The old banger is a vanishing breed. And it’s not because all drivers want new cars. On the contrary, not everyone wants to pay out monthly for a fast-depreciating asset. Many drivers would rather opt for a cheap, serviceable car in its dotage.
Although I write about cars for a living, and shiny new ones sometimes cross my path, cars I’ve actually owned have mostly come from the bargain basement, including a venerable Toyota which lasted for three years and 50,000 miles that someone gave to me because they wanted it removed from their drive. I saved vast sums of money and had fun in the process.
Today, such cars are virtually non-existent and demand for them has never been greater. According to Ian Plummer, commercial director of the vehicle sales juggernaut that is the Auto Trader website, the supply of ‘cheap’ cars (in this case anything up to a not inconsiderable £5,000, but including bargain basement vehicles) is down by 23 per cent, average prices for 10-15-year-old cars have risen by 43 per cent, and just under a quarter of the monthly 70m visits Plummer’s site gets are looking for the least expensive vehicles. ‘Generally, older cars are less available now,’ he said.
This means even the most scrofulous old heaps have shot up in value and some people with the least money to spare are being priced out of car ownership altogether. I recently tried to find a cheap car for near neighbour who lives with his elderly mother on a fixed income, and whose 23-year-old Ford Fiesta had finally expired. Five years ago, I could have tracked down something venerable, MOT’d and sanitary for about £350, but now the classifieds are banger-free zones.
Greater energy is expended in making a car than it’s likely to use during its working life
Scrappage schemes, tighter environmental laws, younger vehicles paid for with finance deals and parents wanting newer models with more safety features for their children are also reasons why ultra-cheap models are being sucked out off the market.
Motoring journalist James Ruppert started life selling new BMWs on Park Lane, but has carved a distinctive niche writing books about what he calls ‘Bangernomics,’ or the art of buying and running cheap cars (Bangernomics.com). He also authors a column about older cars in Autocar magazine (‘my fan base is middle aged men who say; ‘I can’t afford a Tesla. Keep writing about the junk!’’). He agrees the shortage of new cars –blamed in part on a lack of silicone chips – has pushed up used prices and this has trickled all the way down to the least expensive vehicles.
‘The market for nearly new cars has gone bonkers, with values rising for the first time ever, and this has effected everything else,’ he said.
Ruppert had been looking for an obscure-but-useful Fiat people carrier that until recently might have fetched £300. ‘They’ve settled for about £1,500.’ This is a lot of money for an early Millennial tin box.
Last year’s extension of the London ULEZ clean air charging scheme has forced some Londoners out of older, non-compliant cars and this has created a few short-term bargains for people living in charge-free areas, if urban owners haven’t cottoned on to the market value of their unwanted vehicles. Ruppert namechecked a £300, 2005 VW Polo with a full service history and owned by one family from new. It would incur a daily £12.50 charge. ‘They were desperate to sell, but it went in about five minutes.’
Another factor is that cars built from the mid 2000s onwards became a lot more complex. Vehicles that are ten to fifteen years old are now stuffed with electronic and hydraulic systems that make them go and stop. Faults are more esoteric, and can take hours to track down. The labour bills involved for a car worth less than £1,000 could easily outstrip its value, likewise any new parts needed to fettle it. I live in a Kentish village with a traditional garage, whose owner said vehicles which on paper have years of life in them are heading for the crusher because the economics of fixing them don’t add up. He gave the example of a £600 car that needed a £400 exhaust catalyst.
Recently a young customer arrived in a perfectly healthy 2006 Seat Ibiza hatchback with a busted tail lamp. None of the garage’s usual parts suppliers carried a replacement. Eventually, a scrapyard was able to supply the part. ‘It was the last one they had. That car would have ended up in at the breaker’s if we hadn’t found it,’ said the garage man.
There’s a school of thought that says getting older, dirtier cars off our roads is kinder to the environment because they emit more muck, but given that greater energy is expended in making a car than it’s likely to use during its working life, there’s a counter argument that throwing away a perfectly serviceable older car is a waste of energy and resources. If mass take-up of electric cars sees many fossil fuel ones become redundant, this process will accelerate.
In a world where white goods manufacturers are berated for making less sustainable products that can’t easily be repaired and kept going, binning rather than fixing older vehicles is desperately wasteful, suggests Joe Hunter. He’s an advertising copywriter and cheap car serial monogamist who buys pensionable Volvos, BMWs and Mercedes, runs them for a bit and sells them on. He’s turned this habit into subject matter for a YouTube channel confusingly called ‘Geoff Buys Cars.’
Hunter thinks successive scrappage schemes, launched during the 2008 financial crash and repeated several times since, spelled doom for many healthy, cheap cars because they were worth more dead than alive. ‘It was a scandal,’ he said.
He suggests that this is part of a broader agenda to get people out of private cars. ‘The whole thing gets me wound up and animated. I can see a future where driving a classic is reserved for the very rich.’
So where does this leave my fixed income friend? Taxis and neighbours now have to be employed if his mother has a hospital appointment or shopping needs to be bought.
Whether you feel such people are necessary collateral for a cleaner world or victims of rising prices, their quality of life is being diminished. Change is often messy, but there’s a danger that the drive towards newer cars powered by greener technologies once again makes car ownership the preserve of the better off.
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