You do understand that depreciation is not linear.

 

Additionally this person's prior experience is with a vehicle (Land Cruiser) that likely has the strongest resale value on the planet, not exactly a fair comparison...But irrespective of that trying to bail from a car after year 1 is probably as bad as it gets from incurring the steepest part of the depreciation curve. As the old adage goes, as soon as you drive the car off the lot it's lost at least 5-10% of it's value

 

Totally agree the comparison is apples to oranges. I did some comparisons on the residuals before I bought my Defender and the values were entirely in line with or even better than most other brands, like mid-50s to 60% after 36 months. Not that it's good, but most vehicles are like that, it's just part of the game. I don't know where they stand now but I doubt the Defender's retention vs MSRP is any worse than the average out there. I do think as I said earlier loading them up with options and expecting a good appraisal is more difficult than most vehicles. Like getting the offroad pack accounted for you may well need to go specifically to the JLR dealership because everyone else is mostly just looking at auction sales and 9 out of 10 won't have that. Nobody is going to dig into 30k worth of options. Other vehicles aren't like that, you order a trim level and the options are pretty much baked in.

 

You just put my mind at ease. Back in June, I also picked up a '22 110 P400 w/ 25k mi (X-Dynamic SE, air suspension, 3rd row) for $64k and was starting to wonder if I had overpaid. Seems I was right in the ballpark.

It's a give and take. It's not a Toyota or Honda where every SE or XLT is going to basically be the same. Vehicles like these Defenders, Mercedes, and BMW's can have two identical "looking" cars, but were ordered w/ varying options that only the discerning eye can spot in pics. When buying, you can score a deal as a seller (private or dealer) may not know exactly what they have on their hands when pricing it. But on the flip side, when you go to sell, you'll get lowball offers from buyers or Carmax going off base KBB values not taking into account your vehicle having the off road pack, explorer pack, 22" wheels, etc. I recently sold 2 vehicles and ran into this. One was a Mercedes GLS550 w/ the Designo interior, which at the time there were only 2 other clean examples (clean title, no accidents) in the country for sale that also had it. The other was a '20 BMW M340 w/ the Cooling & HP Tire pkg, laser lights, factory M-Performance exhaust, and built before the DME was locked. Several times lowballers would say they can get a similar car on a dealer lot or at auction for less, only to come back and admit that they couldn't find one w/ everything this had.

 

Glad I could put your heart at ease. My Defender buying process was quite fraught with hurdles actually. Two Defenders that I was literally on my way to the dealership to buy, were sold before I got there (in fairness, one was sold while I was on the side of I95 putting a new alternator pulley on my H1). I had looked at the market for weeks in advance and knew where it was when it came to Defenders. I'd actually say you got a bit of a deal.

As far as Carmax is concerned, they actually own one of the larges wholesale auction houses (I can't remember which one, I don't think its Manheim) but they don't use KBB... they use their own auction results to derive values. You can actually sign up for their auctions apparently. https://www.carmaxauctions.com/

 

For an additional data point, I purchased my 2020 110S, nicely outfitted with an MSRP of $71,765, from an MB dealer for $47,899 in April. It had 32K miles, new oil, tires, rear brakes, brake fluid,alignment and wipers (all LR). So that's about 1/3 of the depreciation from the original MSRP.

The dealer started the pricing at $55,299 until I grabbed it four months later at $47,899. Carvana's "we'll take it off your hands now" offer is now $38,000 unseen, down from $43,000 last month (but the original warranty has now expired so that likely sank the price).

 

I traded my 2018 Q5 for the custom ordered 2022 Defender, and granted I don't know much about Mercedes or BMW but JLR I really think takes customization of options to the extremes. I remember when building out my Defender a person could literally spec out a 70k Defender and have it arrive without a rear seat armrest. lol I emailed them about that, it's a joke, stuff that's standard on a base Corolla. Their answer it seems to me has now been to go the other way entirely, soon with Jag if they can't sell it for 150k they don't even want to sell it. Honestly it's absurd some of the stuff you can do in the configurator, like 65-70k sedans/SUVs can arrive with a manual trunk on them all because someone failed to notice it's not standard equipment on what everyone considers to be a 'luxury' vehicle.

I ordered the one up from base trim which was the 'S' trim Defender, with all of the possible options someone can spec out the chances of getting an accurate appraisal from someplace like carmax is minimal. They'll look at the most recent wholesale prices at the regional auctions which will more than likely have wildly different specs from one another and possibly even wildly different options on the same trim levels and then they'll take a guess. You can even tell them what's on it, show them the window sticker but they don't bother to price it in, it's all about what people pay at auctions. If anyone wants better value retention they're probably better off ordering a base model or nearly base. I had an 'S' which I believe was about 61k MSRP, my trade appraisals varied from 52k to 60k. I had an S trim with steelies, they were all about riveted to those steelies during appraisal and didn't give a damn that it had adaptive cruise with cold climate pack and air suspension, etc, why? because all of that they figured is just standard equipment on a luxury vehicle. Why wouldn't it have adaptive cruise as standard, right? I mean I get their thought process. It makes sense.

So anyway, waste of time at carmax (at least for me it was)... if anyone wants a solid appraisal on a Defender then the JLR dealership is where to take it. Ultimately I ended up trading it in for 2k less than what I owed on it but with the sales tax zeroed out on the next vehicle and getting back some of the extended warranty pro-rated my 18 month Defender 'experiment' ended up being a wash. That 2k of negative equity was very much pandemic-aided of course, if that were happening today I'd still have been massively underwater after 18 months.

 

I don't know if I agree about Land Rover's options really being that extreme. Check out Porsche etc.

 

Looks like JLR has shored up some of those loopholes in their options, e.g. I no longer see a way to end up without a rear seat armrest in a Defender and that's probably since they killed off the 'base' model that was starting at something like 48k 2020. Also it looks like the jags etc all have powered liftgates as standard equipment now (as they certainly should). I'm fine with choices but stuff like that not being standard equipment a few years ago on these brands was silly imo.

A lot of the problems I ran into when shopping my trade around during the pandemic were surely due to it being a newly introduced model as there just weren't many being sold at auction at the time. That combined with the sheer variety of options I think was understandably tricky. As someone said above it could work for or against you. I remember 110s were bringing much higher asking prices even though it was only a few thousand dollars difference in price to order one. I want to say the 90s were going for probably 5-8k less than the 110s were as pre-owned vehicles, not sure if it's still that way.

 

Do not rely on Carmax or Carvana for accurate worth/pricing/resale. I had a 2023 P400X with 11,500 miles and they quoted me $65K. My dealer offered me $71K. I sold it privately last month for $78K.