(January 20, 2016) ATLANTA — Certified Pre-Owned (CPO) vehicles are a great option for shoppers looking for many of the benefits of a new vehicle without the new car price tag. Experts at Autotrader have rounded up 10 CPO luxury and 10 CPO non-luxury vehicles that savvy car shoppers should consider.

For the list of "Must-Shop CPO Cars," experts at Autotrader identified CPO luxury and CPO non-luxury vehicles that are "almost good as new" by offering a similar look to their brand-new counterparts while enabling shoppers to get used-car pricing and a manufacturer-backed warranty.

"New cars can be expensive, particularly if the desired features are only included in higher trim packages," said Brian Moody, executive editor at Autotrader. "In addition, used vehicles can sometimes fuel uncertainty about reliability. Cost-conscious shoppers will find that Certified Pre-Owned vehicles are a great bridge between used and new cars — offering the peace of mind they want with a price tag they can afford."

Autotrader's "Must-Shop CPO Vehicles" are based on criteria encompassing price, safety rating and warranty details. "We realized that the criteria for our luxury list was naturally going to differ slightly from that of our non-luxury list," said Tara Trompeter, managing editor at Autotrader. "Luxury and non-luxury consumers want and expect different things, and we took that into consideration when coming up with these benchmarks."

Criteria used for CPO luxury vehicles: a retail price of approximately $50,000 or less; a manufacturer-backed certified warranty; similar look to a current new car; a minimum of 5 years or 100,000 miles of powertrain coverage included in the purchase price; and an overall federal government safety rating of 5 stars.

Criteria used for CPO non-luxury vehicles: a retail price of approximately $35,000 or less; a manufacturer-backed certified warranty; similar look to a current new car; a minimum of 5 years or 100,000 miles of powertrain coverage included in the purchase price; an overall federal government safety rating of at least 4 out of 5 stars; and a warranty deductible of $50 or less (based on results from a recent Autotrader poll that showed a CPO warranty deductible of $50 or less is favored by two‑thirds of the respondents).

Autotrader experts selected 20 CPO cars that are standouts: