Hi folks.

Is anyone out there in the trade able to explain just why used cars have such a low resale value in the UK? Cars today (including Fiats!) are better built, more reliable, more resistant to rust than ever before and yet after a few years many are only a small fraction of their new price. Is it because UK buyers are so hooked on the 'new car every three years' thing that there is a glut of used models on the market, are people afraid of the complexity of modern cars and so afraid that an ecu or something will go wrong and cost shed loads to get fixed, is it the cost of servicing older cars (cambelts and so on)?

I can't remember things been this bad in the past and I can't understand why you can get a good used Brava or Marea or Punto for less than an average second hand Uno would have cost 15 years ago and more. It all makes buying a new car look like a bad idea and yet millions are sold every year. What's going on!? (And is it just me or are the valuations in 'Parkers' generally well below what a good example of most models will actually go for).

i find valuations in 'Parkers' to be about a 30% over what the really sell for, people like the warranty on new cars and also the 0% finance a lot of places offer.

also a lot of cars here are french, so fall to bits after a few years

dave said:

i find valuations in 'Parkers' to be about a 30% over what the really sell for, people like the warranty on new cars and also the 0% finance a lot of places offer.

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Gulp, that would mean that my 2001 Marea Weekend JTD in excellent condition with full service history was worth about £1200! I sold a 6 year old Uno that was starting to look a bit ragged for almost twice that 17 years ago!

I still think something has drastically changed in the market as in the past you still had the benefit of warranties, '0%' apr and all the rest when buying new. I know that Brit buyers are still suspicious of Italian metal (especially big Fiats!) but all almost cars seem to suffer staggering depreciation these days and any car over 3 years old seems to be thought of as being well on the way to the 'recyclers'. Perhaps it's all just a con to keep us buying new cars!

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One factor is people in the UK are rich and can afford to waste money buying and selling cars.

Alot of cars are sold pre-registered, on special deals or with large discounts - few people pay the ticket price of the car.

Yes, the British do place a high priority on spending money on new cars but even if you have loads of cash it is still a matter of spending according to ones priorities and I feel that Brits are often a bit too car-obsessed for their own good. This reminds me of a friend of mine who knows an English ex pat who was having a house architect built in France and who specified that he wanted a built in garage. The French architect was absolutely horrified by this and tried to persuade him to make better use of the space by 'having a nice music room perhaps'. (In France most new buildings hide cars away in underground car parks). I think the architect had a good point and personally I hate these 'garage with attached living accomodation' houses you see everywhere on new estates, especially when the entrace for people is around the side somewhere!

Anyhow, given the current level of depreciation I think I will resist the temptation to buy a new car for a long time to come!

price of scrap is next to nothing. add in floods of cheap ex-rental/rep mobiles all pushes cars prices down

we cant park our cars under ground, we have too much rain

Aurelio Lampredi said:

who specified that he wanted a built in garage. The French architect was absolutely horrified by this and tried to persuade him to make better use of the space by 'having a nice music room perhaps'. (In France most new buildings hide cars away in underground car parks). I think the architect had a good point and personally I hate these 'garage with attached living accomodation' houses you see everywhere on new estates, especially when the entrace for people is around the side somewhere!

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How can you say this!!! I have a single garage on my house, my next house will need to have a double garage as a minimum.

I want to build a multi-story car park in my garden.. Need 3 garages as it is!

the main reason they devalue is because of our fairly strict laws on Mot's an emmisions and rust and speeding and insurance etc etc (the fact it costs more to insure an older car than a modern equivilent), in the uk a depreciation of around 60% (sold private after) over 3years is pretty typical, gooddiesels tend to loose about 45-50%, small cars the same, or lots more (Depending what it is), and big cars, esp big alfas take nearly a 70% hit.

in emerika their cars are slightly cheaper in the first place, but only loose 25-40% over 3years, and that is a typical value!! they platue out too, so you don't see many cars under 1000bucks unless its wrecked

faster4_tec said:

the main reason they devalue is because of our fairly strict laws on Mot's an emmisions and rust and speeding and insurance etc etc (the fact it costs more to insure an older car than a modern equivilent),

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Sorry, but I don't see how the above factors account for the high level of depreciation in the UK. Modern cars are much better built than they used to be and should be able to pass an MOT with minimal work for years to come and it will be years before rust becomes a problem. (A couple of years ago I scrapped a 127 which had been in the family for years and was coming up to 20 years old simply because I felt being in a crash in it would not be a good idea, and even this was getting through it's MOT's with few problems). Insurance costs depend on the model but plenty of older cars have low insurance groupings and with an older car you might well opt for less comprehensive cover. The rest of Europe has pretty stringent testing of older vehicles as well and yet older cars appear to be worth a lot more in places such as France.

