Cars You Never Thought Would Be Overpriced

Jan. 8, 2008 Special to ABCNEWS.com — -- Go shopping for a Dodge Ram, and you may find a $4,500 factory incentive awaits. On top of that, it's likely a dealer will give you an all-smiles, deep-discount price that's lower by thousands more.

Despite these inducements, Rams are languishing on lots. Nationwide dealers reported a 117-day inventory as of Nov. 1, according to Automotive News. Jonathan Banks, senior director of the Automotive Leasing Guide-affiliated ALG Consulting Group, says that excess dealer inventory is a leading indicator that it's time not just for more incentives but possibly a price cut.

Good thing, because the Dodge Ram is among the most egregiously overpriced cars in the U.S. Rounding out the top five: the Mercury Grand Marquis, Ford's F-150, the Dodge Durango and the GMC Envoy.

Click here to see more about America's most overpriced vehicles at our partner site, Forbes.com.

In order to find the market's currently most overpriced vehicles, we first looked at market price figures supplied by Vincentric, a firm that tracks vehicle ownership costs for the auto industry. These are updated monthly to reflect marketplace inventory, demand, rebates and incentives, and represent the price that a buyer typically pays. We ruled out any vehicles where the market price was discounted less than 5% from the MSRP.

Next, we looked at J.D. Power's 2007 Automotive Performance, Execution and Layout (APEAL) survey results and ruled out vehicles with average or better satisfaction or better than two and a half stars. We consulted Consumer Reports' Owner Satisfaction results, data from a survey that asks owners, considering a wide range of factors including price, "Would you get this car again?" Cars with better than average scores were dropped. Then we looked at one-year residual value data from ALG, which help quantify the rapid depreciation of an overpriced vehicle directly after the sale. Finally, we reordered the remaining vehicles by the amount overpriced (difference between market price and MSRP) and ranked the top 15.