marky1

Did anyone read in the sunday times over the weekend that the depreciation on a Porsche Boxster and a 911 is only 7% over 3 years? Surely that is not right? Makes it almost free motoring. Anyone else see it and now a little confused???

ProperCharlie

well, 7% of the £65k odd value of a 911 is still about £5k, plus you've got to have the capital available in the first place. then if you also include the lost interest on the tied up funds. still, nice work if you can get it.

milo

thats a fair point (tho the boxster is a fraction of £65k)... but what about the other side of the argument... why would ANYONE buy a 3 year old one for only a 7% saving on the new value?!

ProperCharlie

no idea tbh- is there still a waiting list for any porsches?

another thing i was wondering about: do they include all the extras that a buyer will usually specify when they work out the depreciation, or do they base it on the list price for the model? this could add up to another few £k saving for the second owner...

marky1

Yeah but I reckon I've lost 5k on my 03 sti already and i only bought it in November! I just think to drive a 911 for 3 years and only lose 5k is very good. as for tying up capital, whatever u buy you are tying it up. Oh and still a 1 year waiting list for a Cayenne Turbo if ordered through Porsche UK

Dapster

I didn't read the article but would caution you on a couple of points. Firstly, all new Porsche's are specced well above the list price when new. Secondly, the dealer price of used cars is very high. Hence the calculation could be thus:

New Boxster - £31,000
Normal amount of extras - £35,000
3 years later, car traded in for £25,000
Placed on the dealer forecourt for £29,000

So, versus the original £31k, £29k is 6.5% dep over 3 years, and 17% against the £35k. The owner has actually lost £10k which is 29%.

I know this as I have been there. Also, Porsche dealers are a VERY expensive place to service your car. The Boxster is the best car I have ever owned but don't let anyone tell you that it's cheap motoring.

It is all relative though - a £35k Merc SLK or BMW Z3M would have lost more in the same space of time.

Dracoro

check over at boxa.net, they'd all love that low depreciation but it simply isn't the case.

Dealers sell used at highly inflated prices (well I guess people must buy them) sometimes at more than the new price (saves waiting list I suppose). If you trade in a boxster you'll lose about 25/30%.

Porkers will lose a lot in the first year (as will all cars) but once they're a couple of years old they go down slowly.

Also, virtually NO-ONE buys a boxster at list price as they nearly always specify various extras, without them the car depreciates even more (would you buy one without leather, decent stereo, wind deflector etc.?). I'm guessing the parker figures are list price - dealer 2nd hand price rather than (list price + extras cost) - dealer price (or should it be trade in price?)

NACRO

Buy a car that some idiot has already taken the depreciation hit on. I paid about 6.5K for an old Impreza that some muppet paid 21K for only 5yrs previously. I was offered a trade in of 5.5K on it recently, after 18 months and 30K miles of motoring. A grand for 18 months of trouble free driving not bad and if you bought a decent motor to start with you could lose even less.
Only a fool buys a new car, only a complete fool buys a new car on finance.

Dracoro

I bought my S2000 a year an a half ago. It had 6500 miles on the clock so was like new for £18,500, sold it for £17,000. That's £1000 depreciation per year which is lower than most cars. The original owner had it for 2.5 years and lost something like £10k (s2000's were £2000 more than now when they first came out) so he lost £4000 per year.

If you want 'new' then best buy something 2/3/4 years old with low mileage and save bucketloads.

NACRO

I dread to think what a private buyer of say a fully specced up BMW745 would be losing, same for most of the big mercs.

The saddest case I can think of is a friend of mine, he's a lowly paid Royal Mail employee (so not the sharpest knife in the block) who bought a Mitsubishi Carisma 1.6 in 98. He paid full list just as the model changed, he was also on a ruinous finance deal. At the end of his contract he'd paid over 20K (including his balloon payment) and was left with a car worth 1.5K at auction. For the money he'd paid he could have leased and insured a 911 for the same amount of time and spent 1.5K on a sh1tter afterwards.

ProperCharlie

it must be pretty difficult to top the STi7 that i had. overall depreciation was about £13k over 18 months. Luckily it was a Co. car so it became tax deductable loss. Even so - won't be doing that again

marky1

yep fair enough views.

Not sure Nacro though about only a fool buys a new car. Plenty of people do mate. Some people are willing to pay not to have other people's trashed rubbish (although of course I'm sure there are some great second hand cars around). I guess just for some it ain't worth the hassle for the saving.

NACRO

quote: "Not sure Nacro though about only a fool buys a new car"

Generally unless you are going for a model that is in very high demand you can get a 'new' but pre-registered example of most mass market cars at a considerable discount. So IMHO only idiots buy new cars. I prefer to let the mugs take the depreciation hit and in the case of the Impreza I bought for 6.5K with 40 odd thousand miles on it the previous owner had treated it better than his wife(I think he liked her).

marky1

sure but an impreza is hardly mass market in my eyes. Maybe I'm a mug though

NACRO

I wouldn't say that marky- but then again there is hardly a huge demand or waiting list for Imprezas these days. Unless you try to get a Spec C that is.

Boss Hogg

no sure what he point is about buying a 5 year old impreza is. It's comparing apples with pears. You've lost 15% of the cars value in 18 months plus all the cost associated with running it are proportionally higher compared to the cars value - hence why spend £1k insuring a £6k car for example?

Luan Pra bang

A friend paid
110000 in 1995

went to trade in
in 2003

17000

93,000 loss in eight years
thats depressing depreciation


Rolls Royce

Makes me happy to stick with my old scooby worth about the same as a roller wheel

ProperCharlie

and the car was?

ferarri 400 perhaps?

pathetic shark

Car was presumably a Merc SL600 or the like?