I don't see how the token efforts to enforce the speed limit in the UK affect second hand car prices either! Many European countries enforce traffic laws much more rigorously than the police in the UK do without this seeming to affect the prices of second hand cars! For example, in Holland 20 Mph limits are pretty rigorously enforced by mobile camera units with the result that 45% of Dutch drivers have points for speeding (it's only about 9% in the UK). Similarly, the British police only do 500,000 or so breath tests a year, with less than half of drivers who are in an injury crash being tested. In France almost all drivers involved in an injury crash are tested and a total of around 9 million breath tests are done a year. (Not surprisingly, despite stories of drink driving being endemic in France, the official figures show that it is much less prevalent than in the UK and has decreased substantially in recent years whilst drink driving in the UK has been on the increase for years). Anyhow, all this is going a bit OT!

The only other reason I can think of for low resale values is that manufacturers keep brining out new models so fast these days that one is always stuck with an 'old model'. Still, a car like my Marea Weekend JTD which is probably good for another 100,000 miles at least has got be worth more than £1200!

Older cars are not very desirable to us rich Brits.

How could you scrap a nice 127, should have sent it over here and sold it for a nice little sum.

faster4_tec said:

in emerika their cars are slightly cheaper in the first place, but only loose 25-40% over 3years, and that is a typical value!! they platue out too, so you don't see many cars under 1000bucks unless its wrecked

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where is emerika

thepottleflump said:

Older cars are not very desirable to us rich Brits.

How could you scrap a nice 127, should have sent it over here and sold it for a nice little sum.

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I just thought that it's time had come, and nowadays I would rather do things other than mig welding in my spare time! Here is one car I wished I hadn't scrapped though. It would probably be worth more than my Marea now!

When you can buy a 9 month old car for 35 to 40% off list price (I've done it 3 times), suddenly, it means the bottom falls out of the market. I think it fell big time from about 2001/2 when the UK dealers started dropping prices as so amny people imported from other EU nations - nobody does now as the UK dealers have dropped prices.

So lower prices for new cars means more new sales, which means the used dealers have to drop prices too. So there's crazy first year depreciation followed by a levelling out over the next few years. (It's why Fiat got out of the rental market in the UK. To try and stop Punto's between 6 months and 1 year old flooding the market). People find they can afford a newer car as all the prices are cheaper, and so the older cars end up losing more money just to sell them. It's supply and demand.

I say, factor in estimated deprciation when you buy a car for how long you expect to use it. People in the UK want a newish nice car. They want air-con and a CD player, and sat-nav, and room for the kids. They want airbags and secondary safety devices since they're going to roll that 4x4 if they aren't careful. The Brits want to feel better than those around them. The car is the status symbol, which is why more cabriolet's sell here than in other Euro markets.

Is it good that I could only get £1500 for my Punto last year at 5 years old, when new it was £10000? No! (Lost 85%, that's 17% a year - actually 40% in the first year and then more like 10% a year). I put up with it, rather than spending out for repairs and consumables. Running your own car IS expensive.

don't know why my post says, 'and speeding' in it, I didn't type that

faster4_tec said:

don't know why my post says, 'and speeding' in it, I didn't type that

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may be some one from emerika did it.

if anyone else did it it would say edited by at the bottom

I think the fact cars are getting more & more complex means people can't look after them themselves. If something goes wrong you could be in for a big repair bill or a £100 bill just for connecting a computer for diagnostics. Things are not fixed on cars now, they are just replaced.

Although mechanics don't get paid much more today, the hourly garage rate has rocketed in the last few years. Many charge more now than doctors do.

I think people just more feel comfortable with a new car and it doesn't cost them more than a used car a few years ago.