Price of cars

[Plantlifeonmars]

What on earth has happened to the price of cars? I know everything has gone up but this is insane. I bought a brand new small car for about £10k in Feb 2020 which I needed for work but it wiped out my savings. The same make is now £18k. It's just a very basic small car (similar to Corsa). A slightly bigger car is £24k. That's a years take home pay. It's a house deposit price. Crazy. Way above inflation. Even second hand cars are crazy prices. How do people afford them anymore? It's worrying me as I currently have no scope to save anything so how will I afford a new/second hand car when I need to replace mine? I need a car for work and have to travel to different places, some of which wouldn't be possible on public transport e.g. I had to travel 70 miles to a meeting last week. It took me 2 hours there and 2 hours back due to traffic. Due to awful public transport in this area it would have taken over 4 hours on public transport (and the same back again) and would have involved a walk, a bus ride, a train, a bus and another walk all for an hour long meeting.

I don't need to replace my car yet but I will need to at some point but how on earth do people do it?

Most financed cars aren't 'flashy'. Some people need a car and finance is the only option unfortunately. Also don't know why you make the correlation between financing a car and having no pension. But do you.

My 20 year old VW is still reliable - had an MOT last month and nothing needed doing. It has a service each summer and that’s it.

If you buy quality it lasts.

In terms of prices, the rise of PCP has allowed people to drive a car costing more than they could previously and then maybe this subsequently allowed car manufacturers to inflate their prices as people can now afford more due to PCP?

Then we had the parts shortage and even second-hand car prices went up. I don’t think new car prices will come down, manufacturers will simply choose to make less If/when demand falls.

My VW cost me less than half what the brand new equivalent would be today and wages have risen but only by about 50%

www.statista.com/statistics/1002964/average-full-time-annual-earnings-in-the-uk/

It's insane the same car i bought for £11.5k in 2019 could sell for that now despite being 6 years old. I couldn't actually afford to buy a new one so will just hang onto it though

Don't agree with this.

The move to EV has made fossil fuelled cars more desirable & thats only going to mean these will keep going up.... unless fossil fuels start becoming harder to get/even more expensive.

My neighbour needs carers, they are all driving older cars - makes me wonder how these people will be able to afford the cars they need going forward?
EV's are not possible for people on 10 or 11 an hour.

Bought an old banger this week for £800 !

The last one lasted 2 years & a few months
It wasn't economical to repair

We are having a nightmare finding one at the moment! I need a big 7 seater and am finding that even 2011-2013 cars are sitting at over £10k! I can’t afford a pcp or a lease and have always previously just bought our cars with a bank loan but are totally priced out now.

Your car is really new, what’s the problem?

By choice (for environmental reasons) I drive an 11 year old car. We will keep it until it literally cannot move any further. You really are worrying about nothing, people must be incentivised to stop replacing things!

It is a problem. Hopefully not for you for a while OP but it is a problem. As pps said the price went up due to the semiconductor shortage. Same as for mobile phones. And it hasn't come down because prices don't go down. Meanwhile public transport is worse now in most areas than it was three years ago - and considering that public transport anywhere in the UK was already shit prior to that, people do need cars if they want to go anywhere really. So even though they're expensive they'll still sell.

Exactly the same problem we are having. Been looking for over a year now. Original budget was £10k thought we'd get something nice now we're looking at spending up to £15k and still can't find anything much that seems like a good deal.
Our current 7 seater was 9 years old when we bought it and it had full service history average miles immaculate condition and was £4k. Looking at similar cars of that age now made in 2013 and like you say they are around the £10k mark! Pushing our budget up to £15k doesn't get you a lot more on a 7 seater either. And just seems like so much money

It's the state of our economy isn't it?

Due to inflation and Brexit our money now isn't worth what is was a few years ago.

So £11k now buys you less/older than it did a few years ago.

@Jmaho it’s a nightmare isn’t it! We were hunting for a sharan or galaxy ideally but wading through the rubbish has taken months. We started searching about 6 months ago. We did find a 2014 sharan for 12k with 80k miles on the clock but it was broken before it left the garage and they withdrew it from sale and I haven’t seen another.

The best I’ve seen was a galaxy at 10k with 50k miles but it was a bog standard model from 2013 and it was snapped up!

I’ve started to look at vans now but even those are a fortune.

@verdantverdure I'm sure our shithole economy doesn't help but cars are a particular problem due to the semiconductor issue. It will get worse as China increases its pissing around re Taiwan.

I find that people who haven't needed to buy a car in the last few years don't appreciate just how bad it's got. Eg I finally passed my test and bought my very first car last year. It took me bloody ages to pass because my lessons and then tests (passed 2nd time) kept getting delayed due to covid and then test centre backlog.

During that time I was saving up and keeping a very close and increasingly horrified eye on prices. When I did finally get my car I had several people say things like 'omg I can't believe you got such an old car/spent so much money ' obviously thinking I was some naive rookie getting ripped off but really although it was much more expensive than it would have been 18 months previously I knew it was about right for how prices are now. The only good thing about it is that because of all the delays with waiting for test dates etc I had time to save more money. Which I then spent on a car that was double the price it would have been before. Yay me.

Oh, and the diesel issue doesn't help. I could have bought one of them for next to nothing, because pretty soon nobody will be able to drive them but they're not getting anything for them. So every dealer has a bunch of perfectly decent condition cars that they can't even give away due to the type of fuel they use, and people who have them need to buy a different car entirely so there is massive increase in demand - previously those people would have kept their existing car and not been looking for a new one.

Yeah, we need a Europe wide semi conductor plan @HopLeaps.

America has one, China has one, Europe needs one.

The trouble is, even if there was a European one we'd probably bar ourselves from it because "sovereignty" means you can't cooperate with other people or some other nonsense

Strangely I haven’t noticed a decrease in prices for diesels at all.

They are still holding value the same if not more than petrol, if your looking for a huge car that is!

I haven't either.

We can build our own semiconductors! Just like the black/blue passports, British Is Best!!!

Yes, we'll have special diverged and deregulated ones that either don't work with anybody else's stuff or that we can't sell because we're not in our local market.

We'll park our van on the grass verge over the road from the car boot sale and wonder why the car boot customers aren't buying our stuff.

Still, we've saved sending that £10 a week to the car boot organisers though so #winning

The forthcoming ban on new petrol cars is causing a lot of demand, especially from people who will struggle to charge at home (i.e. on street parking, living in flats, etc). We're looking for a replacement car (petrol) around 2 years old, and the used petrol ones are more expensive than new EV/Hybrid ones (new petrol ones of our preferred model are no longer made). It's crazy.

Also the deterioration in exchange rates, computer chip shortage, means the usual flow of new cars just isn't happening, so people are holding on to their cars for longer, meaning much less supply in the second hand market.

I just went into a showroom to get my car serviced and my exact model and colour car is more expensive than I bought it for over a year ago with more miles on the clock. I was shocked!