Originally Posted by
CB HI
10% per year is the most a quality bicycle should be depreciated by the insurance company. Any more and they need to be slammed.
We may wish this to be the case, but this is unrealistic. If we expected insurance companies to actually refund market value of the bikes, it would be realistic to assume maybe 35-40% depreciation in the first year, and then probably another 15% or so per year after that. The fact that most year-end clearance sales are at least 20-25% discounts means that the bare minimum depreciation for a one year old bike is 25% of it's retail price.
I get that we want to be able to replace a totaled bike with a new one - but the fact is, you can generally buy a 2 year-old bike for about 1/2 of what they sold for when new.