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About the Best Resale Value Awards

If you want to buy a car with great resale value, you should consider buying a truck. That is just one of the many surprising and valuable conclusions to be drawn from the 2016 Kelley Blue Book Best Resale Value Awards. We'll give you more details later in this extensive coverage of the awards and award-winners, but a quick fact is that just two of the top 10 vehicles having the best predicted resale values for this model year are cars. The eight others are either trucks or SUVs. That fact is yet another example of the American public's switch from traditional cars to tall vehicles like pickups and SUVs.

Why should you care about resale value? That's like asking why you should care about your personal finances at all. Unless you drive your vehicle until the wheels fall off and it becomes a moldering pile of parts smoking in the middle of the road, the ultimate resale value of your ride has a very direct and important effect on your transportation costs. As much as you might love your car, at some point you're going to sell it, and the results of that transaction can either be a big win - high resale value - or a tragic loss - low resale value. The difference can be thousands of dollars that you either keep or toss out the window.

Just as your mother once advised you to be thoughtful in the selection of your friends, so it is with the choice of a new vehicle. You might think you'll hit it off with a wastrel type, but over the long haul hooking up with a vehicle renowned for retaining its value will serve you and your bank account well. The very good news is that while no reliable service can advise you on whom to pick as your BFF, a very reliable service, namely us at Kelley Blue Book, can give you insight on which models will best hold their values and which will send the funds you sink into in a new vehicle plummeting.

The 2016 Best Resale Value Awards are based on what we consider to be the best research and analysis in the industry. Our resale value projections take into account current vehicle data, sales data, market conditions for each vehicle, competition within vehicle segments, expectations of the future economy and the combined experience of Kelley Blue Book's team of market and pricing analysts, who are pretty smart folks.

As our post-award audits have demonstrated, our Kelley Blue Book projections of resale value are extremely accurate in estimating the future values of new vehicles, which is why they are used by many of the nation's leading financial institutions. Our Best Resale Value Awards honor automakers' outstanding achievements in producing vehicles that best retain their value over the first five years (60 months) of new-vehicle ownership, and that's a very good indicator of a model's value-retention ability overall.

The awards are broken into three groups, as listed below.

Every year we honor the Best Brand and Best Luxury Brand with awards for the combined projected resale value of their entire product portfolio. To win this honor, an automaker must offer crowd-pleasing vehicles across its entire model line and keep its production well-matched to demand. If you buy a vehicle from a brand that has received a Kelley Blue Book with a Best Resale Value Award you can be confident it will retain its value well.

Our annual Best Resale Value Awards honor the 10 individual vehicle models projected to retain the highest percentage of their original suggested retail price. Some of these stellar top 10 might also win awards in their specific vehicle categories - Compact Car, Compact SUV/Crossover or Mid-Size SUV/Crossover, for instance - and each deserves recognition for holding its value better than 95% of the new vehicles available this year.

When it comes to shopping for a vehicle that will hold its value well, our 22 category awards provide the most valuable guidance. We've identified a resale value champion - and a couple runners-up - in just about every size, shape and price available. From compact car, to luxury sport utility vehicle, to van and beyond, the Kelley Blue Book Best Resale Value category award winners will give you a look at the elite vehicles in retaining value over time.