I'd never buy a new car, despite the fact that I'd like to, simply because they lose so much to start with. Golden rule seems to be to either buy at 2 years and sell at 5, or buy a quality company car after 5 years once it's had the clutch/discs/shocks/CV joints/bearings done around 100k miles.

A lot of serious executive cars get a lot of miles put on them very fast, and are treated meticulously - after all, the chairman's car tends not to be skimped on in terms of servicing. Buy a loaded 750i, S500 or A8 and you'll know what quality motoring's all about, and they usually don't cost any more to run than, say, a 3-series or an E-Class. The driving experience, however, is very different.

pslewis

I read the article and its impressive reading!

Take a BMW X5 for example .... compare with a Honda CRV, say. In 3 years the Honda will have lost £10,000 BUT, and this is the clever bit! the BMW has lost the SAME £10,000!!

I do NOT like the BMW image and I think Porsche Boxters are bought and driven by ****** ............... BUT, you cannot argue with the financial reality! If you can swallow some pride you could do very well indeed on a new car buy!

The Impreza was my first, and possibly last! New car purchase. In early 2000 it was hard to buy a good Impreza at about 12 months old for less than about £18-19k .... so, I paid £22k for my UK car and know how its been driven - for which I have possibly paid a heavy price (today its worth, what? £9k?) OUCH!!

However, if I keep it for 10 years it will have cost me around £2k a year - and it could go on for another 5 years maybe? ..... then its cheap motoring!

Fools are those who buy on finance and sell at 12 months - you may as well drop your pants, bend over and let the dealer give you a good seeing to - whilst he smokes on roll-ups made with your £20 notes!!

Pete

NACRO

Boss Hog quote: "hence why spend £1k insuring a £6k car for example?"

Well I wouldn't and as my insurance renewal this year was £620 I obviously haven't.

The rest of the running costs are peanuts compared to depreciation and proportionally lower than a new car ie no main dealer servicing, remap costing £50, cheaper, smaller tyres etc etc.

So to run a 6yr old Impreza costs me a lot less than buying a new car like say a Fiesta and incurring the depreciation. Seems like a bargain to me, my car has air con, leather etc as well as the added bonus of being a lot faster than a new age car.

Plus it leaves me enough cash to spend the 10K or so I'd have lost in depreciation over the 18months on depreciation proof classic car like my E30.

Olly

Interesting thread.

Seems you can play the depreciation game and win. BMW have been doing it for years now with the X5 by limiting supply. My parents waited a year for their old (new) X5, yet paid less than a similar 18 month old car.

Porsche seems to play the same game. Personally I wouldn't be seen dead in a Boxter: obviously I am in the minority. Yet look at the target buyer: most seem to be bought by young Flash Harrys, the ones that talk too loudly in the local wine bar, suddenly with enough earning potential to pay the monthly repayments, and who absolutely, DEFINATELY cannot possibly wait a year for a new 'un. So they buy used, and order a brand new one at the same time.

I side with the group that thinks a new car buy is lunacy. Again I seem to be in the minority: hasn't new car sales just reached record levels? Good news for us though: all that over-supply of new cars should bring even higher depreciation levels.

I feel sorry for newer Scooby owners: I bought into the Impreza phenomenon early, and lost zero over 3 cars (2 new). Remember when Scooby's had 9 month waiting lists?

jaf01uk

Mates Lexus was in for a service in Aberdeen and the garage next door is a Porsche dealer so naturally we went in and had a look around. Got speaking to the salesman who said there was a 2 year wait for a GT(3 or 2) cant remember which, and when I asked him why someone with that kind of money was prepared to wait that long for a car he said they just bought an ordinary 911 or Boxter because the depreciation was so low that when the new car arrived they just trade in, low cost car hire?

civictyper

I don't agree that you've got to be a loon to buy a new car. It depends on the type of car you're after and what you want ownership wise. If you're looking for a non performance car then it's just as well buying used but it's not clear cut if looking for a highly tuned motor.

I bought my type r new basically because I got over a grand off it new, I wanted low miles and I didn't want to buy a car that could have been thrashed silly.

For the same money (shade over £14.5k) I could have bought a 2nd hand one with 10-15k on the clock but in this day and age you just cannot tell if a car has been round a track or down a 1/4 mile strip everyday of it's life. Sure you can save some cash but it's a false economy if you've bought a total minger and there's no real way of telling just from an AA check.

Anyways cars are like women and I'd rather I were breaking in a virgin than to start with one that had done some heavy milage

little miss fire

Not sure I agree with you lot on the 'only fools buy new cars on finance'. Bought my 03 Golf on finance, brand new, with all the toys on it. I still stand to get around 4K profit if I sold it today!!!!

NACRO

How? I presume you must have bought it very, very cheaply. Then you would have to pay to get out of your agreement, not to mention the interest you've paid. Also you now have an old model car. In short I don't believe it.

milo

why not sell it then and buy some more of them to sell at 4k profit each?

OllyK

Direct Line personal loans don't have an early settlement penalty. Settled up my loan on a new 206 GTi early, flogged the Pug and got the Scoob

Olly

Did the salesman tell you that when you bought it?

Can't think of many Golf's that would yield such a high markup as a used buy, especially now the **** is falling out of R32's. Or did you buy a brand new Mk1 GTi Campaign, never drove it and coccooned it away for 20 years? Care to explain?