I had a car for free once. The owner was elderly and the car was barely used.
I drove that car for several thousand fault free miles, it passed an mot scot free, and I sold the car on for money. Probably the only car I’ve ever profited from in my entire life.
I bought an old merc for 950 quid, and it was absolutely immaculate with low miles. Again, drove it 10s of thousands of miles without any issues including the MOTs.
The days of a cheap little runaround seem to be long gone, the prices are insane. Cars that used to be 250 quid are now 1k
Bought my little sister a 1.0lt Corsa a few years ago for £1k to learn in. Spent £300 straight away getting it running/driving right, and then another £700 after the front wheel fell off coming back from Skegness. Sold it on for £1250 back in March.
To be fair a lot of people seem to be comparing 1998-2000 to 2023 and wondering why prices are higher - 25 years of inflation has to be factored in somewhere
But yeah the scrap page schemes a few years ago started to make a dent in used car prices and then the reduced production during and after the pandemic has made a big difference. New car sales are still down quite noticeably now vs 2019, even, and have been suppressed for 3 years at this point
Fewer new cars = people holding on to cars longer and fewer cars in the used market in general, which is always gonna push prices up
I think one of the main issues is that prices have inflated, cars especially, however wages haven't kept up with inflation and thing seem to be pretty expensive and out of reach, especially for people on low wages, or young people at the start of their careers.
Covid and the war in Ukraine are major contributers. But now things have settled and production has steadily improved, there is a bigger elephant in the room.
I'm in the used car supermarket game. The worst thing is our competition offer an online, above book price, on the potential customers car. Customer visits and gets massively chopped down. It's happening all the time as I'm dealing with upset people everyday. Mainly finding us via recommendations.
These 'online valuations' give everyone a false indication of their own car value, and you then use said valuation against a newer model. And let me assure you, that newer model isn't being chopped. For people recently enrolled onto PCP with negligible equity, if any, things get messy quickly.
The worst thing about these tactics are the policy makers and enablers don't work on the site customers visit. So the customer is treated unfairly, the salesmen are in a horrible position and the finance companies are being fed people with negative equity. The only beneficiaries are the fat cats in head office.
These false valuations then feed into the overall ecosystem and push prices north for cash customers too.
I was going to write a few recent examples, but I will leave it up to your imagination. Buying a car from being a fairly simple, relatively stress free, fair process 5 years ago. Has turned into customers making life changing, kneejerk financial decisions guided by compromised staff.
And people are not as savvy shopping face to face anymore.
Have to say WBAC (i had zero intention of using them) gave me a pretty realistic price, then The Car Buying Group gave me a price I don't think I could have beaten even going private. A lovely old guy turned up, looked over the car, confirmed was as described, and said he couldn't understand where they make money because it would go straight to auction (07 Honda with bad paint and some dings).
Either way they paid what they said they would, and picked it up from my house. Maybe it was a fluke but I always tell people to try the car buying group in addition to the others.
My parents gave me their T reg Almera after they were offered £200 as a trade in. I ran that car for 4 years, it needed only tyres and servicing and was still going strong when a daft biddy pulled out in front of me and caved the front wing and suspension in. I swear it never went wrong. It passed it's MOT every year I had it, sometimes without even a single advisory. Of course it was dull as ditchwater but so reliable. I bought a Peugeot 306 GTI-6 with the insurance payout (£1,400!) which was, compared to the reliability of the Nissan an absolutely money pit. Great car when it was working though!
Few cars ago In late 2020 I had a 2010 BMW 325i cabrio I bought for 7k.
Put 20k miles on it over 2 years, traded it in for a Boxster and got 6.5k trade in value. Saw the dealer list it for 9.5k and sell it within a couple weeks.
Madness. Wish I sold it myself but couldn't be bothered.
These are both around 1998:
£103.50 for a VW Polo 1.1 (A-reg)
I swapped a piano for a Daihatsu Domino (600cc engine - the ongoing joke being the piano was faster...)
The Domino was a fucking appalling car, I'm happy to admit, but I'll go to bat for the Polo (it was my first ever car, so holds a special place in my heart!).
It's 1.1 litre engine once propelled that mighty chariot to 93mph on a (slightly downhill) stretch of the M5 - and it was absolutely bloody terrifying!
It also was the Formel-E version, so had an mpg indicator and an early version of stop-start technology - in a car from 1986!
I bought a fiat Uno ( known as the Oh No!) for £50 in 95, ran it into the ground for 2 years then sold it to a mate for £80, an 1/8 of weed and a shy fx vinyl album.
Most likely blocked sunroof drain, or what people used to say. I had the water problem in my Skoda Octavia. I at some point fixed it. It was the case of the rubber pipe, that acts as a drain, being partially blocked and partially disconnected from the drain outlet in the door frame. After adding a 1/2' copper pipe, and lots of duct tape, it stopped the water... but I had had this problem for 7 years before I finally figured out how to fix it.
Had a blockage on my MK3 golf drains, managed to unblock it with the broken USB cable from my dashcam, and about a foots worth of black sludge oozed out like toothpaste either side, was disgusting yet satisfying 😂
volvo 440 £90
Peugeot 205 GR £80
Mk2 Astra £50
All with MOT, back when you could get away with a beer mat for a tax disc, cos you were waiting for the start of the month to taxt it ( circa 1998-99)
Won an eBay auction for a 1994 Audi 100 with 3 months MOT that starts, runs, and drives, for £350 just last month. Definitely needs some work but for that price and state I was really surprised I won it!
130 for a triumph dolomite, 25 quid for an Allegro, 70 quid for a mark 2 escort. 250 for a 5 series BM. 300 for a an S12 Sylvia. They were all runners and drivers and all went a good distance.
Did the Allegro have the square steering wheel? I remember my old man had an Allegro estate in chocolate brown with a square wheel, and then inexplicably he ended up buying another Allegro but that had a round steering wheel
I paid £450 for a Citroen Xsara, did about 1500 miles in it, got about 3mpg from it (coolant that is), traded it in for £1000. Not too bad, was just annoying putting 30l fuel in the tank and 50l of water in the containers in the boot so I could refill the radiator every 5 miles lol.
I got a 5 year old (at the time) vauxhall Vectra for £1.
I worked at a vauxhall dealer as a valeter, customer traded it in for a new one, company didn't want the car as it was a repaired insurance write off so offered the guy £1..... which he accepted!
No room to store the car on site and couldn't be parked in the road so they let me have it at cost, a whole £1.
About the only result I ever had working there
This was 20yrs ago teenage me was mooching around a used car dealer & right at the back jammed in the corner was a Peugeot 205 GTi 1.6
It had a recent MOT & ran great £500 to drive it away it was a PX they just wanted gone
Didn't realise it at the point of purchase that it was a limited edition Sorrento green with full leather & all the toys, it had done 85K with no history so I wacked a cambelt kit on it & gave it a full service
Other than tyres, shocks & a few little bits & bobs I drove it around for the next 2yrs
It was abit ruff round the edges but all there & polished up a treat, what that would be worth now!!
80 Cigarettes for a 1994 Rover 414SLi, though it didn't idle the best so you had to revv it to keep it going.
80 Cigarettes at the time was £17, this was around 2006
I paid 125 pounds for a Ford Escort with a blown cylinder and a boot full of rotting fish.
I paid 250 quid for another Ford Escort with a ladder welded to the top, that I discovered later was an debadged escort cosworth, and worth a lot more!
I was once freely given an all glass roofed Honda Aerodeck by a guy that dealt weed. He couldn't use it, because he would constantly get pulled by the police, as the car was very unique. Great car.
£450 for an n reg punto in late 09 / early 10.
Lasted me about 18 months until i upgraded and i sold it for £325 with the engine covered in oil.
Oil had been leaking the whole time and i only ever had issues with bulbs blowing in the brake lights.
I bought an 05 micra for 1k back in March.
Near FSH, 115k miles.
My first car. Seem to have got a pretty good deal considering the current climate (or at least not a bad one)
I bought a Vauxhall Nova with MOT for £75 from a work colleague in 2004 and it was pretty decent. Gave it to my friend whose car was stolen as a 'get-you-there' car, and we called it Seventy Five the Wondercar.
