* You get to option the car with exactly the features/colors you want.
* People will pay a premium for something brand new.
* Financing for used cars usually carries a slightly higher interest rate.
* The actual cost at the dealership can vary significantly depending on the make/model/dealership
In fact the only reason why I bought new in the first place was because even a 10 year old tacoma is worth the better part of a new one. Guess it depends on your market but the premium for new looks pretty tiny or negative to me.
I too have seen this phenomenon, and I think it’s pretty common recently because the used car market is really out of whack. In my case, last year I bought a lightly used Sonata for about $30k with 12k miles, and today I could still trade it for about the same price with 31k miles on it.
Where you’re wrong is that this phenomenon doesn’t apply in general to the used car market but only in the last few years because of the chip shortage shrinking the supply of new cars. Short supply in turn increased demand for used cars, raising the prices.
I almost wonder if people overbought into the "new car must be more expensive" paradigm so they forgot new cars were competing against used cars, and the prices of used cars became irrationally high.
There's a legitimate reason why a car immediately loses its value. People are more likely to sell cars that have something wrong with them. The market price for a car that you just drove off the lot is not the market price for an average car of that age, it's the market price for the subset of cars of that age that people want to sell. Because a car in that subset is more likely to have something wrong with it, its value is lower. Even if you personally are not selling the car because there's something wrong with it, it's hard for the buyer to know this.
If people had magic X-ray eyes that could tell that the car you just drove off the lot doesn't have more problems than an average new car, then its sale price would be similar to a new car. But they don't.