Bob Kelley, who turned the Kelley Blue Book, a price list published by his family’s used car dealership, into one of the world’s leading authorities on cars, trucks, motorcycles and virtually anything else that gets you from the point A to point B, He died on May 28 at his home in Indian Wells, California, east of Los Angeles. He was 96 years old.
His son-in-law Charlie Vogelheim confirmed the death.
The Kelley Blue Book began in 1926 at Kelley Kar Co., a Los Angeles dealership founded by Mr. Kelley’s father, Sidney, and an uncle, Leslie Kelley. As one of the largest used car dealerships in the region (and eventually the country), they had a constant need for new inventory, and the book originated as a simple list of prices they were willing to pay for certain cars in certain conditions.
Kelley joined the company after the end of World War II, a prime time to enter the used car business. The war had put an end to new automobile production and it would be several years before automakers could meet demand.
He was initially in charge of the valuations of the new inventory and the compilation of the book, and he brought his jeweler’s eye to the work. He studied all the factors that go into deciding a car’s roadworthiness and visual appeal (mileage, sound system, paint color) and then developed a long list of data points that, combined, would produce a price .
“I had a habit of driving the oldest car on the lot home at night to understand why it wasn’t selling,” Vogelheim, a former Kelley Blue Book editor, said by phone.
Thanks to the accuracy of Mr. Kelley’s listings and the market-setting power of his family’s business, other dealerships began using the listing as well.
The Kelleys closed their dealership in 1962 and sold Kelley Blue Book to another dealer in Los Angeles. By then, Sidney and Leslie Kelley had largely left the business, but the new owners kept Bob Kelley and the rest of the team as employees.
At first, Mr. Kelley was concerned that, without the dealership, confidence in the book would decline. Instead, his popularity continued to grow, largely due to Kelley’s reputation as an automobile tester.
As it dug deeper into the data underlying its valuations, the Kelley Blue Book became increasingly valuable beyond used car dealerships. Courts, insurance companies, and banks used it to evaluate what for most people was one of the largest assets they would ever own.
He also expanded the scope of the book, incorporating motorcycles, boats, recreational vehicles and trucks, as well as luxury and imported vehicles. Over time, an updated edition of the book appeared every two months, selling a total of one million copies a year.
Until the 1990s, the Kelley Blue Book was used almost exclusively by the used car industry, not consumers. In 1995, Kelley put the book online, a move that further expanded its use by making it easily available to car buyers. Today it evaluates both new and used cars.
Other popular car buying guides have appeared, but the Kelley Blue Book remains the gold standard, and “blue book value” has entered the lexicon as a synonym for objective, top-notch evaluation of a used item, whether whether it is covered by Mr. Kelley’s book or not.
Robert Sidney Kelley was born on December 11, 1927 in Los Angeles. His father and his uncle were the children of a Methodist preacher from Arkansas who had moved to California when they were young to seek their fortune and found it in automobiles.
His mother, Margaret (Miller) Kelley, managed the home.
Mr. Kelley started working at his family’s dealership when he was in high school. After graduating, he enlisted in the Navy and was accepted into naval aviator training at the University of New Mexico. The war ended before he saw combat and he returned to work with his family.
Along with his son-in-law, he is survived by his wife, Wanda; his sister, Debi Sullivan; his sons, Michael and Mitchell; his daughters Christine Vogelheim, Nancy Bracken and Cynthia Shilling; 12 grandchildren; and 10 great-grandchildren.
In 1981 he hired his son Michael to run the day-to-day operations of Kelley Blue Book and retired in 2001. The company was sold to Autotrader.com in 2010.
Although he was famous for his data-driven insights into cars and their value, Kelley insisted that instinct and intuition were still very important when trying to decide how much to ask or pay for a car.
Used-car pricing, he told The New York Times in 1996, “is both an art and a science.” And he added: “If someone does it just as science, they will be fooled.”