> Why do you think the car depreciates the second you drive it off the lot?
Because of the dealership and "new car" markup. There's next to no difference between the car that left the parking lot and a "new" one. If you don't care about this silly game, you can save a lot by buying an ex-display model with a few hundred/thousand km done.
I bought a "used" one-year-old Cadillac ATS with 6,000 miles on it. It had AWD, the V6 engine, and every option available except the rear-seat BluRay entertainment system. It was priced at 60% of new.
It was a great deal and I challenge anyone to tell the car wasn't brand new without checking the odometer.
How many people complain that their new car is slowing down significantly after less than a year, or becomes inexplicably unusable around the time the year+1 model appears?
This is very much not the case with the iPhone slowdown, where a lot of people were noticing issues, on a product which already has a pitiful and barely practical battery life.
I hate to break it to him, but a one-year-old car will perform worse than a brand new car. A car is a hugely more robust piece of machinery than a telephone, so the degradation is less noticeable, but it's there. Why do you think the car depreciates the second you drive it off the lot?