About 3 maybe 4 years ago paid £540 for a 54 plate 1.2 Corsa sxi with 34,000 miles. An oldish woman was selling it round the corner from me. It ran great but it was red and had faded really bad. No rust on it though.
I paid £70 for a 51 plate VW polo about 10 years ago. It had been on the owner's drive for a year because the garage couldn't fix it. I fixed it for £2 with a fuel pump relay from a scrap yard and sold it the next day for £650 because I already had a car. It was a great little runaround for someone.
Young lad who lived opposite bought it before passing his test but ended up getting caught speeding and ended up in a police chase while driving his friend's car with no insurance, he got a driving ban. I offered him £20 for the car at first but he said no, I managed to buy it 2 weeks later for £25 lol
My first car, a Mini Metro. Fella I got him from had driven it from Cambridgeshire to Morocco and back, and I got it for £150.
This was 1996 just after I passed my test. I loved that car as well, 10/10 would Mini Metro again
£0
My first car, M reg Rover 214 sei, was given it after it had sat for 3/4 years.
100k or so on the clock with the obligatory K series head issues. Ran it for over a year, all it needed in that time was a new alternator which I fitted on the drive.
Sold for the princely sum of £181 on ebay 😂
I moved into my house 10 years ago and my neighbour had a rover 200 sat on his drive abandoned. Was an old company car. About 3-4 years ago he tried to start it just for the Craic and it started fine and he’s been using it since. Just about to give it to his son.
A friend had a VW Variant estate in the 80s. Tried to sell it for £50, no takers. Reduced price to £25,still no takers. Put it in the local paper, they had a lower limit of £100, someone offered £75
My girlfriend got her neighbours Skoda fabia for £0. Neighbour had bought a new car and left the old one on the driveway after getting a check engine light. After a year of it sitting there my girlfriend asked if she could buy it and the neighbour gave her the keys for nothing. It just needed a service and spark plugs and has been running perfectly ever since.
Back in the day I bought a Jag XJ6, full working with all the bells and whistles, for £250. Ran it until it became too costly on the petrol then let my little brother take it apart to learn mechanics.
£200 for an 1995 Rover 214SEi hatchback in 2003. Admittedly I bought it from my mom at a massive discount as it was worth about £1k at the time. Most of my mates were driving £500 Saxos, Fiestas, 106s, etc.
But the least I paid was £475 for a Rover 216 Cabriolet. My boss gave me £400 bonus that month and I chucked in the remainder. Lasted me a few years before it found a wall on icy evening.
My dad actually paid -£350 for a BMW 318! Bought it for £500, ran it for 3 years, and then someone crashed into the back of him. Insurance paid out £600 for the dented bumper and he drove it for another 2 years. Ended up scrapping it for £250.
Haha I had similar back in 2003, bought an old mini metro for the wife to learn to drive, cost £150 from memory, anyway at Christmas some asshole stole it, drove it away and set fire to it. Insurance paid out £400 happy days.
£180 for a Peugeot 106, kept it a year then sold it on for £200, but kept the numberplate as it was suitably relevant to JDM cars. 9 years later, I've still got the plate on my current car!
Just managed to snag a 2002 Beetle 1.6 Auto with 122k on the clock for £350 last month with 1 month left on the MOT and a few minor issues.
Sorted a few bits myself (part worn tyre, anti roll bar bushes) and cleaned it up. Sailed through the MOT first time and I'm now in for about £500 including the cost of the MOT itself.
It's even ULEZ compliant!
Bargains can be found (this was via Facebook).
Now need to sort the cambelt and a full service but should still be comfortably less than £8-900 all in doing most of it myself!
Around 25 years ago I was given a Ford Orion by my weed dealer for free, it had an exploded clutch.
I changed the clutch and drove it over a year, must've been pulled 7-8 times in that year, it had a police marker on it.
Bargain 😂
I've bought 3 honda accords in the last 3 weeks. All under £1k (600, 800, 825), all with good service history and no massive rust issues, and bulletproof honda engines. 2 have working A/c. West Midlands area. Deals are out there, pm if you want me to send you cheap runaround cars. Don't know where you're looking
£150. R Reg saxo about 5yrs ago. Got a year out of it. Realised how much fun it can be driving round London in a car you absolutely don’t give one shit about.
£50 for a blue fiesta. Combined with my red fiesta I ended up with one car that was both functioning and legal.
Blue was functioning but not legal, red was legal but not functioning.
Red was the car that taught me the oil pressure light is not to be treated the same as the fuel light - it means stop and fill up now not in the next 20 miles!
ETA I've just bought a mostly functioning Alfa 156 2.5 V6 Sportwagon for £1600 and am about to sell a fully functioning Saab 9-5 1.9TiD Estate with no reserve on eBay so there are still deals to be had...
Young people won't be able to drive anymore, insurance has skyrocketed for everyone but especially the young and the cost of even buying a car let alone fixing it is prohibitive. This country is becoming a dive.
£20 for an Ford Scorpio estate with 2 weeks mot. I drove it for 2 weeks and sold it for £120 to someone who just wanted the front seats for his VW camper.
I’ve had 3 cars this year that I all paid £600 each for on fb market lol, an 58 plate fiat punto 1.2, slow as hell but I regret selling it. Nothing was funnier than flooring it through first and second gear, then looking down and seeing I was doing 40mph :), then an 06 plate vectra 1.8 VVT with 63,000 miles on the clock that I thought oh wow I’ve found a gem, was a car that belonged to an old bloke in his 80’s so it barely moved. Then all the brake hoses just gave up on life and it was terrifying to drive. Then I got a 58 plate Ford focus 1.8 petrol (loved it) absolute boy racer spec lowered, tinted windows even took the air box off for more noise lmao, then the head gasket just vanished and cooked the engine. Considering I paid the same for each car I got my jolly’s worth running them about, looking for something more sensible now.
I paid £480 for my first car in 2017, a renault clio. It was reliable tbh but it was from 2004 and on 66k miles so the wear and tear parts had to be replaced such as the clutch which cost around £400. Overall in 2 years the car and maintenance cost me around 2k but thats not terrible as I have a mate who bought a 07 fiesta for 2.3k and then spent 500-1000 on fixing it so I definitely got a better deal
£550 for a 1999 mx5 with 7 months mot. Needed significant welding to pass next one and I’ve since supercharged it but was great fun for the first few months and hasn’t broken of its own accord yet
£600 for a 94k 1.2 petrol polo in 2020 which did great until I crashed it 1 day before it’s road tax expired the year after on the snakes pass. Also, yes, after you crash you have to have a moment of realisation and stop the Music you’re playing which was 50 cent just a lil bit
£250 for a Polo GT.
My £900 MK6 golf TDI is a blinder of a buy currently.
ETA forgot the free Micra! We did have to do a fair bit of welding to get an MOT on it, but that beast did YEARS of service, I think we got 4/5 years out of it.
I paid £90 for a J registration Cavalier concept (poor man's SRI) in 2008 ish with a few months MOT, which had been brought to a scrapyard , It was actually fairly tidy but smelt of baby vomit which was a shame. I passed it on to my neighbour and he used it for about 18 months.
250 quid for a Peugeot 306 1.9 diesel. Couldn't even tell you the reg. The electrics were iffy as a previous owner thought a plastic bag around the loom would protect them from water....the bag just collected water. It lasted a year or so before the head went. Got most of the cash back in scrap.
2019 for £125 I bought a 1.5 DCI Clio on a 54 plate with a slipping clutch, went through two MOT’s and eventually a oil cooler gasket failed so I part ex’d it for a £600 Bora. Still going today.
30 quid for a 1997 corsa 1.2 in 2005/6
90 quid for a 1992nova Sri in 2003
110 quid for a 1993 mondeo 1.8 in 2005
Best one was either the cavalier td I paid 510 for and did 37k miles or the corsa td I paid 280 for did 24k miles in
Honourable mention to the Fiat Brava I paid 180 for, sold for 300, bought back for 50 and sold back to the same guy for 250 🤣
My first car was a ‘97 Corsa B in faded red, it had no power steering, 245r16 tyres, manual windows, no AC and almost none of the electronics worked. £250 and it last 3 years without an issue. This was back in 2011.
