> The people for whom the advice of "buy a 2-4 year old certified pre-owned car" makes economic sense are the ones who are otherwise buying a new car. There are

> The people for whom the advice of "buy a 2-4 year old certified pre-owned car" makes economic sense are the ones who are otherwise buying a new car. There are a ton of people who seem to default to "I'm buying new" for whatever reason. a lot of people just want the shiniest new thing they can get a loan for. I do think there are some legitimate reasons for buying new/CPO though. a lot of people (somewhat frivolously) plan to own a car for about five years, so buying new/CPO leaves the car in its original warranty for the majority of the time they own it. this probably isn't better economically, but knowing that a) cars are less likely to break during warranty, and b) the dealership will fix it for free if it does might be worth it for the peace of mind. there are some cars (mostly cheap performance cars) that I simply wouldn't consider buying used out of fear of what the previous owner may have done to it. somewhat of a tangent, but I was looking at a couple online TCO calculators recently. not sure how they do their calculations (or how accurate they are), but I got some very surprising results. for all the models I was considering buying, the five year TCO was almost the same for CPO as it was for new, only lower by a few percentage points.