why do big luxury SUVs lose half their value in three years, and is that the whole reason to buy used

the Lexus LX and GX hold value in a way that annoys the rest of us. a three year old GX is still worth a genuinely silly percentage of new, because the demand is high, the supply is low, and everybody knows they do not break. so for those two, the used discount is small and the reliability is high, which is a different deal than the one you are describing.

for the Europeans, the Range Rover, GLS, X7, Q7, used is almost always the play, exactly because the first owner already paid for the cliff. i would never buy one of those new. let someone else eat the first 25 grand and the new car smell.

the Grand Wagoneer is a case study in your second cliff because it has only existed since 2022, so the earliest ones are hitting the used market now and the depreciation has been steep, steeper than Jeep would like. i bought mine new, against this forum's entire religion, because i wanted a specific configuration and could not find it used. i know what i paid for that and i made peace with it.

the honest answer to your question is that there is no big European or American luxury SUV that holds value like the two Lexus trucks, and if resale is your top priority you already know what to buy and it has a GX or LX badge. everything else is a used buy.

called to the stand, and i will be honest against my own kind. the Lexus resale is real but it has gotten a little crazy, to where a used GX can cost within a few thousand of a new one, and at that point just buy the new one with the full warranty. the resale strength stops being a deal for the buyer and starts being a tax on the buyer.

so even the Lexus answer has a limit. the sweet spot across all of these is still a 2 to 3 year old European that somebody else bought new, as long as you walked in with the repair fund the other threads keep preaching. the depreciation already happened. you are just deciding whether to also take on the maintenance, and that is a budgeting question, not a mystery.

one piece the resale math leaves out: running cost, not just repair cost. these big V8 and twin turbo six trucks drink, and over a few years of 15 mpg the fuel bill is a real number that eats part of the used discount you were so proud of.

you can pull the real world and official numbers for any of these by year and engine at fueleconomy.gov before you buy, and it is worth doing. the difference between a 3.0 six and a 6.2 V8 over 15,000 miles a year is a car payment's worth of gas. i went with the turbo six Aviator partly for that reason and i do not miss the two cylinders.

good thread, and the consensus matches what my spreadsheet already believed, which is always nice. summary of where we landed, for the next person who searches this.

the two Lexus trucks hold value so well that used barely saves you anything, so if resale is the priority you buy those and you probably buy new because the used premium is silly. every other big luxury SUV is a used buy at 2 to 3 years old, after the first owner ate the cliff, as long as you budget the real maintenance number from day one. the drop that scares people is the same drop that makes the used purchase smart, and whether it is a good idea comes down entirely to whether you funded the repairs instead of pretending they will not happen.