Depreciation—it's a dirty word in the automotive landscape on par with any of the seven suspect words you can never, and we mean ever, say on television. It can turn a slam-dunk purchase of the car of your dreams into a financial nightmare on par with letting your mortgage drag on for a few years. Seeing which comically-priced ultra-luxurious barge can lose the most value after rolling off the lot should be some kind of Olympic sport, but let’s just cut to the chase and figure out the king of them all. When $100,000 Luxury Cars Become Used Car Lot Fodder So what causes a luxury vehicle to begin life at whatever absurd MSRP it was sold for and wind up less valuable than a Toyota or Honda? Well, if Newton's first law of motion says objects keep doing what they're doing until an outside force changes it, the same is true in appraising luxury cars for resale. The higher the base price, the harder the inertia that sends the price cratering, and luxury items like fancy computers and lots of features make the problem even worse.Take the Mercedes EQS AMG, the performance-kitted variant of theall-electric Mercedes-Benz EQS. On its own, it’s a serviceable alternative to established EV performance sedans like the Tesla Model S Plaid. But a 2024 survey by iSeeCars found that a standard Mercedes-Benz EQS lost 47.8% of its value in a short period of time. Nowadays, you can buy a 2023 EQS AMG with peak horsepower in the 750s for a touch over $50,000. Not to be outdone, a current ICE G70 BMW 7 Series has a base MSRP in the lower $90,000 range, and an all-electric i7 starts at just over $105,000.Or what about the Jaguar XF? One of Jag’s flagship vehicles before, well, whatever on Heaven's green Earth they’re doing currently. In its final 2024 model year, Jaguar offered the most basic XF 250 R-Dynamic SE for $49,800. By 2026, there are examples not that far past 50,000 miles selling for less than the most basic Hyundai Venue, the cheapest new car you can buy in the US today. Why Maserati's Ferrari Heritage Actually Hurts Resale Value Via: Bring a TrailerTake everything we just talked about. The fancy foreign luxury badge, the convoluted electronics, glitchy infotainment, AND swapping a V8 for electric motors or a V6, and Maserati completes the depreciation gauntlet with a considerable degree of skill. The brand performed a soft reboot back in the early 2000s, and since then has been turning out luxury sports cars that depreciate just as fast as they turn heads.The brand underwent something of a soft reboot around the turn of the 2000s with the introduction of the Maserati Coupe and Spyder. Now sporting hardware developed in conjunction with Ferrari, modern digitized comforts and amenities, enough luxuries to fill a mansion, and one of the most historic badges in Italian motoring, Maserati of the 2000s had everything it needed to make depreciation look effortless.It’s as if there was a direct proportionality between an increase in power, luxury, and refinement in the Maserati brand, and how unrelenting the depreciation is. Of course, that’s because there was, and Maserati’s “in-between” status, not quite at Ferrari’s level but better than your average Lexus, made the problem even worse. Nowhere is that more obvious than with one Maserati model in particular. The $150,000 Ferrari-Powered GT You Can Buy for Camry Money Motor AuthorityDesigned by Pininfarina and powered by a screaming V8 co-developed with Ferrari, the GranTurismo shared its underpinnings with the Quattroporte sedan and later the eye-wateringly beautiful Alfa Romeo 8C Competizione. With the choice of a six-speed automated manual gearbox like an F1 car, or a normal ZF six-speed auto, the GranTurismo was the old-school Italian GT car formula re-imagined for the deep 21st century. In other words, they tailor-built a vehicle for lightning-quick depreciation without intending to.Maserati built the original GranTurismo for 12 years between 2007 and 2019, updating it periodically. Only in 2024 did a new Nettuno-powered V6 GranTurismo II come around in the US, now sporting fancy pre-chamber injection or three electric motors. That just about sealed the GranTurismo's fate as the greatest depreciation debacle in recent memory. A finicky high-compression V6 powering a 4,000-lb Italian land ship, or a triple-motor electric setup that almost nobody outside a Maserati showroom knows exists? It’s not common to hear folks call the GranTurismo Folgore EV the best electric GT car you can buy, but what good is that when you almost never see them around?Legendary Depreciation by the NumbersMaserati (Stellantis)Let’s start with the GranTurismo I, the original, with the Ferrari-sourced V8. An example made in roughly the last decade would've MSRP'd for around $140,000-$150,000. Ten years later, you can buy a 2015-16 GranTurismo Sport for as little as $31,500 or the rare MC trim for just over $50,000. Want the roof down? The GrandCabrio, based on the same platform, retailed starting at $153,000 in 2020.Now? You can pick up the coupe or convertible for what it costs for what it takes to finance a mid-tier luxury crossover. We're talking $35,000 and change for a nearly ten-year-old examplewith 25,000 miles on the clock and a few owners in the rearview mirror. Be it the open-top convertible or the coupe, it can be tempting to think this luxury grand tourer depreciates into a real bargain.As for the tri-motor all-electric GranTurismo and GranCabrio Folgore, its 2025 debut hasn’t left enough time for its $205,000 base price to truly fall through the floor. But let’s remember, an electric powertrain multiplies the degree of depreciation by a substantial degree. With all the proprietary EV hardware under the hood, the kind that makes an independent mechanic run screaming, good luck keeping the thing running if you don’t live within a tow truck’s distance of a dealership. Why Smart Buyers Are Ignoring the Depreciation and Buying Anyway Via: Bring a TrailerThe Maserati GranTurismo is the perfect depreciation storm waiting to happen. It's like an apocalypse of economic and environmental factors that's conjuring up the worst depreciation relative to its starting base price that we've ever seen. Very possibly, the electric GranTurismo Folgore could see the most catastrophic depreciation that we’ve seen on a luxury vehicle since people started measuring in the early 1900s. Save for genuine high-end supercars with mid-mounted engines and seven-figure prices, there really isn't a brand that does it better.But rest assured, resale value isn't what the average Maserati GranTurismo driver is mulling over as he struts through a dealership. If you want to eat up miles as comfortably and stylishly as possible, people are ready and willing to eat the resale price when the time comes. So long as Stellantis keeps rolling in the green from new Maserati sales, how much it’s worth later is a problem for someone far younger and less wealthy than whoever buys a car like this new.If you’re at that level in life, you’re looking for the most comfortable, sportiest, and well-sorted grand touring car you can buy so you can eat up road trips like they’re made of stuffed crust pizza. Pardon the comparison, but this is an Italian sports car being sold in the United States, so it’s really not that far off.Sources: CarFax, iseecars