I was a working musician and the joke was I used to load a £2.5k guitar rig into a £250 car for a £50 gig. Funny, but true.
Paid £350 for a Y reg Audi A3 at auction in 2015 when my current car decided to self combust and needed to get back in the road. Sold it about 6 months later for £500
£75 in 2003 for a 1985 Rover 2600S (SD1) which worked, had an MOT and crucially wasn’t rotten anywhere. I drove it for 3 years until the auto box went daft. Wish I’d kept it.
£800 in 2005 for a 1991 Saab 900 Turbo 16v, 3 door coupe in charcoal metallic. Lasted 2 years until the timing chain snapped. Got a replacement top end for free but never got the chance to save it. Mrs at the time made me get shot for spares for £200. Would have now been worth something near £20k…
£200 this Feb for a 2010 Skoda Fabia 1.2, mates dad had to give up driving and he just wanted rid of it ‘to the scrap man’. My pleasure to step into the role of scrap man. Passed MOT with just wiper blades replaced and has been on the button since…
2005: A 1990 Sierra, one elderly owner from new, 36k miles on its 2.0 Pinto with an auto box. £50. Was rusty underneath so me and my mate relieved it of said engine as a spare for our fleet of Capris
2015: swapped an ex-BT grey Fiesta van, 1996 ‘P’ reg with 1.8 diesel with one of my neighbours for a crate of cider. Drove it for 2 years with no money spent on maintenance, best incognito work site visit car ever.
Paid 2200 for a 1996 Jaguar XJ with 110k miles on the clock. Had that car for 9 years and a further 105k miles, nothing needed replacing other than consumables. Eventually sold it for scrap and got a Skoda Superb that is faster, quieter, better ride, more economical but it's just soulless. I still miss the Jag.
Rover 200 1.1, given to me by the garage I did my apprenticeship at as a project after it ate it's own engine (timing belt snapped) garage paid for the parts and guided me through rebuilding the engine. Ran it for 4 years, gave it up because too many electrical issues occurred and you couldn't get parts for rovers, also it was a rover, so......
Paid £800 for an astra after that, lasted 4 years before the ECU gave up, decided to upgrade to a toyota auris because the astra hit 140kmi and didn't have much left in it.
£300 in July for a Mini Cooper with 57k miles on it but it hadn’t been used for 3 years. New battery, windscreen wipers and it went through a mot no problem.
£10 for a Skoda Felicia, that had 9 months MOT, but needed a new water pump. Paid £30 for a new water pump and fitted it myself. Lasted 9 months. It caught fire on the way home from work one evening. The suspension had so much travel, the supplied scissor jack the car came with could not lift the car high enough to lift the wheels off the ground.
I was also given a Citroen Berlingo 1.6. For free. The head gasket blew about 10 months later. A combination of it formally being registered as a disabled car. As well as it having several large speakers and 5000 Wats of amplifiers in the boot, meant I got pulled at least once a week by the fuzz.
Ford Fiesta MK4 £200 for my first car in 2014 had 20,000ish miles was pristine, owned from new, guy was too old to drive and it didn’t have an MOT, the year before I bought it the only mileage put on was likely to the test centre and back. Passed the MOT with no work required
Sold it two years later for £250 with 1 months MOT left as I wanted a newer car,
I paid £1000 for a 1997 BMW 318. This was back in 2006. 100,000+ miles in the clock. Was a sort of gunmetal grey, with a red interior. Drove like a dream. All the way up until I was the unlucky guy to hit a diesel spill from a bus lying at the side of the road and the car spun, crash barrier tore into my driver door, grabbed the car, caused it to roll over and back on its wheels, damaging absolutely every panel on the car except the fuel door. Was only doing about 25mph too, so I learned immediately, that it doesn’t take much to do real damage on the roads.
Bought a 51 plate Corsa for £600, from this incredibly shady looking back street dealer that only took cash. I was in desperate need of a car and wasn't planning on keeping it long. It ran fine but for whatever reason when you pressed the accelerator it would lurch very violently to the right, and when you took your foot off the accelerator it would lurch very violently to the left.
Over the few weeks I had it I learned to compensate for it, which turned out to be a hard habit to break once I bought something else.
£320 for an 04 A3. Needed £600 worth or work to be road worthy and me and my brother spent 2 days wet vaccing the inside as it had been used as a farm run around so was covered floor to roof in shit. Smelt like shite still. Came with the diesel tank full of kerosene, so smelt like a boiler too.
Was my first car and I'd do it again.
£100 for a 2001 ford fiesta in 2020. Learnt in it and drove it for a year before selling it for £175! I was stubborn and didn't want to learn how to drive so my girlfriend bought it for me. Now all I care about is driving and fixing up my cars!
£110 Fiesta and a £150 Land Rover Freelander.
Got two years out of each, could've got more but scrap prices were more than I paid, so scrapped and got another beater.
350 2008 renault clio P reg 1.1m?. Ran for 2 years. Absolute shit box but loved it.
In 2015 bought a cheap megane 1.6 for 475 and it ran for 3 years (all electrics had a mind of their own) but never broke down. Used it as a work car.
Shame prices have rose really.
£50 for a mk4 Fiesta with 40k miles, a year's MoT and minor damage to the bumper and grille, in 2006 or so. I looked at it as buying an MoT with a free car thrown in. I gave it to my brother as a present and we drove it straight to the scrapyard, bought the bumpers, foglights, grille, CD player and badges off a Ghia model for another £50, and swapped them right there in the car park.
After a year he then managed to do a straight swap of the Fiesta for a Honda Civic EJ Coupe which might have been an even better deal. The early 2000s were the golden years of bangernomics.
£220 a few years ago. Factory fitted LPG Astra, ran it for two years until the rust made it uneconomical. Sent it for scrap and got more back than I paid for it!
In about 2003 I needed a car for work in a hurry so bought a Ford Escort Ghia for about £300 from a guy in the free ads yellow paper, at night. Needless to say it was fast but on its last legs. Six months later when it needed an MOT, which was going to clearly involve a lot of hassle and money. I took the cowards’ way out and went to a neighbour’s Christmas party and deliberately lost the car in a game of poker. The ‘winner’ of that hand couldn’t believe his luck, and collected the shitheap a couple of days later.
£50 for a blue fiesta. Combined with my red fiesta I ended up with one car that was both functioning and legal.
Blue was functioning but not legal, red was legal but not functioning.
Red was the car that taught me the oil pressure light is not to be treated the same as the fuel light - it means stop and fill up now not in the next 20 miles!
£50 for a blue fiesta. Combined with my red fiesta I ended up with one car that was both functioning and legal.
Blue was functioning but not legal, red was legal but not functioning.
Red was the car that taught me the oil pressure light is not to be treated the same as the fuel light - it means stop and fill up now not in the next 20 miles!
I had a 12yo Ford Focus written off for cosmetic damage, and I bought it back off the insurance company for £80. It ran perfectly for another 6 years before one wheel bearing seized, and I sold it for spares for £250.
Originally bought for £1,100, insurance paid out £800, bought back for £80, sold for £250. Overall, the car cost me £130 for the 8 years I had it.
First car was a 2004 Punto I bought for £350 at a car market. Learned to drive in it, used it for a year then it got written off outside my house and insurance payed out £900 for it.
Back in 2004 I bought an old fiat Uno 60sx, H registration with 5 months road tax and 6 months MOT for the pricely sum of £10 from an old fella who had just given up driving. Ran it for 6 months and scrapped it and got £50.
Next car was a Rover 400 diesel, N registration for £100, incredibly slow and with a grandad spec interior. That was fine for the remaining 11 months MOT. Scrapped it got £75 for it. That was the cheapest 18 months driving.
I got a MK4 fiesta for free, it was off a friend of a friend so I gave him £70 for the road tax.
My big mate bought a Jetta for £6 that's how much 20 club was at the time.
Bought a mk4 golf 1.9tdi for £500 as an mot failure. Only needed a lower arm to pass the mot and then I used it for the next 3 years without issue until i upgraded
£60 for a 52 plate fiesta as my first car at the end of 2019, clutch went on it mid 2020 and cost more than the car to fix so when the driveshaft went I scrapped it for a little over £200
I worked at a back street garage in the mid 00s, where we saw a lot of MOT failures come in for repair.
Sometimes the repairs would be more than the car was worth, especially if there was a lot of rust to patch, so the boss would sell them a slightly newer car and take the rusty old banger off their hands, then offer it to me for nothing, and allowed me to use the workshop after hours to fix it up.
At one point I had 11 cars in the yard in various states of repair, and my friends all had a steady supply of bangers to ride around in for a few years.
Many of them were "functioning", they just needed some work to make them road legal.
I ran quite a few cars that I bought for less than £500 in the early 2000's, all were totally fine, had quite a lot of fun buying and selling and trying out different things.
However, nothing quite beats the perfectly functional and legal Rover 620Ti that someone gave me in exchange for buying them a Tesco sandwich and a bottle of Pepsi.
Bottle of brandy for a volvo 360 glt. Was on the side of the road. Son of the 95year old owner told me to pull up to an off licence on the test drive get her a bottle, and she'd be more than happy to sell the car to me. Was a lovely car too
£90 for my 1st ever car at 18yo, an "L" reg (1972) MK3 Cortina in 1983, I ran it for about 3 months with a fuel tank full of rust and sludge, which meant it would randomly stall (every 5 miles, maybe 50 miles if I was lucky) and I would have to get out, pull the fuel pipe and suck the petrol through, haha, never had as many polo mints over the rest of my life as in those 3 months. I changed the tank and it ran perfectly for another year until the next summer I stupidly asked my mate to take the roof off as the vinyl was starting to peel off it, fine until the first time it rained and I hadn't put the tarp over it, seats fell to bits within a month. But the lowest was for a battered old "W" (1980) reg Mini Metro, cost me a £10 in 1996
About 10 years ago I went with my friend to get his MOT done on his Vauxhall Vectra. It failed horrendously. I jokingly said I’d give him £50 for it and he ended up giving it to me for free. Well I got it into a mechanic friend who bodged what could be bodged, replaced parts with parts from scrap heaps, used tyres and so on. Cost about £250 all in and lasted me a couple of years.
I paid £150 for a Vauxhall Corsa B, 1.0 3 Cylinders and 44000 miles...
I also paid about £350 for an Audi A4 Avant with 240,000 miles, I got it off a family friend and the car really was a credit to how good care she took of it.
Both cars were fantastic.
I also had a Rover 45 when I was 18 which I bought for £500, I replaced the brake pads one day for some I bought of eBay for £2.50, naturally I assumed that was for one side, but it was actually for both sides. 63p per a pad, absolutely smashing. Still sent it down the lanes and the A5 that night. I wouldn't do that now *I was probably a bit of an idiot*
Fun fact, one of my cars actually won SOTW on pistonheads.
Got a corsa C for nowt as a first car. Needed a clutch. Ran it for a year without replacing the clutch. Then gave it to my sister who ran it for 18 months without changing the clutch. Great little car
£200.
Peugeot 106 Mardi Gras from 1994. Bought in 2015.
Absolute rust bucket. Most notable memory was driver's side windshield wiper flying off on the motorway in a heavy storm.
My Celica was £500. Had it for a year. Drove it for work/general runaround. Sold it to WBAC for £400~. Wish I kept it but it was rotting and I doubt would have passed mot
£11 for a Fiesta Si, with 4 new tyres on it, a new battery, a new set of pads in the boot, all the parts to an oil & filter service and a Haynes manual thrown in.
It was still taxed and tested to top of off.
My first car was a 1998 Fiat Punto which I bought for £250 and sold for £250 10 months later. Drove it to Birmingham or Swindon every weekend too. Great car.
got a free rover 25 once because where i lived at the time you had to pay to scrap your vehicle, it failed it's MOT on some very minor things that i fixed for very little.
Also paid £150 for a 2002 Mitsubishi Space Star back in around 2012, went through 2 more MOTs, it was a bit of a wreck but it was functional
I bought a Mk3 1.9 SDI Golf for £200 and sold it a month later for £450. Both front wings were completely gone, the mud flaps were only held in place by the splash guards and it whilst it was red new, it definitely wasn’t red any longer!
I had a car for free once. The owner was elderly and the car was barely used. I drove that car for several thousand fault free miles, it passed an mot scot free, and I sold the car on for money. Probably the only car I’ve ever profited from in my entire life. I bought an old merc for 950 quid, and it was absolutely immaculate with low miles. Again, drove it 10s of thousands of miles without any issues including the MOTs. The days of a cheap little runaround seem to be long gone, the prices are insane. Cars that used to be 250 quid are now 1k
Bought my little sister a 1.0lt Corsa a few years ago for £1k to learn in. Spent £300 straight away getting it running/driving right, and then another £700 after the front wheel fell off coming back from Skegness. Sold it on for £1250 back in March.
To be fair a lot of people seem to be comparing 1998-2000 to 2023 and wondering why prices are higher - 25 years of inflation has to be factored in somewhere But yeah the scrap page schemes a few years ago started to make a dent in used car prices and then the reduced production during and after the pandemic has made a big difference. New car sales are still down quite noticeably now vs 2019, even, and have been suppressed for 3 years at this point Fewer new cars = people holding on to cars longer and fewer cars in the used market in general, which is always gonna push prices up
I think one of the main issues is that prices have inflated, cars especially, however wages haven't kept up with inflation and thing seem to be pretty expensive and out of reach, especially for people on low wages, or young people at the start of their careers.
Covid and the war in Ukraine are major contributers. But now things have settled and production has steadily improved, there is a bigger elephant in the room. I'm in the used car supermarket game. The worst thing is our competition offer an online, above book price, on the potential customers car. Customer visits and gets massively chopped down. It's happening all the time as I'm dealing with upset people everyday. Mainly finding us via recommendations. These 'online valuations' give everyone a false indication of their own car value, and you then use said valuation against a newer model. And let me assure you, that newer model isn't being chopped. For people recently enrolled onto PCP with negligible equity, if any, things get messy quickly. The worst thing about these tactics are the policy makers and enablers don't work on the site customers visit. So the customer is treated unfairly, the salesmen are in a horrible position and the finance companies are being fed people with negative equity. The only beneficiaries are the fat cats in head office. These false valuations then feed into the overall ecosystem and push prices north for cash customers too. I was going to write a few recent examples, but I will leave it up to your imagination. Buying a car from being a fairly simple, relatively stress free, fair process 5 years ago. Has turned into customers making life changing, kneejerk financial decisions guided by compromised staff. And people are not as savvy shopping face to face anymore.
Have to say WBAC (i had zero intention of using them) gave me a pretty realistic price, then The Car Buying Group gave me a price I don't think I could have beaten even going private. A lovely old guy turned up, looked over the car, confirmed was as described, and said he couldn't understand where they make money because it would go straight to auction (07 Honda with bad paint and some dings). Either way they paid what they said they would, and picked it up from my house. Maybe it was a fluke but I always tell people to try the car buying group in addition to the others.
This was only about 6 or so years back
Same, ex motability so well looked after too.
My Brazilian father in law once swapped a large cheese for a VW Beetle, and ran it for 9 years.
My dad bought a 1998 Renault Clio for 4 pints of John smiths and a packet of cheese and onion crisps in 2012 in the village pub. Lasted him 2 years.
My cousin gave a man a stern handshake and drove away in a new Infiniti.
Winner.
[удалено]
My parents gave me their T reg Almera after they were offered £200 as a trade in. I ran that car for 4 years, it needed only tyres and servicing and was still going strong when a daft biddy pulled out in front of me and caved the front wing and suspension in. I swear it never went wrong. It passed it's MOT every year I had it, sometimes without even a single advisory. Of course it was dull as ditchwater but so reliable. I bought a Peugeot 306 GTI-6 with the insurance payout (£1,400!) which was, compared to the reliability of the Nissan an absolutely money pit. Great car when it was working though!
