Land Rover Defender

The relationship between color and resale value is real, measurable, and counterintuitive enough that it's worth understanding before you make a decision you'll live with for several years.

There are expensive cars everywhere. Most of them will be forgotten. The Porsche 911 will not be forgotten. Neither will the Ferrari Testarossa, the original Land Rover Defender, the Volkswagen Golf GTI, or the first-generation Mazda Miata. None of those last two cost anywhere near what most people think of as an iconic car's price. Expense has almost nothing to do with it...

Most cars look worse dirty. A dusty black sedan looks neglected. A water-spotted white crossover looks like it spent a week in a grocery store parking lot. But there is a specific category of vehicle where a layer of dirt, dust, or mud does not hurt the design at all. In some cases it actively improves it. These are those cars and the reason is more interesting than it sounds...

In 1990 the ten best-selling vehicles in America included sedans, coupes, and a handful of trucks. By 2005 the list was unrecognizable. By 2015 it was almost entirely trucks and SUVs. By 2023 Ford had stopped selling passenger cars in the United States entirely except for the Mustang, which survives only because it is culturally untouchable...