Navigating through a sea of second hand cars can be a daunting and complex activity. When a car has a previous owner, you don’t always know everything you’d like about its history. But you can hedge your bets by relying on some of the criteria that made cars top choices for new buyers the first time around, including the car’s history of reliability, fuel economy and safety.

Cars that are popular when new are often equally popular as used cars, especially if they perform as expected in the reliability, fuel economy and safety categories. So the list below starts with the 10 most popular cars sold in 2009, and shows ratings for these same cars from earlier years. With this criteria in mind, here is a list of the ten best second hand cars of 2009.

If you purchased one of these cars in 2009, congratulations! If you are in the market for a used car, this could be a good place to start your search. The data for these models was compiled from several different publicly accessible consumer rating sites, including edmunds.com, msn.com and consumerreports.org. Ratings shown below are taken from model years 2003 – 2007.

What the numbers mean:
–Units Sold – Number of units sold in the US in 2009, indicating the relative popularity of each model
–Reliability rating – Average reliability scores published for 2003 – 2007 models
–MPG – Published city/highway miles-per-gallon for 2007
–NHTSA – Average rating from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration crash tests performed on 2007 models
–Overall – Combined and equally-weighted score for reliability, fuel economy and safety

Ten best second hand cars of 2009

Model Units Sold Reliability MPG NHTSA Overall
1 Toyota Corolla 252,414 5.0 31/40 4.4 13.5
2 Honda Civic 244,603 4.8 30/38 4.6 13.2
3 Honda Accord 287,491 5.0 26/34 4.6 12.6
4 Nissan Altima 194,211 4.8 26/35 4.6 12.5
5 Toyota Camry 333,937 4.8 24/34 4.8 12.4
6 Honda CR-V 191,214 5.0 22/28 4.8 11.8
7 Ford Fusion 165,117 5.0 23/31 4.2 11.6
8 Chevrolet Impala 165,565 4.4 21/30 4.6 11.1
9 Ford F-150 283,613 4.2 15/19 4.7 9.3
10 Chevrolet Silverado 1500 245,306 3.8 16/20 4.7 9.0