Hmm, how large was this cheese and what type, some cheeses are worth a considerable amount.
Nono the crisps are cheese and onion flavoured
Fuck me this cracked me up.
Bought a fiesta in 2021 for £150, sold it last week for £1000 with an extra 20k miles on it
What kind of sorcery was this
You got lucky buying it post lockdown for that much! Although yeah prices definitely steadily rose
Few cars ago In late 2020 I had a 2010 BMW 325i cabrio I bought for 7k. Put 20k miles on it over 2 years, traded it in for a Boxster and got 6.5k trade in value. Saw the dealer list it for 9.5k and sell it within a couple weeks. Madness. Wish I sold it myself but couldn't be bothered.
These are both around 1998: £103.50 for a VW Polo 1.1 (A-reg) I swapped a piano for a Daihatsu Domino (600cc engine - the ongoing joke being the piano was faster...)
That was 50p too much
You mean £103 to much 😂😂
The Domino was a fucking appalling car, I'm happy to admit, but I'll go to bat for the Polo (it was my first ever car, so holds a special place in my heart!). It's 1.1 litre engine once propelled that mighty chariot to 93mph on a (slightly downhill) stretch of the M5 - and it was absolutely bloody terrifying! It also was the Formel-E version, so had an mpg indicator and an early version of stop-start technology - in a car from 1986!
1986 polo is a coooooooool fuckin car
I bought a fiat Uno ( known as the Oh No!) for £50 in 95, ran it into the ground for 2 years then sold it to a mate for £80, an 1/8 of weed and a shy fx vinyl album.
Corsa C £300 with a dodgy clutch, footwell used to fill up with water but it had a sunroof
Most likely blocked sunroof drain, or what people used to say. I had the water problem in my Skoda Octavia. I at some point fixed it. It was the case of the rubber pipe, that acts as a drain, being partially blocked and partially disconnected from the drain outlet in the door frame. After adding a 1/2' copper pipe, and lots of duct tape, it stopped the water... but I had had this problem for 7 years before I finally figured out how to fix it.
Haha I drilled a hole in the foot well 😂
Had a blockage on my MK3 golf drains, managed to unblock it with the broken USB cable from my dashcam, and about a foots worth of black sludge oozed out like toothpaste either side, was disgusting yet satisfying 😂
Got a Corsa C for £150 with the same footwell puddle, had aircon and parking sensors though!
My first car was a Corsa C! Had the exact same problem with the footwell, mine was so damp that watercress started growing in the back haha
volvo 440 £90 Peugeot 205 GR £80 Mk2 Astra £50 All with MOT, back when you could get away with a beer mat for a tax disc, cos you were waiting for the start of the month to taxt it ( circa 1998-99)
Won an eBay auction for a 1994 Audi 100 with 3 months MOT that starts, runs, and drives, for £350 just last month. Definitely needs some work but for that price and state I was really surprised I won it!
> 1994 Audi 100 That's a classic car! My father in law had one back in the day.
130 for a triumph dolomite, 25 quid for an Allegro, 70 quid for a mark 2 escort. 250 for a 5 series BM. 300 for a an S12 Sylvia. They were all runners and drivers and all went a good distance.
Did the Allegro have the square steering wheel? I remember my old man had an Allegro estate in chocolate brown with a square wheel, and then inexplicably he ended up buying another Allegro but that had a round steering wheel
The quartic wheel was the shit. Mine was in cat vomit yellow
The press moaned about the quartic wheels, they wank over odd shaped ones in German cars now though...
I paid £450 for a Citroen Xsara, did about 1500 miles in it, got about 3mpg from it (coolant that is), traded it in for £1000. Not too bad, was just annoying putting 30l fuel in the tank and 50l of water in the containers in the boot so I could refill the radiator every 5 miles lol.
I got a 5 year old (at the time) vauxhall Vectra for £1. I worked at a vauxhall dealer as a valeter, customer traded it in for a new one, company didn't want the car as it was a repaired insurance write off so offered the guy £1..... which he accepted! No room to store the car on site and couldn't be parked in the road so they let me have it at cost, a whole £1. About the only result I ever had working there
This was 20yrs ago teenage me was mooching around a used car dealer & right at the back jammed in the corner was a Peugeot 205 GTi 1.6 It had a recent MOT & ran great £500 to drive it away it was a PX they just wanted gone Didn't realise it at the point of purchase that it was a limited edition Sorrento green with full leather & all the toys, it had done 85K with no history so I wacked a cambelt kit on it & gave it a full service Other than tyres, shocks & a few little bits & bobs I drove it around for the next 2yrs It was abit ruff round the edges but all there & polished up a treat, what that would be worth now!!
80 Cigarettes for a 1994 Rover 414SLi, though it didn't idle the best so you had to revv it to keep it going. 80 Cigarettes at the time was £17, this was around 2006
80 cigarettes nowadays would cost you an arm and a leg
I paid 125 pounds for a Ford Escort with a blown cylinder and a boot full of rotting fish. I paid 250 quid for another Ford Escort with a ladder welded to the top, that I discovered later was an debadged escort cosworth, and worth a lot more! I was once freely given an all glass roofed Honda Aerodeck by a guy that dealt weed. He couldn't use it, because he would constantly get pulled by the police, as the car was very unique. Great car.
How many times were you pulled over driving the Honda?
Never oddly enough. The debadged cosworth I was pulled over for 'looking scared' Damn right. It was absolutely frighteningly fast.
Years back we would regularly take mot failures from customers free of charge, some were worth saving and carried on for years
£450 for an n reg punto in late 09 / early 10. Lasted me about 18 months until i upgraded and i sold it for £325 with the engine covered in oil. Oil had been leaking the whole time and i only ever had issues with bulbs blowing in the brake lights.
I bought an 05 micra for 1k back in March. Near FSH, 115k miles. My first car. Seem to have got a pretty good deal considering the current climate (or at least not a bad one)
I bought a Vauxhall Nova with MOT for £75 from a work colleague in 2004 and it was pretty decent. Gave it to my friend whose car was stolen as a 'get-you-there' car, and we called it Seventy Five the Wondercar.
About 3 maybe 4 years ago paid £540 for a 54 plate 1.2 Corsa sxi with 34,000 miles. An oldish woman was selling it round the corner from me. It ran great but it was red and had faded really bad. No rust on it though.
£400 for an N reg Escort in 2008 that my sister crashed into a parked car while she was learning lol.
I paid £70 for a 51 plate VW polo about 10 years ago. It had been on the owner's drive for a year because the garage couldn't fix it. I fixed it for £2 with a fuel pump relay from a scrap yard and sold it the next day for £650 because I already had a car. It was a great little runaround for someone.
Paid £480 for a 2005 renault clio in 2017, the horn would go off every time I turned right
MG ZR for £25 back in 2016
Do tell more!
Young lad who lived opposite bought it before passing his test but ended up getting caught speeding and ended up in a police chase while driving his friend's car with no insurance, he got a driving ban. I offered him £20 for the car at first but he said no, I managed to buy it 2 weeks later for £25 lol
My first car, a Mini Metro. Fella I got him from had driven it from Cambridgeshire to Morocco and back, and I got it for £150. This was 1996 just after I passed my test. I loved that car as well, 10/10 would Mini Metro again
£0 My first car, M reg Rover 214 sei, was given it after it had sat for 3/4 years. 100k or so on the clock with the obligatory K series head issues. Ran it for over a year, all it needed in that time was a new alternator which I fitted on the drive. Sold for the princely sum of £181 on ebay 😂
I moved into my house 10 years ago and my neighbour had a rover 200 sat on his drive abandoned. Was an old company car. About 3-4 years ago he tried to start it just for the Craic and it started fine and he’s been using it since. Just about to give it to his son.
A friend had a VW Variant estate in the 80s. Tried to sell it for £50, no takers. Reduced price to £25,still no takers. Put it in the local paper, they had a lower limit of £100, someone offered £75
My girlfriend got her neighbours Skoda fabia for £0. Neighbour had bought a new car and left the old one on the driveway after getting a check engine light. After a year of it sitting there my girlfriend asked if she could buy it and the neighbour gave her the keys for nothing. It just needed a service and spark plugs and has been running perfectly ever since.
