Car Value, Depreciation & 5-Year Cost to Own

Get used-car market value, depreciation curves, and 5-year cost-to-own for any make, model, and year — in bulk, from one clean API. Feed the actor a list of vehicles and it returns a structured valuation row for each: estimated market value in USD, a model depreciation curve (retention by age), and annual + 5-year fuel cost with MPG and CO₂.

Powered by the official vehicles.dev API — no scraping, no proxies, no CAPTCHAs, and nothing that breaks when a website changes its HTML.

What does Car Value, Depreciation & Cost to Own do?

This actor is a batch front-end to three vehicles.dev endpoints:

• Market value — an estimated used-car asking price (USD) for a specific year/make/model, optionally refined by mileage, trim, state, condition, drivetrain and more. Each estimate reports the model's median error (medianApePct) so you know how tight it is.
• Depreciation — a model-level depreciation curve: annual decay rate, retention by age (0–12 years), and per-model-year detail. Great for residual-value and resale forecasting.
• Cost to own — annual and 5-year fuel cost, combined MPG, fuel type, and CO₂ grams per mile, sourced from EPA data.

Give it one vehicle or ten thousand. Results download as JSON, CSV, Excel, or HTML, or stream live via the Apify API. Run it on demand or schedule it to refresh valuations over time. Because it runs on Apify you get API access, scheduling, monitoring, and integrations (Zapier, Make, Google Sheets, webhooks) for free.

Why use this actor?

• No API key required — the actor ships preconfigured. Paste vehicles, hit start.
• Official data source, not a scraper — vehicles.dev is a licensed vehicle-data API, so results are clean JSON that don't break when a marketplace redesigns its site.
• Batch + dedup — price a whole list in one run. Identical vehicles (same make/model/year) are deduplicated so you never pay twice for the same lookup.
• Pay only for what returns — you're billed per result actually written to the dataset. Nulls and failures cost nothing.
• Pick your datasets — turn market value, depreciation, and cost-to-own on or off independently to control cost.

Common use cases: used-car pricing tools, dealer inventory valuation, fleet residual-value modeling, lease/finance cost-to-own calculators, automotive marketplaces, insurance and total-loss valuation, and academic / market research.

How to use Car Value, Depreciation & Cost to Own

1. Click Try for free (or open the actor in your Apify Console).
2. In Vehicles, paste a list of vehicles as JSON — for example:

   [
     { "make": "Toyota", "model": "Camry", "year": 2021, "miles": 45000, "state": "TX" },
     { "make": "Ford", "model": "F-150", "year": 2022 }
   ]
   

   (Or just fill in the single Make / Model / Year fields to price one vehicle.)
3. Under Datasets, choose which of market value, depreciation, and cost to own you want.
4. Click Start. Rows populate as each vehicle is priced.
5. Download the dataset as JSON / CSV / Excel, or fetch it via the Apify API.

Input

Field	Type	Description
vehicles	array	List of { make, model, year } objects. year is required for market value and cost-to-own; depreciation works without it. Each object may include per-vehicle refiners (miles, trim, state, …) that override the run-level ones.
make / model / year	string / string / int	Single-vehicle shortcut, used only when vehicles is empty.
marketValue	boolean	Fetch the market-value estimate. Default true.
depreciation	boolean	Fetch the depreciation curve. Default true.
ownershipCosts	boolean	Fetch 5-year cost-to-own. Default false.
miles, trim, state, condition, drivetrain, fuel, transmission, bodyStyle, color, baseMsrp	mixed	Optional run-level market-value refiners.
maxConcurrency	int	Vehicles priced in parallel (default 5).
apiKey	string (secret)	Optional. Bring your own vehicles.dev key to use your own quota.
customMapFunction	string	Optional JS to reshape each row before it is saved.

Output

Each dataset row merges the requested datasets for one vehicle, with headline numbers flattened for the table view and full upstream payloads kept nested:

{
  "make": "Toyota",
  "model": "Camry",
  "year": 2021,
  "coverage": ["marketValue", "depreciation", "ownershipCosts"],
  "estimateUsd": 26096,
  "currency": "USD",
  "medianApePct": 3.7,
  "annualDecay": 0.0652,
  "combinedMpg": 26,
  "annualFuelCostUsd": 2350,
  "fiveYearFuelCostUsd": 11750,
  "co2GramsPerMile": 338,
  "fuelType": "Regular",
  "marketValue": { "estimateUsd": 26096, "currency": "USD", "medianApePct": 3.7, "inputs": { "…": "…" } },
  "depreciation": { "annualDecay": 0.0652, "byModelYear": [], "curveByAge": [] },
  "ownershipCosts": { "combinedMpg": 26, "annualFuelCostUsd": 2350, "…": "…" },
  "requestedAt": "2026-08-15T10:49:38.000Z",
  "source": "vehicles.dev"
}

You can download the dataset in various formats such as JSON, HTML, CSV, or Excel. The coverage array tells you exactly which datasets were returned for each vehicle; a field is null when its dataset was not requested or was unavailable for that vehicle.

Data fields

Field	Meaning
estimateUsd	Estimated market value in whole USD.
medianApePct	The valuation model's median absolute % error (lower = tighter).
annualDecay	Fitted annual depreciation rate for the model.
combinedMpg	EPA combined MPG.
annualFuelCostUsd / fiveYearFuelCostUsd	Estimated fuel cost (fuel only).
co2GramsPerMile	Tailpipe CO₂ grams per mile.
coverage	Which datasets were returned for the row.
errors / notes	Per-dataset failures / skips (e.g. "requires year"), when any.

How much does it cost?

Billing is pay-per-result: a small per-run start fee plus a charge for each dataset result actually returned. You choose which datasets to fetch, so you control the cost. Turning off a dataset you don't need means you're never billed for it. Deduplication by make/model/year means overlapping inputs never double-bill. Failed or empty lookups are free.

Tips & advanced options

• Sharper valuations: add miles and state (and trim) — omitting mileage widens the estimate.
• Cheaper runs: leave ownershipCosts off unless you need fuel/CO₂; keep marketValue + depreciation for the core picture.
• Depreciation without a year: depreciation is model-level, so entries with no year still return a curve.
• Concurrency: the vehicles.dev rate limit is per-account, so the default maxConcurrency of 5 suits the free tier; raise it if you bring a higher-tier key.

FAQ, disclaimers & support

Is this real-time market data? Estimates are modeled from observed listing data via vehicles.dev; they're guidance, not a guaranteed sale price. Each market-value row includes medianApePct so you can gauge confidence.

Does depreciation vary by trim or VIN? No — depreciation is computed at the make/model level, so the curve is the same across trims and model-years of that model.

What does cost-to-own include? Fuel and CO₂ only (from EPA data). It excludes insurance, maintenance, and depreciation, and assumes ~15,000 miles/year.

Do I need a vehicles.dev account? No. The actor is preconfigured. Advanced users can supply their own apiKey to run against their own quota.

Something look off? Use the Issues tab to report it. Custom fields or a tailored vehicle-data pipeline can be built on request.

Data is provided by the official vehicles.dev API.