Newbie tip on how to compare prices on used vehicles

Here is a formula that I used when shopping for a used Prius.
Say you are looking at one car with 20,000 miles on it and a price of $23,000.
The other is the same year, etc, and has 50,000 miles and is $16,000.
Which is cheaper?
Start by choosing a reasonable number for the total useful life of the car, say 150,000 miles.
It does not matter what the number is as long as you use the same number for both cars.
For car #1: subtract the miles on the car from 150,000 to get the remaining miles of 130,000.
Divide the price of $23,000 by the remaining miles of 130,000 to get a per mile price of .1769
For car #2, divide $16,000 by 100,000 to get a per mile price of .16
Car #2 is cheaper.
I hope this helps.
I looked at a lot of cars at a lot of different prices with varying miles and it can be very confusing.
This at least allows you to compare apples to apples.
PS I find it very informative that SE Toyota is charging me .18 per mile on my Prius IV at the end of my lease if I return the car and my mileage is in excess of the amount allowed by my lease. To me this says that they look at the unused portion of the total useful life mileage of a Prius IV as being valued at .18 per mile. Therefore, it seems that if you can buy a Prius IV for a price of less than .18 per mile of unused miles, you are doing well. The numbers are less for a Prius II or III. Probably around .15 based on what I saw on the market when I was looking.

 

You're welcome. I found it to be a great help in negotiating with dealers.