There are many Myths about importing vehicles from the United States. Canadian new car dealers started spreading all kinds of things when the US import market started to affect their business. Understandably so. I mean, if someone can import a new vehicle from the USA for cheaper than new car dealership buys from the factory for, who would buy locally? So the dealers and factory started their "keep your business local" campaigns. These campaigns included lying to consumers about US market vehicles and spreading bad press about US imports, saying that they were all lemons, not built for Canadian roads, had horrible resale value, were rebuilt/salvage/flood cars amongst a variety of other "keep your business local" tactics.
The first myth I want to tackle is that US vehicles have a lower resale value.
The definition of resale value is "The trade value of a good that has already been purchased. If the holder of the good wishes to resell the good to another party, this would be the amount of money that could be expected to be made from the transaction." In this case, the amount of money lost in a transaction is a fair translation.
What if I were to tell you that US vehicles had a BETTER resale value than their Canadian equivalents? This is more true than a new Canadian dealer would ever want you to know.
To say it simply, if you purchase a new vehicle from a Canadian dealer you will lose more once you sell it than someone who purchased a brand new vehicle from the USA. The market prices for the two vehicles are within one or two thousand of each other, however importing from the US will generally save you $5000 or more, and that's being conservative! Meaning not only will you sell your car faster as you can ask less for your vehicle, but you will lose less once you sell it.
Take a look at the Canadian auto market, or even just autotrader.ca, a large portion of the vehicles you see on the market are from the US, however you wouldn't be able to tell because of pricing. They are all priced almost equal. Why? Because there is virtually no one who will be willing to pay $4000 more for a vehicle just because the speedometer is in KM and the vehicle was built for the US market. Our vehicles are made in the same plants as the American vehicles are!
Simply said, lower resale value is a myth. If you are looking to purchase a new or used car, import it from the USA. You will thank us later.