Britain's top 40 depreciation busters

What's your biggest annual motoring expense? Fuel? Insurance? Think again. For the vast majority of new car buyers, there’s a much larger bill that looms over their automotive budget – and all too often it’s treated as an afterthought.

Depreciation is motoring’s biggest stealth cost. Just when you think you’ve found the thriftiest, most fuel-efficient model on the planet, you could be facing a higher annual cost than you ever imagined when you take into account the dreaded ‘D’ word.

The definition of depreciation is simple – it’s the difference between the value of your car when you buy it and what it’s worth by the time you come to sell. Residuals are the likely value of a model after three years and 30,000 miles, represented as a percentage of the original price, and these figures enable us to compare the depreciation suffered by new vehicles.

Second-hand values are predicted by teams of experts, who monitor thousands of transactions every day. So, which new models are the safest places for your money? To lift the lid on the biggest hidden cost in motoring, we’ve uncovered the lowest-depreciating models in eight key classes.

Whether you’re after a new coupé or a tiny city car, we’ll reveal the best investment here. And if the class champion isn’t for you, we name four other depreciation beaters from rival makers in each sector – so you can see the strongest alternatives. Read on to find out which models hold on to their value best.