To ask what car you drive and if any payment?

[Carsearch]

I’ll start:

BMW X1 2022
Year left on PCP, paying £350 a month

Need inspiration for what to do next, tempted to buy a used outright!

2023 Porsche Macan. Bought with cash last year. Before that, I had a lease car which I was paying £300 a month for. I managed to save up over the four years that I was leasing and send that to buy my car when it was 18mth old. I don’t do very high mileage so I plan to keep it for the next 10 to 12 years until I want to downsize.

Wow, that’s very cheap!

For me, it was saving a huge chunk of my first graduate salary as I was used to living frugally as a student and carried on house sharing for my first couple of years working so I had spare cash. I used what I saved as a deposit on my first flat and to buy a car for £15k. Since then I have traded in and added a few thousand from savings each time to change the car. Since my husband learned to drive a few years ago he contributes 50% to whatever we are adding.

Mazda 3, 10yrs old but low mileage, bought 2yrs ago outright (£10.5k), goes well but don't need to drive too much. Does the job with 2 young kids, only downside is turning circle seems like a tank! Not one for flashy cars though (apart from the MX-5 I'll be buying again once kids are older!)

I've had a privileged life I guess! But also savers mindset, don't spend much month to month and savings just tend to build up anyway. Was in the Armed Forces back in the day which really helped save up for first property, so had a higher deposit/lower mortgage than others, husband earns well and we've never had any loans/car finance. It becomes a virtuous circle, the more you can save, the more you benefit and the returns start to fund other things. A lot depends on the initial leg up though I freely admit (and I went through uni early enough to not have massive student loans either). It's definitely harder these days if you're younger/renting in a city or something.

2019 Vaux Insignia
Bought outright for somewhere between 6 and £7K.
Single, spinster, expensive mortgage, never had a car on finance.

Discovery Sport, ex-demo, 3-yrs old, paid cash.

No mortgage, kids are adults and moved out, more disposable income and higher wages. In the past I’ve had cheap cars, always around £5000, but now we’ve got more money to buy a newer one.

@eewwdavid I traded in my previous car and paid the €29k balance. I wouldn’t do this unless I had the same amount again to keep.I wouldn’t leave myself without savings. I save 500-1k per month.

No car, no payment (unless I hire one - couple of times a year) 👌

Why? Its hardly a big deal

Just out of curiosity, I did the maths on petrol prices. I just paid $4.27 per US gallon for standard-grade petrol. That's $1.13 per liter. At current exchange rates, that's 0.84 GBP per liter. Before the current price shock, gasoline was about $2.80 per gallon here, or $0.74 per liter, or 0.54 GBP.

Subarus tend to get worse gas mileage than comparable cars because of the full-time All Wheel Drive system. That adds weight to the vehicle and puts an additional load on the engine. I live in an area (the Hudson Highlands, NY) that gets very snowy winters and the odd hurricane or tropical storm. So we accept the mileage penalty as the price of not getting stuck in a snowstorm or skidding off the road in heavy rain. They are almost unstoppable in snow.

One reason I'm trading in my old Forester for the hybrid is that it gets much better mileage, about 38 mpg driving around town, than my old ICE 2020. It also retains the full-time All Wheel Drive system, so it's the best of both worlds.

2013 Audi A1. Was 2 when we bought it, cash. Its done 70,000 miles.

@Schnapps00

But also savers mindset, don't spend much month to month and savings just tend to build up anyway

Same here re "saver's mindset". When I got my first "Saturday" job whilst at school, I decided to spend half, save half, and I continued doing that when I got other part time jobs around college, i.e. waitressing a couple of evenings per week and doing room changes in a local B&B at weekends. So I already had quite a buffer of savings even before I started full time work, and I liked seeing the interest being added. It was then pretty easy to continue "save half/spend half" of my wages, so it didn't take long to save enough to buy my first car.

Thanks for doing the maths I CBA with. Not quite as bad as I suggested but here, standard petrol is about £1.75 a litre so over twice as expensive.

I also forgot to mention in my previous post that we went to Iceland for a big birthday and the spectacular landscapes and while DP loved those, he seemed most excited by the fact that there was a lot of Subarus.

Once you've been bitten by the Subaru bug, there's no cure. 😁

I think Subaru prices here are much more competitive here than in the UK because they have so much market share here, and many are built at Subaru's US factory, so they avoid import duties. My Forester hybrid Touring, which is the top, fully loaded trim with all of the new tech and comfort features, is less than the average new vehicle price in the US.

Lol used to get loads of subarus cruising down Southend seafront back in the day

The thing about these sorts of threads is it brings out all the people who have cars 15-20 years old, rarely have issues etc. Yet PCP has the majority of the market. Where are the people who have PCP's bar me..

The PCP/Lease cars go out to open market after the term to be sold as second hand. So lots of people will buy them when they come off lease/PCP whilst they're still relatively new and reliable and likely to last a decade or so more.

2017 Honda HR-V, bought in 2022, financed about £11k via HP and paid it off over 5 years. Only the second car I've ever owned, before that was a 3 year old Kia Picanto which again I financed over 5 years, it cost me less than £100 p/m but that was buying in 2013. Great little nipper, I miss it and wish we'd kept it as a second car tbh!

I'm enjoying being payment-free for now, but there's no way we'd ever be able to save enough for anything other than a banger outright as we've since had a baby, cut hours, got a mortgage etc. We do save monthly for maintenance tho to avoid any huge shocks come MOT/service time. I would love to be able to live without a car in all honestly but we're semi-rural and it's just not practical with the state of public transport in this country.

Brand new Citroen EC5 Aircross via NHS Fleet Solutions
£349.88 a month after deductions to NI and Pension
Everything is included in the lease except "fuel" but I can charge for free at work so I'm saving a fortune that way

This is my third lease car through work and I can't see me ever being able to buy a car outright

Tesla Y
I bought it outright as a Company purchase

2016 Honda Civic. Bought outright at about 18 months old for £13k. I had one as my previous car which I bought new and sold at 15 years old, I anticipate keeping this one for another 5 years or until it starts needing work.

I would never lease a car.

I think on MN you get a lot of people who WFH or can afford to live near work and amenities or the station so their mileage is lower than average.

Most of these 15-20 YO cars that have been 'run into the ground' won't have the 200k+ mileage that length of average mileage usually leads to.

People are also sufficiently financially organised to keep up with the service schedule and can cope with the car being off the road if it breaks down, because they live near work or WFH.

They're not in a position where they need to work shifts or travel 30 miles to work on an industrial estate not served by public transport without spare money to save up for a reliable car, so £300 pm is more achievable. The car version of the Vimes Boots Theory.

2011 Volvo XC70, no finance, paid £6k for it secondhand and I love it.