Used car lot
(Bike Tourist via Bigstock)

Seattle has not only become one of the toughest places to drive in the country, but what you’re driving — if you buy it used — is also going to cost you more than it would in many other U.S. cities.

The car-shopping website CarGurus crunched the nationwide data to come up with top 10 lists for the most affordable and most expensive cities to buy a used car. Seattle came in at No. 8 on that expensive list, ranked 91st out of 98 cities with an average used car price that is about 8 percent above the national average.

Fresno, Calif, is the place you’re going to want to drive past if you’re shopping for a used car, CarGurus reports. And you’ll want to get all the way to Miami to find the best deal, as the Florida city topped, among others, the Ohio cities of Cleveland, Akron and Toledo, in the most affordable top 10.

The CarGurus analysis showed a strong concentration of higher used car prices in cities on the West Coast.

CarGurus map
Green pins indicate car prices more than 1 percent below the national average, red indicates more than 1 percent above the average and yellow is within 1 percent of the average. (Via CarGurus)
CarGurus 2016 top 10 most affordable cities to buy a used car:
  1. Miami
  2. Cleveland
  3. Akron, Ohio
  4. Stamford, Conn.
  5. New York
  6. Detroit
  7. Toledo, Ohio
  8. Boston
  9. Providence, R.I.
  10. Worcester, Mass.
CarGurus 2016 top 10 most expensive cities to buy a used car:
  1. Fresno, Calif.
  2. Albuquerque, N.M.
  3. Reno, Nev.
  4. Portland, Ore.
  5. Bakersfield, Calif.
  6. El Paso, Texas
  7. Little Rock, Ark.
  8. Seattle
  9. Wichita, Kan.
  10. Jackson, Miss.

“While staying local makes sense for most car shoppers, they also may not be aware that car prices do vary across the country,” said Lisa Rosenberg, data analyst at CarGurus. “Expanding a car search to a nearby city can sometimes yield significant savings, and for those truly driven by price, it might be worth it.”

Check out the CarGurus site for the methodology and an interactive map showing the cities in the study.

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