To buy a new car?

[OrwellianTimes]

Driving on motorway at the weekend my car started making a thumping noise, I had kids with me so didn’t want to take any risks and pulled off at next services. When I tried to drive on on A road the engine died.

Long story short, it needs a whole new engine. It’ll cost min £3,000 to fit a replacement reconditioned engine. We bought the car 9 months ago for £4,000 - it’s 10 years old, low mileage and one of the premium brands so very disappointed. I’ve found the same model/age for sale locally for £2,900 but no way would I buy this model again.

AIBU to think bin this car off and buy a newer one? A reliable car is crucial for my work, and I do quite a lot of miles with a lot of bulky equipment, so I’m thinking it’s time to take a loan and buy something much newer, looking at 3 year old or newer if we can find a good one. I need a really big boot space so larger cars aren’t cheap. It’ll be a stretch but we can do monthly payments but we don’t have £4000 sat about at the moment to fix this car. DH thinks we should fix it.

YANBU - take a loan, buy newer car
YABU - fix it

From my understanding and talk with accountant some months back as a sole trader there’s barely any tax benefits even with fully electric cars, but I’ll look into it again.

Mercedes so not really much difference.

I go by the rule, when it starts costing you money, get rid. 3k is a lot when it was 4k to buy.

My car was a 2010 plate, not bad mileage, in great condition for its age, but it was startingto feel old and i got the feeling something is ready to go in it. Slow off the ball, bit chuggy. Traded it in and gone for a 3 year old car. Gotr a decent trade price and put down cash deposit, rest on finance. Absolutely love it. I've been on the lookout since last year, and saw this last week, so went to view.

Interesting, I’ve not heard much around bottom end failures in Mercs, tends to be reasonably common in BMWs and regular in certain JLR products.

I agree with the others. In fact, we've recently done the same. Old car (12 plate) was coming to the point of needing a clutch and it cost us £800 in new injectors two weeks before Christmas. We only had half the injectors done, so the other two would be needed soon too. By the time we'd done brakes, tyres etc it would easily have cost us £4k to get through the MOT and safe this year, but with an 11 year old car with 130,000 on the clock something else was bound to go.

We traded in, and got £2k for it part ex. Took out a £15k loan and bought a 3 year old Kia. Still have 4 years warranty on it and it's like a dream. No regrets at all. Most of all, because I feel safe driving now and I didn't before!

Yes, they’ve always been fine. DH regularly checks too.

We bought it with full service history but I wonder if it was faked.

We bought a 10 year old Mercedes'. Low mileage, great condition, FSH. It needed repairing every few months. We got rid after a year. It was cheaper to lease a car then keep that one on the road

Does it have a full Mercedes service history? You might be able to get Mercedes to do a goodwill gesture if thats the case. It shouldn't really fail after 10 years.

I've just spent £2k on my 10yo car. I was looking to replace it but the price of second hand cars is shocking. For what we paid for a 3yo car 7 years ago we'd get a 7 or 8yo car now. Hence the money being spent on mine.

Not a chance in hell. 6 months outside warranty, maybe.

Given it's worth £4K, I wouldn't be prepared to throw another £3k at it. If you can afford something newer, and you research it properly, it seems the more sensible option. Go for a personal loan to fund it though, rather than expensive car finance. Or a 0% credit card if you have the capacity and are willing to move providers to avoid interest.

I’m surprised you got a Mercedes with low mileage for that little money, even a 10 year old one. Wondering what else is wrong to make it do cheap?

The only time I've ever been stuck on the hard shoulder was in a "brand new" car. And the warranty somehow wriggled out of paying the full cost of the repairs. So buying new is no guarantee of reliability.

@honeylulu apologies for resurrecting an old thread but we have a BM which appears to have engine failure according the garage . It’s 6 years old well maintained and recently was at same garage and got engine work done as part of a recall . I could cry but just wondering what happened with your husbands friend ?

@Charliescat
I'm sorry to say he ditched the car. I don't think he had any luck getting anything refunded. He now shares his wife's company car (which ironically is a BMW!)

We got a new car. Heard of a few Mercedes that have had total failures at average mileage and not very old. I’ve got a friend who bought a brand new £90k one, and hadn’t had it for 6 months since it was 3 months old because of some fault.

We are considering just writing off the car and going for a second hand van that would double up as a camper van . The amount of money it will cost to get a new engine is just awful 😞