Prices getting beyond a joke

[Mumto2at]

Prices of new cars are just going up soo much! Why do they have to include and make cars so fancy? All I want is an 'older' style of car but new?
I've been getting fords for the past 10 years (slightly better deals due to family connections) prices have always been under £200 a month, give the car back before MOT and before anything starts needing replacing. Yes it's considered lost money as it's not mine, but I just see cars as lost money either way and I'd rather have something less likely to go wrong with it than have to worry about MOTs and it breaking down.
my contract was due last year, a newer version of what I have (puma) was over double what my installments were with my older (current) one. I've always had the cheaper ones (fiesta now puma).
all the other 'less fancy' car brands are very similar in price too yet alone the fancy ones!
all I care for is parking sensors (no camera) and to be able to use Bluetooth, not even bothered about satnav although it's handy at times when it's not sending me down the wrong way!

does anyone else feel this way or are cars on finance now for the wealthy and the rest of us are going to have to constantly think of the next MOT and what repairs need doing next

Cars on finance being common place is what's driven up the price of cars. I prefer to buy 3/4 years old outright and run as long as possible. Kept my last one 7 years and only lost 5k when I sold it and it was only a Citroen nothing flash.

I just bought a 4 yr old Kia (with very low mileage)for 12.5K. Had 7.5 deposit, borrowed the rest. It is a lot of money but I'll have that car for years. It's got parking camera and apple car play but is otherwise pretty basic. Might be worth a look.
I think the issue is that people don't want to buy a used car and keep it til it dies - they want a new car every 2/3 years and so leasing companies have got customers over a barrel.

Personally I don't like the idea of paying £200 pcm and not owning the car at the end - it relies on you always having the income to pay for a lease. At least when you buy it, it's yours in a few yrs and if you hit hard times, you have a car already.

The car industry in Europe set the train in motion for what we see today more than 30 years ago when it saddled itself with massive manufacturing overcapacity, which the unions would never allow them to address. They worked out that the only way they could stay in business was to get us to buy more car than we needed, more often.

Vendor finance allowed them to structurally alter the car retail environment. Almost nobody actually buys cars any more; they consume credit and the manufacturers build cars to support the credit business. That helped lower the monthly out-of-pocket costs of car 'ownership' (it would be far more accurate to say 'usership') which enabled the overconsumption the manufacturers needed and tied them into a vicious circle where the consumer, in turn, is reliant on the finance to run a car - on someone else's terms.

Consumers are now so indebted that approach has run out of road, as it were, and the only way for the manufacturers to stay in business now is higher prices as well, at the same time as credit costs (interest rates) have risen, manufacturing input (steel and energy) costs have risen, R&D costs (electrification) have risen, and the regulatory costs (GSR2 safety regulations) all forced prices up.

It certainly didn't help that 10/12 years ago everyone suddenly decided they needed an SUV for the school run because they have bad backs. These are much more profitable than the hatchbacks and saloons upon which they're based, which is why the Fiesta and many other cheaper cars have simply disappeared. That was an open goal for the manufacturers.

I suspect the final nail in the coffin will be all these much cheaper Chinese imports suddenly appearing.

Ultimately, this is a country with an average household income of £37k that thinks it can afford to buy, every three years, a new car costing around about that much. It can't.

Vote with your wallet. Across Europe, which has higher incomes and better standards of living than the UK and rather less of a fixation on image, the best-selling car in 2025 was the Dacia Sandero.

The car leasing/finance industry is driving it all and that's been the long term plan for a few decades, and now here we are! Same with software - long gone are the days when you bought a piece of software for life - now they're all monthly subscriptions which, of course, increase every year. The financiers think that people will spend more if it's relatively small monthly amounts rather than tens of thousands in one go and they're right - it's basic human behaviour.

Even finding new cars to buy outright is getting harder as the number of new brand dealerships continues to fall, We used to have Peugeot and Citroen dealerships in our own town and the next town along, but now the nearest Citroen garage is in the next city nearly an hour away and the nearest Peugeot garage is in the city beyond that, some 90 minutes drive away. Unsurprisingly, where Peugeots and Citroens were once commonplace in our town, now you barely see any. We did in fact go to the nearest Citroen garage an hour away and were disappointed in that they had barely any cars in the showroom - and their used car lot was also very sparse - I expect to hear it's closed shortly!

"They" (financiers) clearly want people to lease online and wait for their car to be delivered on the back of a van rather than go to dealerships to cut out the commissions/margins made by the dealership and keep all the profit for themselves!

Someone above mentioned Dacia - they're a car we've looked at a few times as they fit the brief of being more of a basic/old fashioned car without all the gimmicky bells and whistles and priced sensibly to reflect that - in fact compared with other brands, they're remarkably cheap. What puts us off is that they look a bit clunky, cheap and naff and don't really have any style, but when it comes to buy our next new car, I think we'll be tempted as they're very good build quality (Renault parts etc) so you do get a lot of bang for your buck if you can get over the "naffness" of how they look and can get one in a sensible colour rather than the naff colours that are usually available.