Kia Cars Have The Best Resale Values With Honda A Close Second

This year, American cars dominated J.D. Power's reliability study, and European brands ruled the roost in the J.D. Power Customer Satisfaction Index, but Kia, Honda, and Toyota came out on top for this year's Residual Value Awards.

In these tough economic times, consumers are changing the way they buy cars. Things like affordability, insurance rates, and fuel costs become more important, and there's another element that ranks highly as an important selling point: residual value. We know that car depreciation is a fact of life, and some cars lose value faster than others, and in this year's J.D. Power Residual Value Awards, we get to find out which brands and models hold their value the best.

The big news is that Lexus has received the brand award for best premium brand three years in a row, while Honda has won best mass-market brand for the second year in a row. Kia walked away with the most individual model awards and the most improved mass-market brand award for the year. Porsche wins the most improved premium brand, moving up four places, but depreciation has not been a factor for many Porsche models for a long time. This year's competition looked at recognizing vehicle models projected to hold the highest percentage of their manufacturer's suggested retail price after three years of ownership. The competition took into account factors such as options and feature sets, weather and the macroeconomic environment, mileage, and quality/reliability.

For 2023, 13 brands received awards over 29 segments, and J.D. Power evaluated a grand total of 291 models. Only brands with line entries in at least four different vehicle segments qualified for this year's award.

Kia walked away with five model-level residual awards for the K5, Rio, Sportage, Soul, and Telluride. Honda and Toyota each received four model-level awards for the Civic, Passport, HR-V, and Odyssey, and GR Supra, 4Runner, Tundra, and Tacoma, respectively. The best European brand is Land Rover, in fourth place with three awards for the Discovery and the Range Rover Velar and Evoque, and is followed in fifth place by the first American brand, Chevrolet, which won awards for the Bolt EV and Silverado 2500 HD.

Interestingly, the large car segment is not represented as this only has three model lines in 2022. To qualify for an award, a segment must have at least four different brands, but with so many new startups working to take a slice of legacy automakers' pie, we could soon see this filled for the 2023 round.

"This year's achievement by Kia speaks volumes about how far the brand has come," said Eric Lyman, vice president of ALG, the division of J.D. Power. "The marketplace acknowledges that Kia has a very strong product lineup in terms of design, quality, and residual values. Kia has become a force to be reckoned with."

A full list of winners can be viewed on the J.D. Power website.