Far less than you’d hope if you are selling.
We’ve recently been looking for a new (old) car. Some real bargains out there if you want to buy.
£1000 tops, on a good day, with people who have not shopped around.
Realistically, less than £750.
Mileage is not really related to price – a low mileage car could have sat around for ages in the wet, a car that gets used more, dries out when being driven, so can be in better condition than a little used one.

Its like my old XTR rear mech- worth a fortune to me, priceless but to anyone else market rate.

If it was an interesting model from a manufacturer it’d be different but sadly all it’ll mean is it’ll sell quicker at the market rate.

You buying it? DONT pay over the book price. It’ll still have age-related problems. Turned over every week and ran short distances no doubt.

Even if you were a neighbour of mine and leased a Audi Q7 S-Line and washed it every week infront of my house I wouldn’t ‘corr you must be rich’.

Who cares? A car/model is no measure of your wealth or personality 😀

My 02 Astra 1.8 cost me £570 a couple of years ago. Nearer 100,000 miles and ‘average’ condition. For low miles and pristine maybe I’d have paid up to £1500. On the good side it has been reliable on the down side it costs £260pa to tax and only does 33mpg (though mpg not a big issue if you do as few miles as me).

My grandfather bought an Orion brand new in 1984. Absolutely babied it. Always garaged, cleaned weekly, everything. He even kept a notebook in the car detailing every tank of fuel he’d put in.

When he eventually had to stop driving in about ’97 nobody in the immediate family wanted it but my gf needed a car so it went to her. It had about 20k miles on it by then.

A few weeks later it shredded the cam belt driving down the A3 and needed four new valves. It had only ever pottered about locally and the stress of suddenly doing 70mph was all too much for it. It also needed four new tyres.

The lesson – don’t pay too much of a premium as it’ll need work doing on it to make sure it stands up to normal use.

Oh, but it SO is. Just not always in the way that the respective drivers were hoping to project, that’s all… 😆

I had a Skoda that had silly low milleage for the age. Didn’t pay much of a premium for it and rightly so, the car was a heap mechanically and needed a full engine rebuild after a year or so. The body work and interior were very nice though.

Edit: air bag also failed, which is also an age related things and cost £££. Some rubber parts, door seals etc., were also degraded.

Similar story here.

My first car was a 1977 Fiesta, it was 13 years old when it came to me and had 35,000 on the clock. Previous owner was my late Uncle who’d used it to pop to the shops and come visit us, and not much else. It’d been looked after, garaged, regular servicing and underseal and all that jazz.

It had a number of problems out of the gate. The clutch linkage had snapped, the exhaust was swiss cheese and most of the HT electrics needed replacing. There was probably more that I’ve forgotten, it was a long time ago.

Couple of years in my teenage hands, and it was rotten. I put more miles on it in three years than it’d had in the last 13. Suddenly being regularly driven at 80mph down the motorway after a lifetime of an OAP pootling it around proved too much for the poor thing. It ate thermostats for fun, I went through one every six months. The radiator was held together with eggs and Radweld. On a trip back from down south one time, I blew out three exhaust valves just cruising along the motorway. The exhaust was held together with that foil wrap stuff and the last foot from the silencer was fashioned from an old telescope I’d found discarded by someone. The wheel arches were mostly rust; I clipped a kerb with the mudflap (remember those?!) one time and the entire assembly disintegrated taking a chunk of wheel arch with it. I could go on.

Now, granted, I could’ve been more careful with it, and it was late 70s technology rather than early 21st Century. Point is, “very low mileage” isn’t necessarily a selling point. Cars aren’t meant to be sedentary. If you sit on a couch for ten years drinking beer and eating chips and then suddenly decide one day to start running marathons, it’s only going to end one way.

You’d be surprised, My focus is only a few years newer and book price is still £2.5k, likewise the missus Fiesta is that age and still book price is double your estimate (at 80,000 and 100,000miles respectively).

There are bargain cars around, especially as reliability came on in huge leaps around 2000. I was counting oncoming cars last night to see how old mine is relatively, and 1/3rd were over 10 years old. 10 years ago car’s were either <3 years, <6 years or <9 years (1st owner, 2nd owner, bangernomics). For a bargain you’d have to be looking at something a bit less usual (the aforementioned Wagon-R, unpopular models, etc).

I’d budget for a full (cambelt) service, and make sure it has a fresh MOT to check for seized brakes etc, but if it passes that I’d say it’s as likely good for 100,000miles as any other car with that current milage.

What the hell do you tow to kill a clutch flywheel and hg in 60k miles !