Investigate what affects the price of a used car.

Authors Avatar

Sophie Lakes

Introduction

For my maths coursework, I have been asked to investigate what affects the price of a used car. I have been given information on 100 cars. On each car I have details of its

  • Make (e.g. Ford)
  • Model (e.g. Fiesta)
  • Colour
  • Price when new
  • Current price
  • Age
  • Colour
  • Engine
  • Petrol Type
  • MPG
  • Mileage
  • History         
  • Service?
  • Number of owners
  • Length of MOT
  • Tax (months)
  • Insurance group
  • Doors
  • Style
  • Central Locking
  • Seats
  • Gearbox
  • Air conditioning?
  • Airbags?

In the information there are 26 different brands of car.

Hypothesis

The value of a car decreases exponentially with age

By decreasing exponentially I mean that in a graph of a certain type of car, with age along one axis and its value along the other, a downward curve would be seen, for example:

Plan

The factor that I am first going to investigate, as I believe it to be the most important factor affecting the selling price of the car, is the age. As there is a lot of information contained within the database, I am goin to narrow down my search by first looking at four different brands of car.

I will be using a variety of charts, diagrams and graphs in order to present my information.

The results I collect from each make of car I will then combine to find an overall average of the affect of age on the selling price of a car.

Join now!

For each Make I will be finding:

The Median

This is the age in the middle, found by putting all the results into numerical order.

The Mean

Found by adding up all the age and dividing the result by the total number of data. This is perhaps the most precise way of achieving an average.

The Range

 Found by subtracting the lowest value from the highest value

The Mode

The most common occurring age

Ford

Average price when new:

Mean:

Total = 174526

Divided ...

This is a preview of the whole essay