Our agent asked me a simple question on the phone last week while we were talking about raising our liability limits: "What's the van worth these days?" I said I didn't know. He said most people don't, and that I should find out before I decide what I'm paying to insure it. That was a fair hit.
So I spent a Saturday morning at the kitchen table with the spiral notebook from the Silverado's door pocket, a cup of coffee and three valuation sites open in three tabs. Then on Monday I stopped by a dealer lot on the Belt Highway on the way home from work and asked what they'd give me on trade. Here is what I found.
The numbers
The Sienna is a 2011 LE, eight seats, V6, silver, with about 189,500 miles on it as of this week. We bought it in 2016 with 61,000 on the clock. The Silverado is a 2014 LT crew cab with the 5.3 V8 and 4WD, dark gray, a little under 134,000 miles. I entered both with honest condition ratings, which for the van meant "fair" because of a scraped rear bumper and a passenger sliding door that is getting lazy.
- Sienna, trade-in across the three sites: $3,300 to $4,100
- Sienna, private party: $5,200 to $6,100
- Silverado, trade-in: $13,200 to $14,800
- Silverado, private party: $16,500 to $18,200
- Dealer walk-around offer: $3,500 on the van, $14,000 on the truck
The dealer's offers landed right at the low end of the trade-in ranges, which is about what I expected. The young man who looked at the truck was polite and spent more time on the rocker panels than I would have liked. Road salt has been eating at them since about 2021, and he noticed.
Why the ranges are so wide
The three sites disagreed with each other by as much as $900 on the van and $1,700 on the truck. Part of that is how each one handles mileage. One of them seemed to fall off a cliff after 180,000 miles on the van. Another barely cared. The other part is condition. Click "good" instead of "fair" on the Sienna and you gain $600 without touching a wrench.
I don't think any of these numbers is the truth. They are opinions with decimal points. The only real number is what a real person hands you in cash, and I'm not selling either vehicle, so I'll never know for sure. But the ranges are still useful, because they tell me roughly where the floor is.
The number that matters
Here is where I landed. Trade-in and private party matter if you are selling. We are not. The number that matters for us is what it would cost to replace each vehicle with something just as dependable, and what we pay every year to protect it.
For the van, I figure the realistic value is about $5,000. If it got totaled tomorrow, an insurance check of around $5,000 minus our deductible would not buy us another eight-passenger van we'd trust with Lainey's volleyball carpool. A similar van with 100,000 fewer miles is running $12,000 to $15,000 around here. So the van is worth more to us than it is to anybody else, which is the case with most old cars that still start every morning.
That also shapes the insurance question. Right now we carry collision on both vehicles. On a van worth about $5,000 with a $500 deductible, the most collision could ever pay us is about $4,500. I'm not changing anything yet, but I wrote that number at the top of a page in the notebook so I can compare it against what the coverage actually costs us when the next renewal comes. I'm not telling anybody else what to carry. I'm just saying I'd never done the arithmetic before.
The truck is a different story. At $16,000 or so private party, it is the most valuable thing we own that isn't a house. Collision on that one stays, no debate.
Tina's takeaway was shorter than mine. She read the list over my shoulder and said, "So the van is worth less than the AC compressor I keep hearing about." That is not true yet. I'm told it's close.
If you want to do this yourself, give yourself an hour, use at least three sites, be honest about condition, and write down the trade-in and private-party numbers separately. Then ask yourself the question our agent asked me, and the follow-up he didn't: what would it cost to replace this thing with one I'd trust just as much? That's usually a bigger number than any of the sites will show you.