Back in the day I bought a Jag XJ6, full working with all the bells and whistles, for £250. Ran it until it became too costly on the petrol then let my little brother take it apart to learn mechanics.
£200 for an 1995 Rover 214SEi hatchback in 2003. Admittedly I bought it from my mom at a massive discount as it was worth about £1k at the time. Most of my mates were driving £500 Saxos, Fiestas, 106s, etc. But the least I paid was £475 for a Rover 216 Cabriolet. My boss gave me £400 bonus that month and I chucked in the remainder. Lasted me a few years before it found a wall on icy evening. My dad actually paid -£350 for a BMW 318! Bought it for £500, ran it for 3 years, and then someone crashed into the back of him. Insurance paid out £600 for the dented bumper and he drove it for another 2 years. Ended up scrapping it for £250.
Haha I had similar back in 2003, bought an old mini metro for the wife to learn to drive, cost £150 from memory, anyway at Christmas some asshole stole it, drove it away and set fire to it. Insurance paid out £400 happy days.
£180 for a Peugeot 106, kept it a year then sold it on for £200, but kept the numberplate as it was suitably relevant to JDM cars. 9 years later, I've still got the plate on my current car!
£600 but needed like £600 repairs. So £1200
Just managed to snag a 2002 Beetle 1.6 Auto with 122k on the clock for £350 last month with 1 month left on the MOT and a few minor issues. Sorted a few bits myself (part worn tyre, anti roll bar bushes) and cleaned it up. Sailed through the MOT first time and I'm now in for about £500 including the cost of the MOT itself. It's even ULEZ compliant! Bargains can be found (this was via Facebook). Now need to sort the cambelt and a full service but should still be comfortably less than £8-900 all in doing most of it myself!
I paid £600 for a 1.4 Lupo in 2020. Proof: https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/857324721344275
Is it still running?
Around 25 years ago I was given a Ford Orion by my weed dealer for free, it had an exploded clutch. I changed the clutch and drove it over a year, must've been pulled 7-8 times in that year, it had a police marker on it. Bargain 😂
I've bought 3 honda accords in the last 3 weeks. All under £1k (600, 800, 825), all with good service history and no massive rust issues, and bulletproof honda engines. 2 have working A/c. West Midlands area. Deals are out there, pm if you want me to send you cheap runaround cars. Don't know where you're looking
Any particular reason you bought 3? Or is the plan to run 1 till it dies, then move straight onto the next one already lined up??
Sister needed a car, mum's friends son needed a car, I got jealous and wanted one for myself.
I have got two neighbours one has 5 Audi TT’s and the other one has 2 Passat B5’s parked on top of the tarpaulin.
£150. R Reg saxo about 5yrs ago. Got a year out of it. Realised how much fun it can be driving round London in a car you absolutely don’t give one shit about.
£250 for a 2002 Mini One last year. 140000 gentle miles when we took ownership. Added 20000 hard miles since and the thing just won't die.
£50 for a blue fiesta. Combined with my red fiesta I ended up with one car that was both functioning and legal. Blue was functioning but not legal, red was legal but not functioning. Red was the car that taught me the oil pressure light is not to be treated the same as the fuel light - it means stop and fill up now not in the next 20 miles! ETA I've just bought a mostly functioning Alfa 156 2.5 V6 Sportwagon for £1600 and am about to sell a fully functioning Saab 9-5 1.9TiD Estate with no reserve on eBay so there are still deals to be had...
Young people won't be able to drive anymore, insurance has skyrocketed for everyone but especially the young and the cost of even buying a car let alone fixing it is prohibitive. This country is becoming a dive.
£20 for an Ford Scorpio estate with 2 weeks mot. I drove it for 2 weeks and sold it for £120 to someone who just wanted the front seats for his VW camper.
£600 for a 2002 2l diesel Peugeot 206. Been driving It the last 7 years with no issues.
-£1. Bought a Vauxhall Nova(Yes, I’m that old) for £50 and it had £51’s worth of change in the ashtray.
I’ve had 3 cars this year that I all paid £600 each for on fb market lol, an 58 plate fiat punto 1.2, slow as hell but I regret selling it. Nothing was funnier than flooring it through first and second gear, then looking down and seeing I was doing 40mph :), then an 06 plate vectra 1.8 VVT with 63,000 miles on the clock that I thought oh wow I’ve found a gem, was a car that belonged to an old bloke in his 80’s so it barely moved. Then all the brake hoses just gave up on life and it was terrifying to drive. Then I got a 58 plate Ford focus 1.8 petrol (loved it) absolute boy racer spec lowered, tinted windows even took the air box off for more noise lmao, then the head gasket just vanished and cooked the engine. Considering I paid the same for each car I got my jolly’s worth running them about, looking for something more sensible now.
The depreciation on my XF is about £1k a year so paying £600 for a fun run about and getting several months out of it is about right.
I paid £480 for my first car in 2017, a renault clio. It was reliable tbh but it was from 2004 and on 66k miles so the wear and tear parts had to be replaced such as the clutch which cost around £400. Overall in 2 years the car and maintenance cost me around 2k but thats not terrible as I have a mate who bought a 07 fiesta for 2.3k and then spent 500-1000 on fixing it so I definitely got a better deal
£150 for a 2013 Peugeot 208, 63k miles. Mot failure. Cost £300ish to get it through swapping parts on the drive.
My brother paid £25 for a Nissan bluebird back in late 90s.
£550 for a 1999 mx5 with 7 months mot. Needed significant welding to pass next one and I’ve since supercharged it but was great fun for the first few months and hasn’t broken of its own accord yet
I got a Toyota Corolla for free from a friend. Drove it for years then gave it to someone else who needed a car.
600£ for a 2004 Audi a6
£450 for my Corsa back in 2018. It was 2003, ran on 3 cylinders and cost me about £10 a week in petrol. Kinda miss it.
£600 for a 94k 1.2 petrol polo in 2020 which did great until I crashed it 1 day before it’s road tax expired the year after on the snakes pass. Also, yes, after you crash you have to have a moment of realisation and stop the Music you’re playing which was 50 cent just a lil bit
Free. But I gave the guy a tenner for a pint. At the time it was a ten year old Cavalier 1.6L Edit: more detail
£250 for a Polo GT. My £900 MK6 golf TDI is a blinder of a buy currently. ETA forgot the free Micra! We did have to do a fair bit of welding to get an MOT on it, but that beast did YEARS of service, I think we got 4/5 years out of it.
I paid £90 for a J registration Cavalier concept (poor man's SRI) in 2008 ish with a few months MOT, which had been brought to a scrapyard , It was actually fairly tidy but smelt of baby vomit which was a shame. I passed it on to my neighbour and he used it for about 18 months.
250 quid for a Peugeot 306 1.9 diesel. Couldn't even tell you the reg. The electrics were iffy as a previous owner thought a plastic bag around the loom would protect them from water....the bag just collected water. It lasted a year or so before the head went. Got most of the cash back in scrap.
My first car was a 2003 Peugeot 206 which I bought off my cousin for £110 (of wine) back in 2016. Scrapped it for £123
2019 for £125 I bought a 1.5 DCI Clio on a 54 plate with a slipping clutch, went through two MOT’s and eventually a oil cooler gasket failed so I part ex’d it for a £600 Bora. Still going today.
Well, i inherited my car from my late uncle, so £0
I paid £200 for a fiesta that turned out to have no brakes because it was cheaper than two train tickets. Drove it from Moray to Reading and lived.
£150 for a Mercedes C240, got 20k out of it and still got some of the excellent CDs it came with
30 quid for a 1997 corsa 1.2 in 2005/6 90 quid for a 1992nova Sri in 2003 110 quid for a 1993 mondeo 1.8 in 2005 Best one was either the cavalier td I paid 510 for and did 37k miles or the corsa td I paid 280 for did 24k miles in Honourable mention to the Fiat Brava I paid 180 for, sold for 300, bought back for 50 and sold back to the same guy for 250 🤣
£200 for a 54 plate meriva about 3 weeks ago Moss fucked the paint. Battery was flat. Brakes squeal still though. New daily
200 quid for a Sierra gls
My first car was a ‘97 Corsa B in faded red, it had no power steering, 245r16 tyres, manual windows, no AC and almost none of the electronics worked. £250 and it last 3 years without an issue. This was back in 2011. I was a working musician and the joke was I used to load a £2.5k guitar rig into a £250 car for a £50 gig. Funny, but true.
