Achi news desk-
If you’re wondering how much your car is worth, or how much to pay for that car you’re considering buying, there’s a good chance you’ll be checking out KBB.com.
That’s short for Kelley Blue Book, and it’s one of the longest-standing sources for used car values. A man who was instrumental in his rise to prominence, Bob Kelley, died on May 28 in Indian Wells, California, aged 96.
The roots of the Blue Book lie in the Kelley Kar Company of Los Angeles, a used car dealership founded by Bob’s uncle, Les Kelley, in 1918 with a few Model T Fords. Wanting to grow its inventory, Kelley Kar Company distributed a list of cars it wanted to buy and how much it would pay for them. By 1926, that list became the first Kelley Blue Book pricing guide for used cars.
Long ago, Bob Kelley was a “lot boy” at the dealership run by his uncle and father, Sidney “Buster” Kelley. He was doing things like filling tires. He eventually took charge of repairing used cars and estimating their resale value, the kind of figures that would go into the paper guide.
By the 1960s, that book became a whole business. The family sold the car dealership and sold the pricing guide, separately, to a private investor, said Bob Kelley’s son-in-law, Charlie Vogelheim. Nevertheless, Buster and Bob Kelley signed 40-year management contracts to continue running operations, he said.
For most of its first 30 years as an independent business, the Blue Book was largely an industry source, not something for the public to use, according to KBB.com. Car dealers, finance companies and insurance companies relied on its values and the book helped shape how people thought about what cars were worth. Kelley Blue Book claims to be the first to show the effect of mileage on the value of a used vehicle, for example.
Other related products were added over the years, including a new car pricing guide in 1966, RV and motorcycle guides and even a “Manufactured Homes” price guide.
In 1995, Kelley Blue Book started a website, making its data readily available to the general public, not just industry insiders. Still, the book continued to be published every two months for several more years, Vogelheim said, because not everyone used the Internet.
“The nice thing about the new technology is that you could deliver fresh values more often and more specifically in terms of your information,” he said, “but, you know, the book, if you dropped it, it would still to work. You didn’t have to plug it in and recharge or anything like that.”
Bob retired from the company in 2000. Vogelheim worked with him at Kelley Blue Book starting in 1985 and was there when Kelley retired.
“Bob was my mentor, going through all the values of the vehicle, relationships between the different vehicles and, of course, the whole process of publishing the book,” said Vogelheim. “Before the computer, we did it in-house, all of the setting up and distribution of the test sheets and then the printing and distribution themselves.”
The final step in the production process was rounding the corners of the little book so dealers could easily slip it into a shirt pocket, he said.
Bob Kelley also taught people to pay attention to what customers really valued and would pay for in their cars, which was more complicated than just subtracting a certain amount from the price of the new car. For example, some Lexus cars from the early 1990s came with a phone installed as an expensive option, Vogelheim said, but, when the cars were sold used, the clunky corded phone actually reduced the value of the car.
“It was in the way,” he said.
Kelley Blue Book and its website, KBB.com, were purchased by the car sales website Autotrader in 2010, becoming part of the privately held conglomerate Cox Enterprises.
There were, and are, competitors to Kelley Blue Book, of course. A company called Edmunds started its own consumer-oriented pricing guide in 1966, and also went online in 1995 as another source of automotive pricing information. But Kelley Blue Book was one of the earliest to create a standard way for shoppers and the industry to measure the value of a used car.
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