Will used car prices crash in the next year?

@politecameraaction

Go on. Tell us what car it is.

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If you look at the slope from 8 years on, it’s way less. So lower rate of drop, and from a lower start so way less in £££ terms.

Yes, you drive an 8-10 year old car. But I’m ok with that. My current car is 9 years old now and will need a cam belt next year. I’m planning to do that and keep it another few years.

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The maths on older cars is that they work out cheaper. We bought a renault that in many ways was a disaster but was still cheap. The first owner did Bought it for £18000 and did 35000 miles. I bought it for £6500 and had 3 big bills. One was the cam belt and water pump so not a failure and cost just under a grand . The turbo and EGR were both repairs and cost about £1600 between them.

So i spent £9000 to drive 90,000 miles, 10p a mile. He spent £12,000 to drive 35,000 miles and spent 34p per mile

I wouldn’t set everything by one diagram showing a premium small car (here is where I presume it came from https://www.webuyanycar.com/how-to-beat-depreciation/ )
We are talking about an SUV here that may have cost £70k new? (OP, tell us all what it actually is) And don’t forget the extra £410 a year for RFL for it being over £40k new.

You’d probably get a year old EV for peanuts next year being how prices are crashing.

Doubtful, there is a lot of latent demand waiting for used prices to fall. A lot of people who appreciate cheap motoring also want cheap cars, so once they hit that price point they will hold there for ages I reckon.

It was some kind of 7 seater Volvo SUV with all the stuff. I actually went off it the morning after posting the thread based on the very sensible observation that selling it at a reasonable price would likely be a pain. All the same, amusing to see unhinged comments for which there’s no evidence in real life or the info given in the OP, like “Your mate is either deluded or trying to rip you off”. That comment says more about your expectations of your friends than anything else! 😉

Meanwhile…”buy at the bottom of the depreciation curve”…is classic STW – surely it’s obvious that a 13 year old Berlingo isn’t going to meet everyone’s needs, even if it won’t lose any further value? Obviously cars are going to depreciate – they’re a consumption good, not an investment good. Depreciation is just part of the cost of owning and using the thing. Hence the question about whether depreciation would likely accelerate in the coming year due to a crash in used car prices…

When you said you had good credit. What did that mean? Like you would be able to get a loan to fund it?

If that’s the case then there’s also the interest rate on debt to factor in too.

Have you seen the prices of new cars ? Even crap cars new these these days are £30k plus with a range of about 100 miles.

New Dacia Diusters start at £17300 !

Apart from the interior plastics (everyone seems to comment on them) user reviews of Dusters seem pretty good, and it is also pretty capable offroad, in comparison to many cars that that style themselves in that manner.

“Meanwhile…”buy at the bottom of the depreciation curve”…is classic STW – surely it’s obvious that a 13 year old Berlingo isn’t going to meet everyone’s needs, even if it won’t lose any further value?”

To meet my needs at the very bottom of the depreciation curve I have;

£500 Porsche Cayenne (blingy nice to be in caravan tow car).
£500 Volvo XC90 (7seater)
£2500 Berlingo (cheap basic no frills dog/bike transporter).
Volvo V70 (long legged European tourer).

Three of those are appreciating in value by me tinkering and restoring them, the Berlingo has lost a bit of value as I bought during Covid.

Three of those are appreciating in value by me tinkering and restoring them,

Yours are a pretty fringe case Rusty!

“Yours are a pretty fringe case Rusty!”

I do seem to have acquired a reputation – I was offered the company’s 11 plate 40k mile Ducato van for my usual £500 last week (I turned it down!) and my work colleague offered me his Golf Mk5 GTD for……£500 but I let another fellow tinkerer at work have that.

Ah RNP , a rival for a mcmoonter thread!

Great car projects- check

Fabulous dog – check

Awesome workshop – check

Who doesn’t lust after a sliding man cave door?

Anyway what I meant to say was ‘buy just before it approaches the bottom of its depreciation curve’, assuming that something worth 35k second hand retains a baseline of value well above 0 well into the future, lets say plateaus at 10-15k… or even starts to climb again if properly niche/ desirable. A 7 seat volvo though nice, isn’t really that kind of car- up my end its what every other biddie drives to the shops, badly. Offer him 15k for his convenience or be done with it, 35k second hand could get you into something properly nice. You can get an Aston Vantage with 30k on the clock for £35k, Aston or Volvo shopping car, hard choice…

“To meet my needs at the very bottom of the depreciation curve…”

Yeah but you’re an engineer with a bunch of land and an equipped garage and an apparently infinite amount of time and skill for spannering! 😆

You can get an Aston Vantage with 30k on the clock for £35k, Aston or Volvo shopping car, hard choice…

Not when you consider the ongoing costs. Clutch goes on your volvo and you might have to pick a cheaper holiday that year. Clutch goes on your Aston and you’ll be questioning whether or not you really need both kidneys.

surely it’s obvious that a 13 year old Berlingo isn’t going to meet everyone’s needs

I suppose some people might prefer a kangoo…

Another point is, if it gets crashed / stolen / burned out during that  9 months, what do you get from the insurance? Usually it’s less that it should be. So through no fault of your own you could take a 5k or more hit, potentially the day after you bought it.

