MANHEIM’S quarterly Market Analyis has looked at the relationship between fuel and transmission type for three key fleet sectors – upper medium, compact executive and executive.

In all areas, Manheim found that diesel and automatic were the best combination for maintaining residual values.

Findings were as follows:

UPPER-MEDIUM
TWO-FOUR YEARS/80,000 MILES

IN this older sector, diesels are by far the most popular variant with automatics returning 36% of cost new and manuals 33%. In contrast, petrol models show 28% for automatics and 29% for manuals.

COMPACT EXECUTIVE
TWO TO FOUR YEARS/80,000 MILES

THIS sector in this age range shows a much smaller variance, with just 4% separating all four combinations. Automatic diesels just lead the way at 44% while manual petrol models at the back are returning 40%.

EXECUTIVE
TWO-FOUR YEARS/80K MILES

THERE is still a pronounced gap between the variants. Diesels are very much the most popular at 48% and 42% for automatic and manual models respectively, while petrol models showing much lower returns at 35% and 34% for automatic and manual models respectively.