When it comes to the pedigree of one-to-three year old used cars, most shoppers for pre-owned cars continue to look down a very long nose when it comes to daily rental units while holding Certified Off-Lease models as the gold standard.

Put into financial terms: They’d be willing to pay an average of $1,240 more for C-OL and expect a discount of $1,572 for daily rental models. (Both figures from a typically off-finance model in generally good condition.) The picture hasn’t changed much since 2001. At that time about 10.4 percent of used-car shoppers said they’d consider or might consider a daily rental unit. That slipped to 9.8 percent in the 2009 survey — the difference a statistical tie.

What’s interesting is the growth of “Unlikely…” and “Definitely Not…” consider numbers. For financed vehicle, 9.9 percent of the 2001 sample said they would be unlikely to consider this category of used cars. That fell to only 1.9 percent in 2009, most of the improvement due to the increasingly good quality of vehicles. (Again, remember we are talking about one-to-three year old models.)