Oh, and ANYTHING from JLR – make sure you’ve got £10k spare for a **** transmission or engine.  I’d doubly not touch one with a barge pole.

Oh, and ANYTHING from JLR – make sure you’ve got £10k spare for a **** transmission or engine. I’d doubly not touch one with a barge pole.

or an EV it seems – Renault wanting £11k to fix a radiator because the battery has to be removed, anything involving the slightest damage to an area near the batteries might need a new battery pack which can be more than the new cost of the car (few cases of this with Ionic 5s in the US and Canada).

I have good credit bit this is about ten times as much as I can afford to spend on a car.

If I can sell it next year for £2-3000 less, I can afford it.

Was going to ask that its got to be dependent on the car but just seen its a Volvo SUV. Nobody, absolutely nobody, will be able to say whether if you spend 35k on a car today whether you could sell for £32k next year unless that £35k car today is actually mates rates and on the open market it’d probably be £45k+ and even then there is a risk.

As for it being 10x what you can afford, jesus wept…

endoverend

You can get an Aston Vantage with 30k on the clock for £35k, Aston or Volvo shopping car, hard choice…

A petrolhead I work with has got an Aston Martin V8 Vantage. It’s a nice car, but he paid quite a lot for it and it barely comes out of his garage. Servicing seems to cost him at least £1k a year, he taxed it last week & it cost him £735 and if he drives it really carefully he can get it up to 19mpg.
A couple of years ago he was debating a driving holiday through Europe in the summer & was erring towards taking his Mini diesel as the fuel for the Aston was going to cost him so much 😆.

He’s recently also bought a BMW i8 and seems to be wondering what the point of the Aston is now, apart from showing off.
He’s the sort of person who would leave his Aston Martin key on the table hoping everyone notices.

A petrolhead I work with has got an Aston Martin V8 Vantage. It’s a nice car, but he paid quite a lot for it and it barely comes out of his garage. Servicing seems to cost him at least £1k a year, he taxed it last week & it cost him £735 and if he drives it really carefully he can get it up to 19mpg.
A couple of years ago he was debating a driving holiday through Europe in the summer & was erring towards taking his Mini diesel as the fuel for the Aston was going to cost him so much 😆.

Part of me really want’s to buy something silly like a £7k Jag XKR for a holiday.

Buy a good one in November when no one wants a convertible, DIY service, SORN, wait until June, rag it round Europe for 2 weeks pretending I’m a budget James Bond, sell it into the peak of the Summer convertible market having only have to pay the eyewatering tax for a month 😂.

What could possibly go wrong, answers on a postcard.

He’s recently also bought a BMW i8 and seems to be wondering what the point of the Aston is now, apart from showing off.

0-60 in 4 seconds, the engine from a Mini hatchback, and if you get an older one they’re free road tax.  It’s somehow a sensible supercar!

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taxed it last week & it cost him £735

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Or one and half a Porsche Cayenne’s

This is how I’ll be measuring all my motoring costs from now on 😀

thisisnotaspoon

Part of me really want’s to buy something silly like a £7k Jag XKR for a holiday.

@thisisnotaspoon – not wanting to derail this thread, but do you follow “Number 27” on You Tube?
He recently bought a V8 Jag XK and there’s a few vids about his experiences.

This is the first one:

Part of me really want’s to buy something silly like a £7k Jag XKR for a holiday

I would buy a Mercedes AMG CLS 63 and drive it around Wales a few times before selling it, but I’d have to be very much richer than I am now to even consider it.

Adding value at the bottom of the depreciation curve this weekend!
Front diff swop – original has a noisy pinion bearing (common Cayenne / Tourareg problem)

@stumpy01 , no I’d not, I’ll take a look and hopefully it’ll put me off 😂

Like RNP I’m quite happy spannering it’s just the cost of parts that worries me, and unlike the Cayenne there’s less of them being scrapped and less of a VW parts bin to keeps costs down.

That and (I’ll probably post a thread at some point, or submit it to GCN’s HACK / BODGE segment) I f****** hate cars, car culture and driving 😂, to the extent I’ve just built a bike trailer to tow my track bike so I don’t have to drive to the velodrome.

@rustynissanprarie I’m attempting to do the same by replacing all the bushings on the rear suspension and diff. An essential activity on any car you want to keep nice, IMO.

Hard pass on this idea from me.

Lease something if you must have a new car.

Not sure about leasing anymore. We used to as we value the new car warranty and it was less than depreciation vs discounted cash. But with higher IR, not too sure anymore.

