Little cars (VW Up!), only going to do 6-7k miles a year.

Car one is a 2015 but has 57k on the clock. Looks and drives OK.

Car two is a 2012 but is the same colour and spec (apart from minor detailing…. Car one is a limited edition with slightly different alloys and trim colour), but this one has 20k on the clock. Not seen it in the flesh yet but will do next week.

Effectively the same price and both coming from the same VW dealership with same warranty.

Which would you buy?

Tough one init.

If you plan to keep it for a very long time, basically until it’s dead or being pensioned off as a £500 ‘banger’ then the lower mileage one probably makes more sense, cars don’t really rot these days. If you keep it 10 years it’s still be below 100k miles, and that seems to be the sort of mileage when things start to go wrong with cars.

If you’re going to keep it 2-3 years and swap it for something else, the newer one might be a better bet – a 5 year old 70k mile car is easier to sell than a 8 year old one with 41k maybe? I can’t imagine many Up!s are doing 15k miles a year so 41k miles won’t seem so low mileage.

Doubt there’s much in it though.

Yeah tricky.
It will probs be kept for at least 4 years as my youngest daughter’s start driving in 28 months so it’s for them to use as well.

We actually already own the 2015 car but have the option to swap FOC under the VW 30 day exchange deal.

The 2015 does have some scratches on the dash that we are unable to fix and an annoying engine/exhaust rattle at 2500 rpm which may be fixable under warranty.
I also suspect the 57k brakes may need replacing soon.

A test drive of the older car will be interesting.

Does car 1 still have a year’s manufacturer warranty on top of any warranty negotiated with the dealer? 57k in 2 years is a lot of miles for a little car. Ex-rental?

No car one just has 12 month warranty… Doesn’t get added to the existing manufacturer’s warranty.

So both cars would have the same warranty.

Not ex rental, sold to a local girl who just did big miles for some reason.

57k one may be coming up to service interval for some large parts?

I disagree – they might not rot, but a lot of things seem to die based on age rather than miles IME (admittedly my experience is of bigger cars, but current car now has more miles than the last one when I got rid and is in far better condition – I bought this when it had done 120k miles in 4 years). The other thing to bear in mind is that 4k a year is too low mileage – the implication has to be that it’s had a life of short trips, often not warming up properly. Whereas the high mileage one has most likely spent a lot of time cruising at steady speeds (strange for an Up to do high mileage, but it’s still hard to see any other way to rack that up). So the amount of wear due to use is unlikely to be very different. It’s not how many miles, it’s what sort of miles – a mile in town could cause as much wear to everything as 10 miles on the motorway.

As always, the correct answer is to buy on condition not miles, but all else being equal one is still 3 years newer.

57k one may be coming up to service interval for some large parts?

but most of those have a time interval as well as distance. 2 years old and 57k means it’s done a lot of motorway miles which are easy on a car.

Given you’re going to do low mileage on it I’d go for the newer one every time.

the implication has to be that it’s had a life of short trips, often not warming up properly.

I’d usually agree but these little engines warm up very quckly….. this one was up to temperature within 2 miles this [1 deg C] morning.

Whereas the high mileage one has most likely spent a lot of time cruising at steady speeds

I agree again, but I also suspect a 1 ltr 3 cylinder engine is working harder to maintain motorway speeds than a 4 cylinder 1.6 engine for example.

Hang on VW have a 30 day exchange deal on used cars? Considering it took us about a week to go from “this is a nice car” to “this car is everything I hate about cars” on a used 3008 we got last month I really might look at a VW to replace it…

Hang on VW have a 30 day exchange deal on used cars?

Yep. 30 days/1000 miles (whichever is sooner) and the car must be the same value or more and come from the same ‘retailer’.

imagine doing 30K miles a year in an Up 😯

80 miles a day 7 days a week.

Drive both and see which is nicer. Timing belt been done on the older one? Needs doing evry 5 years apparently

😆 – what proportion of car journeys is under 2 miles? I think the stats are only available for all car journeys, not just ones covered by an Up doing 4k a year.

I also suspect a 1 ltr 3 cylinder engine is working harder to maintain motorway speeds than a 4 cylinder 1.6 engine for example.

Sure, but it’s still doing far less work than in covering a similar mileage around town – not that it’s particularly engines which wear out anyway, and all the other parts will be having a far easier time.

Timing belt been done on the older one? Needs doing evry 5 years apparently

Ahh, good point, I didn’t know that…. I’ll check when I go to see it. An approved VW is ‘supposed’ to be sold with nothing requiring doing for 12 months.

I’d look into engine revisions if any, in 3 years there could of been a revision to a problematic part (if any) (start by googling the engine number)

But personally I’d be with the newer one. 50kish miles is nothing in new cars anymore. It depends how they’ve been driven and maintained, really. Look at the service history!

Higher mileage one for me, it it test drives well.

Your lower annual mileage for the next 4 yrs will be the mileage back towards average.

If you are lucky, the 2012 car may not have tyre pressure sensors.

Unless it was really special, I’d buy the newer one. And I bought a RS Twingo 133 (not cup) that was six years old because It had 13K miles on it and I REALLY wanted a fast city car – and it’s a rocketship that takes a bike with the back wheel still on!

The UP is not that car, so buy newer.

Do they look different? Is the newer one a facelifted model? If not, the older one. Miles are usually worth more than years.

Time for a Pic me thinks.. Awesome little cars, the three door for me every time and in this spec. I’ve hired them when abroad and they’re a superb little car, short or long journeys. I’d have one over the Fiat 500 or equivalent every time, no question.
I’d be looking at the newer one you’ve proposed as an option.. only for the fact that there may have been some “upgrades” that you never really see under the bonnet or bushes and stuff that we dont really care about..

Do they look different? Is the newer one a facelifted model? If not, the older one. Miles are usually worth more than years.

No they look the same.

doris5000 – Member
imagine doing 30K miles a year in an Up

You know what, it’s probably not that bad.

Audi / VW whatever you call them made a ‘little big car’ in 1999 with the A2, yeah it was tiny, but you could do 30k miles a year in one without dying to death, it was meant to have the sort of refinement of an A4 or whatever in a smaller city sized car and it did – since then even tiny cars are usually more than up to long drives.

The only thing that would stop me are the seats, when I drove one it had the same sort of seats as my Wife’s Ibiza, they might be exactly the same in the great tradition of VW or just similar I don’t know – but I don’t quite fit in them, they’re soft enough, supportive enough, not too low, not too high but my ‘latissimus dorsi’ as my wife calls them, don’t fit between the bolsters in my Wife’s car so after an hour or two I become uncomfortable – but other than that they’re perfectly good at sitting for hours on end at 70mph, not as quite or refined as say a Golf sized car, but more than adequate, a hell of a lot better than my mid-2000s Mondeo.

dunno i had a hire “up” dinky little thing thought it was going to be fun

it felt even more like i was in a mobility scooter – more so than even a c1 – at least the c1 had a nice revvy little engine it had the illusion of being fun. the up just felt like i was driving the works electric forklift.

it just felt like it was made from the blow mould packaging easter eggs came in.