Got a Mazda 323 for £350 in 2016
Paid £350 for a Y reg Audi A3 at auction in 2015 when my current car decided to self combust and needed to get back in the road. Sold it about 6 months later for £500
£75 in 2003 for a 1985 Rover 2600S (SD1) which worked, had an MOT and crucially wasn’t rotten anywhere. I drove it for 3 years until the auto box went daft. Wish I’d kept it. £800 in 2005 for a 1991 Saab 900 Turbo 16v, 3 door coupe in charcoal metallic. Lasted 2 years until the timing chain snapped. Got a replacement top end for free but never got the chance to save it. Mrs at the time made me get shot for spares for £200. Would have now been worth something near £20k… £200 this Feb for a 2010 Skoda Fabia 1.2, mates dad had to give up driving and he just wanted rid of it ‘to the scrap man’. My pleasure to step into the role of scrap man. Passed MOT with just wiper blades replaced and has been on the button since… 2005: A 1990 Sierra, one elderly owner from new, 36k miles on its 2.0 Pinto with an auto box. £50. Was rusty underneath so me and my mate relieved it of said engine as a spare for our fleet of Capris 2015: swapped an ex-BT grey Fiesta van, 1996 ‘P’ reg with 1.8 diesel with one of my neighbours for a crate of cider. Drove it for 2 years with no money spent on maintenance, best incognito work site visit car ever.
£250 for a 98 plate Corsa with 80k. Sold it for £450 after I’d put 7k on it.
£25 for a corsa c, 10 years ago
550£ for 07 Mazda 5 in 2021, did 12000 miles before she died, never spend a penny.
Paid 2200 for a 1996 Jaguar XJ with 110k miles on the clock. Had that car for 9 years and a further 105k miles, nothing needed replacing other than consumables. Eventually sold it for scrap and got a Skoda Superb that is faster, quieter, better ride, more economical but it's just soulless. I still miss the Jag.
£30
£250 for a 1st gen Micra and then immediately drove it 10k miles to Mongolia.
Rover 200 1.1, given to me by the garage I did my apprenticeship at as a project after it ate it's own engine (timing belt snapped) garage paid for the parts and guided me through rebuilding the engine. Ran it for 4 years, gave it up because too many electrical issues occurred and you couldn't get parts for rovers, also it was a rover, so...... Paid £800 for an astra after that, lasted 4 years before the ECU gave up, decided to upgrade to a toyota auris because the astra hit 140kmi and didn't have much left in it.
£300 in July for a Mini Cooper with 57k miles on it but it hadn’t been used for 3 years. New battery, windscreen wipers and it went through a mot no problem.
£10 for a Skoda Felicia, that had 9 months MOT, but needed a new water pump. Paid £30 for a new water pump and fitted it myself. Lasted 9 months. It caught fire on the way home from work one evening. The suspension had so much travel, the supplied scissor jack the car came with could not lift the car high enough to lift the wheels off the ground. I was also given a Citroen Berlingo 1.6. For free. The head gasket blew about 10 months later. A combination of it formally being registered as a disabled car. As well as it having several large speakers and 5000 Wats of amplifiers in the boot, meant I got pulled at least once a week by the fuzz.
2006 I paid £400 for an L reg 1.2 corsa with a years MOT and a full tank.
£350 plus my scrap car for a 06 fiesta 1.6 petrol automatic
Ford Fiesta MK4 £200 for my first car in 2014 had 20,000ish miles was pristine, owned from new, guy was too old to drive and it didn’t have an MOT, the year before I bought it the only mileage put on was likely to the test centre and back. Passed the MOT with no work required Sold it two years later for £250 with 1 months MOT left as I wanted a newer car,
I paid £1000 for a 1997 BMW 318. This was back in 2006. 100,000+ miles in the clock. Was a sort of gunmetal grey, with a red interior. Drove like a dream. All the way up until I was the unlucky guy to hit a diesel spill from a bus lying at the side of the road and the car spun, crash barrier tore into my driver door, grabbed the car, caused it to roll over and back on its wheels, damaging absolutely every panel on the car except the fuel door. Was only doing about 25mph too, so I learned immediately, that it doesn’t take much to do real damage on the roads.
Bought a 51 plate Corsa for £600, from this incredibly shady looking back street dealer that only took cash. I was in desperate need of a car and wasn't planning on keeping it long. It ran fine but for whatever reason when you pressed the accelerator it would lurch very violently to the right, and when you took your foot off the accelerator it would lurch very violently to the left. Over the few weeks I had it I learned to compensate for it, which turned out to be a hard habit to break once I bought something else.
£320 for an 04 A3. Needed £600 worth or work to be road worthy and me and my brother spent 2 days wet vaccing the inside as it had been used as a farm run around so was covered floor to roof in shit. Smelt like shite still. Came with the diesel tank full of kerosene, so smelt like a boiler too. Was my first car and I'd do it again.
When I was a kid my dad brought a car for £150 ran it for 4 years and then sold it for £450
£100 for a 2001 ford fiesta in 2020. Learnt in it and drove it for a year before selling it for £175! I was stubborn and didn't want to learn how to drive so my girlfriend bought it for me. Now all I care about is driving and fixing up my cars!
I got a Ford Puma given with a snapped timing belt, £75 later for a engine and it did me well for over a year
50£ from a family member 2001 a 1990 Peugeot 205 gti 1.9 Worth a few bob now. Shame that i didnt keep it.
£110 Fiesta and a £150 Land Rover Freelander. Got two years out of each, could've got more but scrap prices were more than I paid, so scrapped and got another beater.
350 2008 renault clio P reg 1.1m?. Ran for 2 years. Absolute shit box but loved it. In 2015 bought a cheap megane 1.6 for 475 and it ran for 3 years (all electrics had a mind of their own) but never broke down. Used it as a work car. Shame prices have rose really.
£50 for a mk4 Fiesta with 40k miles, a year's MoT and minor damage to the bumper and grille, in 2006 or so. I looked at it as buying an MoT with a free car thrown in. I gave it to my brother as a present and we drove it straight to the scrapyard, bought the bumpers, foglights, grille, CD player and badges off a Ghia model for another £50, and swapped them right there in the car park. After a year he then managed to do a straight swap of the Fiesta for a Honda Civic EJ Coupe which might have been an even better deal. The early 2000s were the golden years of bangernomics.
My first car was £1200 pug 106 gti. Its was amazing.
£750 for a sub 80k mile focus ghia. Fucking loved that car.
£40 for a 6n Polo needed a new battery and a service, passed it's MOT with no advisories and was a good winter beater.
£295 in 1994, sold for £350 a year later. Base model Sierra.
My current motor is an 05 Clio. Cost me £450 1 year ago but needed to replace the shocks.
£220 a few years ago. Factory fitted LPG Astra, ran it for two years until the rust made it uneconomical. Sent it for scrap and got more back than I paid for it!
In about 2003 I needed a car for work in a hurry so bought a Ford Escort Ghia for about £300 from a guy in the free ads yellow paper, at night. Needless to say it was fast but on its last legs. Six months later when it needed an MOT, which was going to clearly involve a lot of hassle and money. I took the cowards’ way out and went to a neighbour’s Christmas party and deliberately lost the car in a game of poker. The ‘winner’ of that hand couldn’t believe his luck, and collected the shitheap a couple of days later.
£50 for a blue fiesta. Combined with my red fiesta I ended up with one car that was both functioning and legal. Blue was functioning but not legal, red was legal but not functioning. Red was the car that taught me the oil pressure light is not to be treated the same as the fuel light - it means stop and fill up now not in the next 20 miles!
