Mike Cronin

mcronin@citizen-times.com

Like purchasing a house and renting an apartment, it’s expensive to buy a used car in Asheville.

Second-hand vehicles average $459 more than the North Carolina average, according to data from Autolist.

The San Francisco-based company provides car shoppers with the ability to compare makes, models and prices much like the Connecticut-based company Kayak supplies customers a comparison of times, rates and routes among different airlines.

Asheville ranks 19th in the state as the most affordable place to buy a used car, said Alex Klein, Autolist data science vice president.

“(We) found that there were statistically significant differences in list prices at the state, county and even the city level across both North Carolina and the U.S.,” Klein said in an email.

What makes Autolist's methodology unique is that its algorithms arrive at prices by factoring in the way car dealers in a specific geographic area are behaving compared to the way they are expected to behave, Klein said in a phone interview.​

“While dealer density predictably contributed significantly to price differentials, other factors did so as well, such as manufacturer community presence and geography demands,” he said.

The average price of a used car in North Carolina is $16,137, Klein said in the interview.

Klein and his colleagues used more than “72 million vehicles and 4.5 billion unique data points across vehicles of all makes and models nationwide” to determine Asheville’s ranking, he said in an email.

The least expensive cities to buy a used car in North Carolina, according to Autolist, were:

1. Charlotte, $396 below the state average

2. Gastonia, $358 below the state average

3. Winston-Salem, $283 below the state average

4. Cary, $280 below the state average

5. Raleigh, $243 below the state average

Autolist compiles these data to give car buyers the opportunity to “save hundreds if not thousands of dollars on their next vehicle by taking advantage of geographic differences in used vehicles prices,” Klein said.

The company also identified the most affordable used-car models in Asheville:

1. Volvo S60, $1,669 below the state average

2. GMC Sierra 2500HD, $1,486 below the state average

3. Cadillac CTS, $1,002 below the state average

4. Ford F-350 Super Duty, $971 below the state average

5. Chrysler 200, $963 below the state average

To learn more, go to www.autolist.com.