The five-year story and the 100,000-mile story are two different stories
Ask which pony car holds value best and most people reach for the same answer: Mustang. That’s true for the first five years of ownership. In iSeeCars’ 2026 analysis of more than 950,000 five-year-old vehicles sold between March 2025 and February 2026, the Ford Mustang depreciated just 26.8% and landed among the top value-retaining vehicles in the entire study — a list the Chevrolet Camaro and Dodge Challenger did not crack. Run the head-to-head numbers on iSeeCars’ own Challenger vs. Mustang comparison and the gap is stark: the Challenger loses 39.5% of its value over five years against the Mustang’s 28.7%. But that’s the early-life picture. Cross the 100,000-mile line, and current dealer-listing data tells a noticeably different story.
What actually happens once the odometer clears six figures
Live valuation data from VIN Assessment’s Ford Mustang depreciation tracker, pulled from active dealer listings, shows a 2010 Mustang averaging 99,711 miles currently trades for around $11,998 — about 29% of its value versus a new Mustang’s price scaled to today’s dollars. Run the same math on Camaro listings and a 2012 model averaging 98,714 miles sits at $13,998, retaining roughly 33% of value, while 2015 examples near 94,330 miles hold about 36%. The Challenger’s own high-mileage data shows 2011 models averaging 101,611 miles priced around $13,522, also in the 35-36% retention band. In dollars and in percentage terms, the two cars that looked worse at year five are commanding more money than the Mustang once everyone’s odometer is past 100,000 miles.
Why the ranking flips
The explanation is supply, not quality. Chevrolet ended Camaro production after the 2024 model year, confirmed in Chevrolet’s own announcement, where Global Chevrolet VP Scott Bell said “this is not the end of Camaro’s story” while confirming the sixth generation would stop building at Lansing Grand River. Dodge cut off Challenger and Charger orders even earlier: Dodge’s own “Last Call” press release set production to end no later than December 31, 2023, with brand CEO Tim Kuniskis calling it “the end of an unforgettable era.” Ford, meanwhile, kept building new Mustangs straight through the seventh-generation S650 launch. A continuous flow of new and lightly-used Mustangs onto the market keeps downward pressure on every older Mustang competing for the same buyers. Camaros and Challengers don’t have that problem anymore — every one on the road is a fixed, shrinking supply, and V8 and supercharged HEMI examples in particular are being bought up by owners who know no more are coming.
What this means if you’re actually shopping at 100,000-plus miles
If you’re buying new or trading in within the first few years, the Mustang remains the statistically stronger bet, exactly as the broad iSeeCars retention data shows. But if you’re the buyer cross-shopping high-mileage pony cars specifically — the person looking at a 2011-2015 example with six figures on the clock — the discontinued nameplates are quietly out-earning the one still in showrooms. A Challenger or Camaro at 100,000 miles isn’t just holding sentimental value; it’s holding actual dollars better than a Mustang at the same mileage, according to the listing data above. That’s a real reversal from the five-year snapshot most buyers see quoted, and it’s driven entirely by Stellantis and GM’s own decisions to stop building these cars, not by anything mechanical separating the three.
It also matters which trim you’re chasing. The scarcity effect is not evenly distributed across a Camaro or Challenger lineup — a naturally-aspirated V6 base trim doesn’t carry the same collector premium as an SS with the LT1 V8 or a Scat Pack with the 6.4-liter HEMI, because those are the drivetrains buyers correctly assume will never be built again. A high-mileage Mustang GT with the Coyote V8, by contrast, is competing against a showroom full of brand-new Coyote-powered Mustangs, which caps how much a buyer will pay for the used one no matter how clean it is. That’s the mechanism behind the reversal in one sentence: scarcity of the powertrain, not the mileage on the odometer, is what’s setting the price floor once these cars cross 100,000 miles.
The pattern underneath the numbers
Depreciation curves aren’t fixed physical laws attached to a nameplate — they’re a function of how many alternatives a buyer has at any given moment, and that population keeps shifting as production lines shut down. The Mustang wins the race everyone measures because it’s the race with the most data behind it. The Camaro and Challenger are quietly winning a different one, in the mileage range where most of these cars actually spend their working lives, because nobody’s making more of them.