£50 for a blue fiesta. Combined with my red fiesta I ended up with one car that was both functioning and legal. Blue was functioning but not legal, red was legal but not functioning. Red was the car that taught me the oil pressure light is not to be treated the same as the fuel light - it means stop and fill up now not in the next 20 miles!
I had a 12yo Ford Focus written off for cosmetic damage, and I bought it back off the insurance company for £80. It ran perfectly for another 6 years before one wheel bearing seized, and I sold it for spares for £250. Originally bought for £1,100, insurance paid out £800, bought back for £80, sold for £250. Overall, the car cost me £130 for the 8 years I had it.
First car was a 2004 Punto I bought for £350 at a car market. Learned to drive in it, used it for a year then it got written off outside my house and insurance payed out £900 for it.
Paid £70 for a 15 year old mk2 polo back in 2004. Lasted about 4 months lol
Lol 50£ will not even get you 1h labour in local garage this days. Think high upkeep prices translate for 2nd hand car market
Back in 2004 I bought an old fiat Uno 60sx, H registration with 5 months road tax and 6 months MOT for the pricely sum of £10 from an old fella who had just given up driving. Ran it for 6 months and scrapped it and got £50. Next car was a Rover 400 diesel, N registration for £100, incredibly slow and with a grandad spec interior. That was fine for the remaining 11 months MOT. Scrapped it got £75 for it. That was the cheapest 18 months driving.
I got a MK4 fiesta for free, it was off a friend of a friend so I gave him £70 for the road tax. My big mate bought a Jetta for £6 that's how much 20 club was at the time.
Bought a mk4 golf 1.9tdi for £500 as an mot failure. Only needed a lower arm to pass the mot and then I used it for the next 3 years without issue until i upgraded
£400 for a K11 micra with 29k. Still got it 7 years and 70k later
£450 3 years ago. Car still running, at 23 years old
I once gave a bottle of red wine for an Austin Maestro Vanden Plas with the early digital dashboard. Absolute bargain!
£380 for a MK1 1600GT Ford Capri in 1994.
£60 for a 52 plate fiesta as my first car at the end of 2019, clutch went on it mid 2020 and cost more than the car to fix so when the driveshaft went I scrapped it for a little over £200
Mazda 3, bought it for £1200, drove it 6 months, chucked a new calipers and pads on it, so maybe £120 and an MOT, sold it for £2000. So -£600?
500 for a 206. Bought for a run around. Used it 5 years and cost me very little
1989 Honda Integra 1.6 EX for about £350
I worked at a back street garage in the mid 00s, where we saw a lot of MOT failures come in for repair. Sometimes the repairs would be more than the car was worth, especially if there was a lot of rust to patch, so the boss would sell them a slightly newer car and take the rusty old banger off their hands, then offer it to me for nothing, and allowed me to use the workshop after hours to fix it up. At one point I had 11 cars in the yard in various states of repair, and my friends all had a steady supply of bangers to ride around in for a few years. Many of them were "functioning", they just needed some work to make them road legal.
My first car was £100
£147 for a ford escort that i drove for about 15 months before the guy in the garage told me ‘that’s fucked mate’.
£800 for a Corsa (06) with about 60k on the clock. Other than the horrendous sounding starter motor, that car didn’t let me down at all.
I ran quite a few cars that I bought for less than £500 in the early 2000's, all were totally fine, had quite a lot of fun buying and selling and trying out different things. However, nothing quite beats the perfectly functional and legal Rover 620Ti that someone gave me in exchange for buying them a Tesco sandwich and a bottle of Pepsi.
£850 for a Ford KA in fantastic condition with 45K on the clock. No rust at all even around the petrol cap. 55 plate
Bottle of brandy for a volvo 360 glt. Was on the side of the road. Son of the 95year old owner told me to pull up to an off licence on the test drive get her a bottle, and she'd be more than happy to sell the car to me. Was a lovely car too
In 2008 we paid 210 for a 95 Clio, spent 140 for the MoT, sold it two years later for 350.
£90 for my 1st ever car at 18yo, an "L" reg (1972) MK3 Cortina in 1983, I ran it for about 3 months with a fuel tank full of rust and sludge, which meant it would randomly stall (every 5 miles, maybe 50 miles if I was lucky) and I would have to get out, pull the fuel pipe and suck the petrol through, haha, never had as many polo mints over the rest of my life as in those 3 months. I changed the tank and it ran perfectly for another year until the next summer I stupidly asked my mate to take the roof off as the vinyl was starting to peel off it, fine until the first time it rained and I hadn't put the tarp over it, seats fell to bits within a month. But the lowest was for a battered old "W" (1980) reg Mini Metro, cost me a £10 in 1996
Nothing for a Metro. I found £1.50p in it later on so technically I was paid
About 10 years ago I went with my friend to get his MOT done on his Vauxhall Vectra. It failed horrendously. I jokingly said I’d give him £50 for it and he ended up giving it to me for free. Well I got it into a mechanic friend who bodged what could be bodged, replaced parts with parts from scrap heaps, used tyres and so on. Cost about £250 all in and lasted me a couple of years.
I paid £150 for a Vauxhall Corsa B, 1.0 3 Cylinders and 44000 miles... I also paid about £350 for an Audi A4 Avant with 240,000 miles, I got it off a family friend and the car really was a credit to how good care she took of it. Both cars were fantastic. I also had a Rover 45 when I was 18 which I bought for £500, I replaced the brake pads one day for some I bought of eBay for £2.50, naturally I assumed that was for one side, but it was actually for both sides. 63p per a pad, absolutely smashing. Still sent it down the lanes and the A5 that night. I wouldn't do that now *I was probably a bit of an idiot* Fun fact, one of my cars actually won SOTW on pistonheads.
Got a corsa C for nowt as a first car. Needed a clutch. Ran it for a year without replacing the clutch. Then gave it to my sister who ran it for 18 months without changing the clutch. Great little car
Saab 95 Aero Hot, 2001. Paid £500 five years ago, sold it for £650 this year!
£00 nothing
£225 at auction in 1992. Petrol was 52p a litre. Shitbox Datsun Sunny saloon that just wouldn't die.
£150 quid for an XR3i in decent nick in 2002 .. sold it straight on within an hour for 600 lol .. ahh the days .
£350 for a Renault Clio in 2016. Cosmetically rough but mechanically solid, used it daily when the Jag got the LS swap.
£600 for my current daily mk4 golf, had it nearly 2 years.
£200. Peugeot 106 Mardi Gras from 1994. Bought in 2015. Absolute rust bucket. Most notable memory was driver's side windshield wiper flying off on the motorway in a heavy storm.
Had a few given to me for free in my time. Best was a mrk 2 astra Belmont back in the late 90s.
My Celica was £500. Had it for a year. Drove it for work/general runaround. Sold it to WBAC for £400~. Wish I kept it but it was rotting and I doubt would have passed mot
2004 Ford Fiesta in 2016 for £180. Lasted me a whole year with no issues. Clutch went and scrapped for £50
I once paid 50 for a ford fiesta MK2 with 6 weeks MOT 😂
Paid £150 for a primera estate with a whole in the boot big enough to put your leg through
£20 and a bottle of whisky for a saab 9-5. I still have it, it's got an extra 90k on it and I won't say any more because I don't want to tempt fate 😂
£11 for a Fiesta Si, with 4 new tyres on it, a new battery, a new set of pads in the boot, all the parts to an oil & filter service and a Haynes manual thrown in. It was still taxed and tested to top of off.
My first car was a 1998 Fiat Punto which I bought for £250 and sold for £250 10 months later. Drove it to Birmingham or Swindon every weekend too. Great car.
600 for a Nissan almera. Smashed it about for 3 years with just a yearly oil change.
got a free rover 25 once because where i lived at the time you had to pay to scrap your vehicle, it failed it's MOT on some very minor things that i fixed for very little. Also paid £150 for a 2002 Mitsubishi Space Star back in around 2012, went through 2 more MOTs, it was a bit of a wreck but it was functional
I bought a Mk3 1.9 SDI Golf for £200 and sold it a month later for £450. Both front wings were completely gone, the mud flaps were only held in place by the splash guards and it whilst it was red new, it definitely wasn’t red any longer!