In the United States, the average selling price for a new light vehicle was approximately 36,800 U.S. dollars in 2019. New automobiles and light trucks were on average almost 16,000 U.S. dollars more expensive than used light cars: the average selling price for used vehicles amounted to about 20,840 U.S. dollars in 2019. In light of a growing price gap between new and used cars, an increasing number of U.S. households will likely choose a used car over a new one.
The issue is whether or not it is possible to estimate the selling price of a used car. We have used a dataset comprising 120 records describing 120 used vehicles. The descriptions contained 24 different fields of information, which can be summarized as follows:
- Characteristics related to the vehicle’s market segment, i.e., premium or mass market, normalized yearly loss,
- Physical and mechanical characteristics of the vehicle, i.e., width, weight, engine type, and several other fields for each group of characteristics.
Current approaches for used car price computation are basic and calculate a rough average, which does not account for a particular used car’s specificities. Instead of these outdated solutions to get a listing price for a used car, Quaartz can compute an exact price estimate.