Black Book Value

While the Kelley Blue Book is a widely known vehicle price guide, it does have its competitors. Many dealerships use the Black Book which bases its appraisal value on wholesale auctions. Their staff attends roughly 50 car auctions a week to help them determine the pricing for a car. The Black Book provides values for trade-ins and retail price, while the Kelley Blue Book also lists a private party value.

So what does it matter which book or price guide a dealership uses to determine used car pricing? The answer is that the different pricing guides can appraise your car and vary by thousands of dollars! For example, I plugged in my 99 Dodge Intrepid to all three pricing guides and received the following trade-in results:

Kelley Blue Book: $3,075
Black Book: $1,515 - $2,760
NADA Orange Book: $4,275

Obviously by looking at the results above, you would be hoping that the dealership you take your trade-in to uses the NADA Orange Book. The difference isn't chump change. While the Black Book wasn't ideal for trade-in value, it appraised the retail value of my car much less than the others. So knowing that, you would hope the dealership you're buying a used car from uses the Black Book to judge the worth of their used cars for sale. We compare all three pricing guides or books in our used car haggling page.

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