When wanting to upgrade your vehicle, it can be very tempting to just look at the latest new-car deals to see what the monthly costs are and then set your shopping list from there – all according to your budget.
But should you just automatically ignore second-hand or used cars? We think not. And here are our top ten reasons to avoid buying new when the time comes to change your vehicle.
You pay less
Let’s start with the obvious one: used cars cost less money than new cars, like-for-like. This is a simple matter of depreciation – as soon as you drive a new car off the forecourt, it starts losing value. So, if you buy a version of the car you want that’s 12-18 months old, you get an almost-new example of the vehicle you’re after but with the initial (and biggest) hit of depreciation already taken out of the price.
You have more choice
If you set a certain budget – whether that’s a one-off fee of €30,000 or a monthly limit of €400, as examples – then you will have more choice of cars at the used level than you will new. So, while you might only be able to afford a small hatchback as a brand-new machine, for the same money you might be able to get a bigger and more practical used car to help with the rigours of daily life instead.
You can pick a higher specification of car
Linked to the above, there might be a certain feature you want on a new car – like, a heated steering wheel or an uprated sound system – that isn’t fitted to the mid-grade specification of the new model in question. But if you go for a used example, then if you can tolerate a little distance on the odometer, you should be able to ‘upgrade’ to a higher-spec car with the toys you want for the same cash.
The warranty might still be valid
As manufacturer warranties have become ever more competitive over the years, the fact is that you don’t have to sacrifice the full safety net of an approved level of cover on a second-hand car. Warranties tend to be transferrable from owner to owner, so you don’t necessarily need to buy an approved-used vehicle from a main dealer to get the manufacturer’s guarantee. Most new cars have come with at least a three-year, 100,000km warranty for a good while now, but there are carmakers with five-year cover (e.g., Renault) and even up to seven years (the most famous being Kia), the latter meaning that you could go for a used example from 2019-onwards and still have a warranty to back you up in the unlikely event something big goes wrong with the car.
Ongoing costs are cheaper
As the vehicle you are buying has lower value, you’re likely to get a lower insurance premium for it than a newer version. If you are on a tighter budget and you go for a pre-2008 car, with its tax based on engine capacity instead of CO2, you could end up paying less motor tax going forward. And if you pick a relatively modern (yet still reliable) car that has fewer electronic gadgets on it, or no particulate filter in its exhaust, then the potential for things on the vehicle to go wrong is lower – resulting in reduced maintenance costs.
Avoiding teething troubles
Whenever a brand-new model is brought out, inevitably the manufacturer in question might have a few teething troubles with it – minor electrical glitches and rare oversights that result in recalls. However, you can usually safely go for these examples as a second-hand buyer, because the original owner will likely have had any resulting remedial work done during their ownership period of the car. And if those early teething troubles were widely known about and more problematic, then it might be that the value of the vehicle is pushed down even further than it otherwise would have been if the model was fault-free, so you get even more of a used-car bargain – provided the repair works have been done prior to your purchase, of course.
Lower ongoing depreciation
Depreciation in the value of a car is an ongoing thing but represented on a graph it is a curve that drops steeply downwards in the first three years of car ownership, before starting to flatten out as the vehicle gets older than that. So, while you might not ‘break even’ by buying a three-year-old car now and selling it three years down the line, the money you will lose on the overall value of the vehicle will be less than the financial gap between a brand-new car and a three-year-old one.
No waiting times
You might think a new car will be right there waiting for you at your local dealership, but unless your tastes happen to exactly match with the demonstrator model they’ve got in for test drives, the likelihood is that you will have to specify and then order your new car, and you will then be given a timeframe for when it will be built in the manufacturer’s factory and then shipped over here ready for registration. This can be a matter of months if it’s a particularly popular new car, so if you can find a good, lightly used example in a spec you like, you can cut out those waiting times and get your perfect machine right away.
The quality of cars has got better – so older ones are no longer bangers
It used to be that older cars, once the newness of manufacture had worn off, usually became ropey old bangers with questionable reliability. But since the turn of the millennium, the general standard of quality of car manufacture has gone up, so genuinely problematic or flaky vehicles are a rarity. Therefore, while you might have grown up believing that you couldn’t possibly run a ten-year-old car with 160,000km-plus on the clock without suffering a load of aggro and inconvenience with its variable day-to-day reliability, the fact is that you can trust higher-mileage, slightly older second-hand vehicles much more these days – provided they have evidence of a solid service history/maintenance, and they’re in a cared-for condition, of course.