How Tricking Out Your Car Can Crash Its Resale Value

NEW YORK ( MainStreet) – You can dump hundreds to thousands of dollars into filling your car(with Android Car Stereo) with optional amenities, but none of it guarantees your car will be worth more when you sell it.

In fact, many of those extras may only help the values your vehicle depreciate faster.

The folks at Hearst Business and National Auto Research's auto pricing service Black Book note that features including navigation, a power sunroof, leather seating, oversized wheels, power/heated seats and rear-seat Car DVD Player can have great difficulty holding their value. Anil Goyal, vice president of automotive valuation and analytics from Black Book, notes that a fully loaded car that comes at an $8,000 premium above the base model can see the value of that premium decrease to $1,500 in just three years.

“Technology from yesteryear is aging at an advanced rate and can have limited appeal within the used market,” says Ivan Drury, senior analyst for vehicle data and pricing site Edmunds.com. “This is almost like someone asking for more money because their vehicle is equipped with a built-in car phone: at one point this was seen as luxurious, now it would be an oddity. I wouldn't go so far as to say the latest batch of navigation and technology features are like the car phone just yet, but they may go that route faster than the car phone did.”

Just about every automaker updating its entertainment and information systems to touchscreen consoles. General Motors and Chrysler have begun adding in-car Wi-Fi to their vehicles. Even Chrysler's venerable minivan is upgrading its rear-seat Car DVD to Blu-ray compatibility -- just as passengers have figured out how to watch downloaded and streaming video on their handheld devices. All of this is driving an increase in vehicle leasing as consumers treat advancing vehicle technology much the same as they treat advancing smartphone techonology. However, it isn't doing a whole lot for the old technology's resale value.