Guides by Denis
267 articles
Private Sellers List Cars Five Years Older Than Dealers Do
"Buy private, skip the markup" assumes both sides sell the same cars. They don't. Across 232,000 listings the private side is five model years older and 27,000 miles further along, which explains most of the price gap people think is markup.
Electric Cars Are 6% of the Used Market. In 2016 They Were 0.7%.
New-car EV sales get reported monthly. The used market is where those cars end up three years later, and that wave has only just started breaking — I can see it arriving year by year in our listings.
597 Car Models Have Been Discontinued. Two Years Killed the Most.
I counted every model in our catalogue whose last year is in the past. Five hundred and ninety-seven of them, and they didn't leave evenly — the deaths cluster into specific years, and those years tell the story of the American car industry.
A Lamborghini Emits More Than Two Volvos
Everyone knows a supercar drinks fuel. Fewer people have seen the actual spread: across every model rated since 2020, the dirtiest brand puts out 2.2 times the CO₂ of the cleanest, and scores a 1.5 out of 10 on smog while Volvo scores 6.2.
Tennessee Drivers Cover 62% More Miles Than Hawaiians
The same odometer reading means different things in different states. I divided mileage by age across tens of thousands of listings and found a 62% spread between the hardest-working cars in the country and the easiest life.
The Feature Everyone Switches Off Is Now on 63% of New Cars
Start-stop is the most disliked feature in modern motoring — the first thing owners turn off every morning. It went from 4% of new models to 63% in twelve years, and there's a specific reason it spread despite everyone hating it.
A Used Car Listing Lasts Under Seven Days
The advice you always hear is to be patient — watch the listing, wait for the price to come down, don't look eager. I measured how long listings actually survive. The answer changes the advice completely.
White Cars Went From 23% of the Road to 40% in Twelve Years
Park anywhere and count. Roughly two in five newish cars are white, and it wasn't always like that — in 2008 it was fewer than one in four. I sorted our listings by model year to watch the takeover happen.
The Five Most Complained-About Cars in America Are All Fords
I sorted 41,337 model-years by how many complaints owners filed with NHTSA. The top of the list is a clean sweep — five Fords, led by the 2010 Fusion with 5,124. Before you read that as a verdict, look at what sits underneath it.
Subaru Has the Most Wrecked Cars on the Used Market
I sorted every listing by brand and counted branded titles. Subaru came out on top at 12.4%, ahead of Tesla and Honda. For a marque built on safety adverts that looks like a contradiction — until you look at who buys them and where they live.
Crash Scores Improved Everywhere Except Rollovers
Cars have got measurably safer over the last decade — in two of the three tests NHTSA runs. The third has been flat since 2011, and the reason isn't that engineers stopped trying.
Home Charging Still Takes 10 Hours. It Did in 2023 Too.
Every launch promises quicker charging, and every year the fast-charger figures do improve. Meanwhile the number that actually governs owning one — how long it takes on the socket in your garage — hasn't moved since 2023.