Anyway I resolved that equation by buying a new Kia with a 7 year warranty. Probably cheaper than leasing it, although the opportunity cost at say 4% makes it a little closer. We have probably been helped by a massive discount and lower than expected depreciation. Probably £140/month depreciation so far and £50 opportunity cost so still less than what a lease would have been by about £100/month. And then we have another 4 years of warranty.

 There are no cheap cars any more.

Not my experience. Maybe you need to look harder?

“Your mate is either deluded or trying to rip you off”. That comment says more about your expectations of your friends than anything else! 😉

If your mate is asking the same price that dealers have them up for on AT (as you suggested in the OP), then I’d say he’s being very naive / optimistic – rather than actively trying to rip you off.

The WBAC or Motorway price would be the fairer option.

We used to as we value the new car warranty

The money you lose on a new car is almost guaranteed to be far more than you’d ever spend on repairs on an older car.

Without reading the whole thread used prices still seem super high.  We bought a year old Caddy Maxi life in 2019 and it looks like it’s potentially worth more than we paid for it.

That also explains why car insurance has been going up so much – the replacement cost of vehicles is way higher than it was a few years back.

Anyway I resolved that equation by buying a new Kia with a 7 year warranty. Probably cheaper than leasing it, although the opportunity cost at say 4% makes it a little closer. We have probably been helped by a massive discount and lower than expected depreciation. Probably £140/month depreciation so far and £50 opportunity cost so still less than what a lease would have been by about £100/month. And then we have another 4 years of warranty.

Or put another way, our 20 year old Ford costs on average* less in repairs each year than your Kia does in depreciation every fortnight.

*depends where you draw the line between what’s a warranty job, what’s maintenance and what’s an accident.

This year it cost about twice it’s value with a cambelt service, a new suspension strut and tyres! One of those you might not need in the first 7 years, one of those is a consumable, and one was from smacking it into a traffic island.

Before that I think the last few issues were a jammed center rear seatbelt (sorted with a Stanley knife, so it’s now a 4 seater), weeping coolant reservoir, and a perished HT lead.

Modern cars (anything post Japanese cars becoming completely mainstream and forcing everyone to up their game, so around the 2000 model year) are just so boringly reliable.

The money you lose on a new car is almost guaranteed to be far more than you’d ever spend on repairs on an older car.

Sure but I prefer recent(ish) cars so even 7 years is pushing it a bit for me. I can’t be dealing with expected repairs and enjoy a car with less miles and fresher suspension in particular, not to mention better tech and usually lower mpg.

The exercise was to compare buying new cash vs leasing new not comparing used to new anyway.

I’ll happily pay more depreciation for the benefits. I could have bought a year old car though but that was about the same as new through a broker.

I think everyone prefers newer cars don’t they?

In any case, a 1-2 year old car is going to be cheaper than a new one, and still just as good in every possible way.

In any case, a 1-2 year old car is going to be cheaper than a new one, and still just as good in every possible way.

Yes sure it should be. Back in June 21 when we bought, the broker price was slightly lower than the cheapest 1 year old used Xceed. Not the first time it happens but that’s obviously not a rule.

And traditionally for us buying 2 year old meant that you only get 1 year warranty. And if fairness 6 years would have been OK but we got 7 for the same money.

I also quite like the newness and choosing the colour / spec.

Everyone likes the “new car smell”……..

Working in the industry that manufacturers the majority of those materials that contribute to new car smell I’m happier running older vehicles😉

Everyone likes the “new car smell”

I actually don’t, our old Hyundai stank of it for 2 years and I wished it would go away.

Our replacement doesn’t smell of it, instead it still smells of the cheap nasty rubber car mats the previous owner put in which absolutely stank of rubber, it was nauseating. Even now, months after we threw them in the bin, if my wife has been driving the car and comes in her clothes smell of the same rubber.

I also quite like the newness and choosing the colour / spec.

Yes, that would be nice, but I’d much rather have a 3-4 year old luxury car than a basic new one.  But I’m happy for you to buy new ones so that I can buy them when you’re done.

“Modern cars (anything post Japanese cars becoming completely mainstream and forcing everyone to up their game, so around the 2000 model year) are just so boringly reliable.”

Erm, yes, no, maybe – other experiences are available.

Erm, yes, no, maybe – other experiences are available.

Sure they still blow up once in a while. But it’s by far the expiation rather than the rule.  Almost all cars will be scrapped after an accident, and the remainder will rust after 20+ years.  Even known weaknesses tend to be overblown, not all Zafiras burst into flames, not all Fiestas snapped their wet belts (the transit also has a wet belt but doesn’t seem to have the same hysteria as the cars), etc. Whereas 10 years earlier in 1990 a 5 year old B/L car was rapidly heading for rust and engine rebuilds.