Short term car purchase

JJJJNR

Looking to buy a car for a family of five could end up doing 30k in a year, has to be diesel, has to be reliable. we don't want to lose a lot of money on it as itll be traded in off a new car in about a year. Budget can stretch to 6k obviously less is more.

Whats the best way to do this, If planning to buy a new car in a year as some dealers e.g. Ford are doing a 6k trade in.

bazz26

Any car you put 30k km on in 12 months you will loose money on unless you go bangernomics. I certainly would not be spending 6k on something doing that mileage and selling it a year later. Buy something cheap to begin with so that there is very little depreciation left to suffer.

acronym Chilli

JJJJNR wrote: »

Looking to buy a car for a family of five could end up doing 30k in a year, has to be diesel, has to be reliable.

If it's really just for a year, then I would say that it doesn't have to be diesel. You may not get to collect the long-run benefit of cheaper fuel costs, and if trying to buy cheap, you expose yourself to greater risk of very expensive repairs that will mess up the whole deal. With your mileage, it definitely does need to be reliable though.

I don't know if you mean km or miles when you say 30k.
Say it's 30k km, say you get a not very economical petrol, and end up with fuel consumption of 9l/100km (IIRC what I had long-run on a Saab 2.0l petrol).
You'll consume (30,000)/(100)*(9)=2700 l of petrol, and at today's avg price from pumps.ie thats (2700)(1.399)=€3777.30

I've now got a diesel, 1.9tdi 130bhp A6. I'm averaging 6l/100km, so the same distance would use (30000)/(100)*6= 1800l of diesel and cost about (1800)(1.259)=€2266.2

So the diesel saves €1500 in a year. If you meant 30k miles, then the saving would be 1.6 times higher or €2418.

If you can get a petrol engined car with a bit better fuel economy (which wouldn't be that hard, e.g. Avensis II 1.6 and 1.8 VVTi both claim 7.2l/100km on combined cycle), then the difference closes a bit.

If you can buy the new car sooner than currently planned (e.g 9 mths vs 12) that would close gap further.

I fully concur with bazz26, it doesn't make sense to put €6k into a car, drive it for 30k (miles or km) and then sell it again unless you don't need the money, or unless you're going to sell it to family or something. It will depreciate a chunk in that time, when in fact its value to you could go up if it has performed well (when you buy a used car, say 90k miles, there are a lot of unknowns, by the time you drive it for 30k more, you now know 25% of it's service-miles, and have probably serviced it 3 times so you have decent service history).

kermitpwee

Pm'd