Hey all, Ive been looking into buying a starter car for myself in Cork. My budget is ideally around 4k for the car + under 1.8k insurance.
Ive done some research already to see how much the car would cost upfront and how much itd end up costing me over 5 years (Ill keep the car for at least this much time). The screenshot below shows the summary. The 5 year insurance cost is based on a hueristic quadratic function (45.8889*x^2 + 392.841*x + INITIAL_PREMIUM) which gave a decent estimate of how the cost will go down over 5 years based on the data I got from manually checking for the Punto and Agila.
At the moment, the cars highlighted are the ones I am considering.
Start off by discussing each car here:
2008 Punto: This was my first choice, cheap car but the insurance is pretty high. Its a decent looking car too. Fiats however arent known for their reliability which is a concern. Has like 136k km on it.
2008 Polo: This is a cheap car, insurance is cheap too but with 220k kms its pretty run down. And since its an 08, its also pretty old.
2010 Agila: I know nothing about this car other than whats on the spreadsheet above :p
2008 Yaris: This is a very good car in terms of reliability I believe, but I really dont like the styling of it. Its fairly old as well tbf. But its the cheapest car overall that I can buy (over 5 years)
2012 Panda: This I think looks like a very good option. 2012 so its the newest one thats affordable and has less than 70k kms. Slightly more upfront cost but over the years itll pay for itself with the really cheap insurance. But again, Fiat
The things I do not know about at all are how good these cars are. I am working purely off of what they look like and the numbers. I would like to see if any of ye have any input on how reliable these cars are, which one I should probably go for as a started car, etc. Anything really would be useful to me. Thanks!
PS. if anyone wants a copy of the spreadsheet for their own comparisons I can create a template and post it here or something :)
