It’s my considered opinion that for low mileage vehicles, Edmunds and KBB are useful only as a very loose guide. You’ll notice that with an older vehicle with low miles you can put in much higher mileage in the pricing calculators and still get the same price as low miles. Of course, it depends if you are a seller or buyer and if the numbers these vehicle-pricing solutions offer are in your favor or not. For me, low miles are not necessarily a good thing as a car that sits a lot can still deteriorate. On the other hand, low mileage vehicles are usually in better than average shape. Either way, low miles and condition are factors for what a car is worth.
For example, I recently sold a near mint condition 1992 Mits 3000GT VR4 with less than 17k miles on it. Bluebook was around 10k. After researching what these vehicles were selling for around my area, which was around 10k, I decided to list my car for sale at $18,000 obo just to see if I could get someone to bite. Silly price I know, but I figured that if someone were really into these cars they would have to appreciate what I was selling. In the case of this vehicle, the bluebook value didn’t decrease until I put in over 50k miles or so into the pricing calculators.
There was a lot of interest, mostly from guys calling to see if the car really was in perfect condition and with only 17k miles. Then I would get, “You know bluebook is only 10k?” I would retort by saying, “Great, when you find a mint condition 92 VR4 with 17k miles, buy it!” Anyway, I didn’t get 18k, but I did get $16,500 from an avid VR4 nut that exclaimed that my car was the cleanest VR4 he had ever seen.
The point here is; if you have something that can’t be easily found else where, you can probably command better pricing than bluebooks – this would include Vipers for the most part as there are not many in numbers. On the other hand, there seems to be a lot of Vipers for sale on Ebay, Viper web sites and so on. It depends on what buyers at the time you are selling are looking for.
When I bought the VR4 above, I paid more than bluebook - as I did for my Viper. For both of these cars, I paid the seller what it was worth to ME. Of course, I don’t want to be ripped off, but also I’m NOT necessarily thinking about what I’ll be able to sell the car for in a few years. I want the car to enjoy NOW. That’s what I’m paying for. My daily driver is a 93 Honda Accord. It had 21k miles on it when I purchased it a year ago. I got it for $4600 – perfect running and above average cosmetic condition - only needed to replace the original tires. $4600 is below bluebook – and I did get a good deal - but Hondas are a dime a dozen.