as well and to his shock and amazement it was selling at auction for the same price as the 2011 Toyota RAV4, which was about $10,000 for a trade-in value.
That’s pretty unreal considering the 350hp 2010 BMW X5 4.8l had an MSRP of $56,300 before adding in all the options for the vehicle. It’s more like $60,000 to $65,000 by the time you start adding options on a vehicle like that one. And that’s compared to a 179hp 4 cylinder 2011 Toyota RAV4 LE with an MSRP of about $25,575. So, you have a high-performance german luxury brand that is over twice the amount of money new selling 7 to 8 years later for the same amount of money at auction and at retail as a basic Japanese SUV. Which means that if you’re into European vehicles be prepared to lose money or you can buy them at a substantial discount.
WHY DO MORE EXPENSIVE CARS LOSE THEIR VALUE SO MUCH
It seems pretty amazing that a more expensive vehicle would depreciate more than a less expensive vehicle, but part of the problem is the cost of parts and overall repair costs. Many times people who own a less expensive vehicle will work on vehicles themselves rather than taking it to the dealership for repairs. These people don’t count the time that they are spending fixing brakes or doing oil changes or other repairs into their overall cost of ownership. Most people who own more expensive vehicles don’t tend to work on their own vehicles, so they take it to the dealer at $150 to $200 an hour. They don’t always think about the fact that they could be going to a less expensive repair shop, with a lower hourly rate, for some of their more basic repairs.
For example, I had to replace a radiator overflow in a 2011 BMW 3 Series and the local BMW dealer wanted $500 to do it. I found the part on Amazon for $80 and had a local repair shop install it for me for a half hour of bill time for $50 and a $500 repair turned into a $130 repair. You can’t find after-market parts for most high-line vehicles for the first few years of production, so you have to wait a few years before you can find other options for parts than the dealership. The parts can be very expensive, which is one of the reasons why these vehicles do not hold their value the way the Toyota or Honda vehicles do. It’s a supply and demand issue because people want to have lower repair costs.
Basically, you can thank the dealers and the mechanics for depreciating your Euro luxury vehicles. If you know what you’re doing you can get a great deal on a luxury performance vehicle a few years old. Which is the case for The Cool Car Guy because I like driving vehicles that sold for $65,000 new for $10,000 to $20,000.
Of course, I shouldn’t be telling people this because the more people who figure this out the more expensive these vehicles are going to be and they won’t depreciate as much based on supply and demand. The reality though is as long as the majority of people keep wanting to drive a 7 or 8 year old Japanese vehicle for 50% off, I’ll keep telling my clients that they can be driving the equivalent year high-performance vehicle for 70% to 85% off and laugh all the way to the bank.
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Auto Consultant – John Boyd: The Cool Car Guy
John is an auto consultant who owns CoolCarGuy.com that is a licensed car dealership in Lone Tree, CO. He can help you save time and money on any make or model, new or used, lease or purchase – nationwide! Call or email John about your next vehicle! jboyd@coolcarguy.com or Twitter @coolcarguy
Hey Cool Car Fans,
I decided I should take the time to write an article on why luxury vehicles are more expensive than other brands on the market. Many people assume that it’s all about just selling a vehicle for what the market will bear. Which is a nice way of saying that they think that all vehicles are the same and therefore they are ripping people off with a brand name. It’s true that the manufacturer needs to turn a profit, but when you buy a more expensive vehicle you are also getting a product that costs much more to produce. The components are more expensive to build the vehicle.
Brembo brakes are usually found on a vehicle like a Porsche 911 Turbo or a high-end Audi. You can grab a set of these over at 
Contrast that with a set of rotors for a 2015 Hyundai Elantra GT that you can grab for $122.83 and these are much better than what the manufacturer would put on. These brakes are not even close to the same in performance or quality which is why they are more 15 to 16 times less money!
Here’s the engine for a 2011 BMW 335xi, which I happen to own and drive as my daily driver here in Colorado. It’s a 6 cylinder twin turbo engine that produces 300hp. If you needed to replace this engine it would cost over at CarMonkeys.com close to $11,000 for a used one and that’s a deal.
As you start to go throughout the vehicles and add up the cost of components like brakes, tires (run flats on the BMW or Mercedes Benz for example), the transmissions, shocks, struts, all-wheel drive systems, sound dampening, the quality of interior, you discover that everything costs more on the luxury vehicle. You can keep going with this sort of exercise in other aspects of the cars.
It is amazing how global the automotive industry has become over the years as we have watched prices of vehicles skyrocket. Isn’t the idea that if you manufacturer something in another country you should be paying less? We’ve seen that with calculators, computers and digital watches, but apparently not with cell phones and automobiles.
Let’s look at the new 2017 Chevy Bolt for example and who has been involved in creating this new vehicle. According to Wikipedia the Chevy Bolt was created in conjunction with LG.
You could get a 2000 BMW Z3 similar to this one (I’m not selling this one, just showing an example) that I spotted through the Manheim dealer auction that gets great gas mileage and has about 77,000 miles for less than half the price of a 2017 Chevy Bolt. I would take an older BMW hands down personally, but I recognize they are not in the same category. My point is that there are some great used vehicles out there that you don’t have to spend $30,000 on with a tax credit to get a cool car.
Hey Cool Car Fans,
The exhaust was done at BDM Performance Exhaust and my client had them put Magna flows on and change out the tips to single oval shapes to match the contour the rear bumper, which gives is a slick look from the backend. 
The 2008 BMW M5 had an original base MSRP of $86,675 according to Edmunds.com and a 1/4 mile track time of 12.8 seconds at 115.1 mph and it took 4.5 seconds to get from 0 to 60 mph. As I mentioned it has 500hop and 383 ft lb of torque. This bad boy will get up and go, but the M5 doesn’t really feel like a fast car, which is the beauty of it. It’s more of a sleeper where people believe it’s just another 5 series sedan, but it’s actually a monster on the highway.
The E60 M5 was the world’s first production sedan to feature a V10 gasoline engine. At the time the M5 was released to the public it was the fastest 4-door production sedan in the world, which you would probably suspect it to be. It had a five year run from 2005 to 2010.
If you are looking for a fast BMW with plenty of room for five people, amazing horsepower and speed look no further than this nice BMW M5 sedan.
Last year I sold a 2005 Pontiac GTO for a client, Rob, that he had placed on consignment with me. He was in Russia at the time, doing some work and needed to sell it, so I helped him sell his vehicle as I’ve helped hundreds of people do over the years. I got an email from him back in September that after several years in Russia, the company he was working for was transferring him to North Dakota.
He asked me to help him get his new vehicle and he was kicking around between the BMW 135i or the 335i with Xdrive, formerly known as the 335xi. We landed on the latter and I tracked him down the exact vehicle that he wanted with all the features he was going to need for living in North Dakota. He only had about a week to get his vehicle before he was off to North Dakota and he wanted the window tinting done and a clear bra, but I got it all wrapped up for him within his deadline.
His BMW 335i is probably my favorite production vehicle with the twin-turbos and you can’t argue with the great looking lines of this car that so many car companies want and try to duplicate. It’s definitely a blast to drive! I can’t say that about every BMW, but the 328i with the straight six cylinder and the 335i with twin turbos rock! The Xdrive is an added bonus giving them all-wheel-drive handling and great performance in all driving conditions.