It's not quite a Jaguar

[simont]

In other news, the car hassle now seems to be mostly sorted out. I've got a new (well, second-hand, but new to me) Polo to replace my defunct Clio; my insurance company have paid me a settlement that looked relatively plausible in terms of my own perusal of online price guides; I've given back the temporary hire car; all that's left now is for the insurers to sort out getting paid back by the other insurers, for which they don't need my help as far as I know. Phew.

Though I've been musing in the past few days that my methodology for choosing a car is wrong. (If you think it seems foolish to think about this just after I buy one, I wouldn't disagree, but better that than not thinking about it at all!) In the past my approach has been to think up a list of models that meet my basic requirements for size and price range and suchlike, then go and test-drive all of them; on some of the test drives I get a strong sense of wrongness, when it just doesn't behave the way I instinctively feel a car should, and then I go ‘warrgh!’ and decide not to buy that one.

The thing is, I got that same sense of wrongness the first time I got into the hire car, and actually it turned out I adjusted to that fine over a fortnight or so, to the point where the Polo now feels less right to me than it did in the test drive. I'm sure I'll readjust fine to the Polo, of course, but that's precisely my point: if that feeling of culture shock at an unfamiliar car is a basically transient issue, I shouldn't be basing buying decisions on it. What I want to be able to do is to distinguish the annoyances which are merely unfamiliarity from the ones that are genuinely annoying and will still be irritating me after a month, and I'm not sure if I can do that on a short test drive.

Or perhaps I should assume that any immediate annoyance is something I'll get used to eventually, and make my buying decisions solely on objectively measurable properties such as that model's statistical reliability, fuel consumption, likely TCO, and tedious things like that.

Comments

[gerald_duck]

I think the most major complicating factor you've not modelled is mileage — that's very nearly as important as age in both determining a car's value and in its longevity and reliability.

To complicate matters, different people drive different amounts. I, for example — and I've not done the maths — reckon it makes sense to buy an older car with lower mileage, since that will weather 30,000 miles a year better than a young high-miler.

Running costs will be hugely variable between cars, based on their fuel economy, reliability, longevity (more precisely: tendency to become less reliable as they age and rack up miles) and original purchase price (a £10,000 secondhand BMW 7-series costs more to run than a £10,000 brand new Ford Ka). Unfortunately, two of those factors are subjective. But they matter: last year I happily bought a car that had done 130,000 miles. For a large-engined luxury saloon with a reputation for impeccable reliability, that makes sense, whereas I've known cars to be completely past it at 100,000 miles.