How DriveIndex Computes Car Market Values
Every number on DriveIndex traces back to a real, verified sold price. No editorial estimates, no dealer asking prices, no user-submitted guesses — just what real cars actually sold for, recomputed every night.
1. Verified sales, from the sources that matter
DriveIndex continuously collects sold results from the auction houses and marketplaces where collector and enthusiast cars actually trade: Bring a Trailer, RM Sotheby's, Gooding & Company, Broad Arrow, Mecum, Cars & Bids, Bonhams, Barrett-Jackson, Hagerty Marketplace, Sotheby's Motorsport, and more. Each sale records the price, date, mileage, transmission, colors, and equipment.
2. Cleaning: outliers, damage, and mislisted cars
Raw auction feeds are messy. Before a sale can influence a value, it passes filters that exclude statistical outliers, cars with accident or salvage history on their vehicle report, replicas and tributes lumped under the real car's name, and higher-spec variants mislisted under a base model. A sale that fails these checks is kept visible in the history but excluded from the math.
3. Mileage-aware values
A 3,000-mile example and a 60,000-mile example are different assets. Sold prices are normalized to the model's typical mileage before aggregating, so the market value reflects the car — not whichever examples happened to sell recently.
4. The Value Signal and projections
From each car's full price history, DriveIndex classifies where it sits in its price cycle — appreciating, stable, bottomed, or depreciating — and projects its value 1–5 years out with confidence bounds. Equipment options (Paint to Sample, carbon-ceramic brakes, packages) are priced from with-vs-without comparisons of real sales, with statistical confidence intervals.
5. Nightly recomputation
The entire index recomputes every night. New sales land, values move, Value Signals reclassify, and every car page, model page, and collection re-ranks automatically. What you see is never more than a day old.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where does DriveIndex's data come from?
From verified public auction results: Bring a Trailer, RM Sotheby's, Gooding & Company, Broad Arrow, Mecum, Cars & Bids, Bonhams, Barrett-Jackson, Hagerty Marketplace, Sotheby's Motorsport, and more. Every sale is a real sold price with a date — never an estimate, dealer ask, or user-submitted guess.
How is a car's market value computed?
Each model-year's value comes from its own recent verified sales: prices are filtered for outliers (damaged/salvage cars, replicas, and mislisted variants are excluded), normalized for mileage so a 5k-mile example doesn't skew the number, and aggregated with a robust estimator. Values recompute every night as new sales land.
What is the Value Signal?
DriveIndex's classification of where a car is in its price cycle — appreciating, stable, bottomed, or depreciating — computed from its full price history with mileage-aware trend analysis, plus a projection of value 1–5 years out with confidence bounds.
How often does the data update?
Nightly. New auction results are collected daily from every tracked source, values and Value Signals recompute overnight, and every car, model, and collection page refreshes automatically.
Why do DriveIndex values sometimes differ from price guides?
Price guides publish periodic editorial estimates. DriveIndex values are recomputed nightly from actual sold prices, so they move with the market instead of lagging it — when the market shifts, the value shifts with the next night's sales.
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