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Walking home from work today I passed my local LR dealer.On the forecourt was a new, unregistered Discovery. I had to do a double take. It was priced at £46,250. No idea on the spec, but as someone who for the past 20 years has bought his cars privately off friends and contacts at 3/7 years old it shows how little I know of new vehicle prices. I thought they were around £30/35k tops. Strewth.
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They're gonna need wider windscreens soon.
I get the same slightly giddy feeling every time I pass my local MB dealer. Gulp. I also pass an Aston/Lamborghini/Land Rover/Jag/Volvo dealer very day. I dare only peep at (some) Volvos.
Last edited by: Alanović on Wed 27 Mar 13 at 14:57
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It shouldn't be surprising that prices have crept upwards but somehow it is. The price of a 'nice' biggish car seemed to stick in the low £20,000s for ages; my S60 new in 2002 was about £21,500 list, so if a new one today is £30,000, that's an annual compound rate of 3.4%. Not outrageous, especially given the fall in the value of pound against euro (S60s come from Belgium, not Sweden) since 2002.
And yet £30,000 for a family car does seem an awful lot of money, especially considering that many of us have seen incomes fall well behind prices in the last five years. Whether any of these cars sell for anything like list price is, of course, another matter entirely.
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My car was £28616 when it was ordered in 2011. The equivalent model now (main difference is climate seats now also do massage) is over £31k! Actually mine went up towards the end of 2011 too.
Back in 2000 I got a Passat 1.8T Sport with few extras (cruise control and front fog lights). That was over £20k back then list price. And nowhere near as well specified as my current car. Some differences:
- Full leather
- Sat nav
- 18" wheels
- Bluetooth in the headunit for phone and audio streaming
- Adaptive suspension
- Xenon HID (Adaptive) lighting
- More powerful (but diesel) engine
- Much better fuel economy
- Stop-start/regenerative braking system
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^ great if you want that stuff. Just seems like more to go wrong to me!
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>> ^ great if you want that stuff. Just seems like more to go wrong to me!
I'll only have it when it's under full warranty so don't see problems. It's also a company vehicle so I'd not pay to fix things anyway. :-)
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I hired a low end new Golf at the weekend and whilst it was beautifully put together it was short of kit but I see the list price is £18,800!!!
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It doesn't take too much fiddling with the options lists on the higher end models to push them over £30k! Even top end Fiestas and Clios are now pushing £20k with a few options.
It wouldn't be so bad if they actually retained this value. The Golf is probably as good as mainstream cars get in this respect, but it's still hardly a sound investment in the greater scheme of things.
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I gave a friend a lift to the dealership this week to collect his new Porsche Panamera. He didn't tell me how much he'd paid and I didn't ask on the basis that it would probably have made me ill.
The car though was, much much nicer than I was expecting. Very nice in fact. Nicer than a nice thing in niceland actually...
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>>I gave a friend a lift to the dealership this week to collect his new Porsche Panamera
My son bought his last weekend. Inside it is really well finished and he does not have to look at the outside.. I thought his X6 was bad until this car appeared.
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The cheapest Panamera is over £60k. The most expensive more than double that!
Last edited by: rtj70 on Wed 27 Mar 13 at 21:30
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Quite easy to get one spec'd to over £155k! And they charge over £1600 if you want to collect it, i.e. they aren't delivering it to the UK!!
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> And they charge over £1600 if you want to collect it,
If you collect from the factory they don't just throw the keys at you and say "There you go".
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Or even, "Dort gehen Sie".
:-)
I really don't know or indeed care what he paid but I don't think it was the LX. More of a Ghia at a guess. Lots of toys and buttons anyway.
Much better looking than I'd imagined it would be.
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>> If you collect from the factory they don't just throw the keys at you and say "There you go".
Obviously! You'll get a tour and all sorts. But over £1600 extra? If they did it in lieu of the cost of transporting it to you then maybe that would be acceptable.
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>> Obviously! You'll get a tour and all sorts. But over £1600 extra? If they did
>> it in lieu of the cost of transporting it to you then maybe that would
>> be acceptable.
>>
You will not be flying Ryan Air and staying at the local Premier Inn. Porsche buyers collecting from the factory tend not to operate at that end of the market.
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>Obviously! You'll get a tour and all sorts. But over £1600 extra?
I was once with a colleague on an AI (Prolog) course in Stuttgart. One evening in the hotel bar we got talking to a couple from Scotchland who were there to collect a new 911.
They'd been flown to Stuttgart the day before, greeted at the airport and chauffered to the hotel for the evening. That day they had been given a personally escorted tour of the factory, a very fancy lunch and then a tour of the museum. The next morning they were due to collect their car. I think he said that the handover was an all morning job and Porsche had even arranged the paperwork to allow them to spend a few days in Austria and Italy on the temporary registration before driving home.
If the setup is still the same I don't think £1600 is too OTT for the flight, two nights in the Graf Zeppelin, two silver-service lunches, a day and a half of personal service from a Porsche employee and the admin work.
My employer charges more than that for the time alone.
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I love the current BMW adverts here in Aus, the X5 3.0D is now 'only' $AU99,990 - that's about GBP70,000, exactly the same car is about GBP45,000 in the UK - and the AUD is actually unusually strong right now, someone is making a nice profit....
However, the GBP is weak and it seems unlikely to recover any time soon, I suspect that many things will become relatively more expensive in the coming year in the UK and that people's standard of living will be further squeezed, but that's already in another thread somewhere....
I'd add that (like rtj70) I saw car prices in the UK fall in both relative and real terms between the late 1990s and (say) 2010, a trend which is now reversing I suppose.
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>> I'd add that (like rtj70) I saw car prices in the UK fall in both relative and real terms
>> between the late 1990s and (say) 2010, a trend which is now reversing I suppose.
And salaries have gone where on average?
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>>And salaries have gone where on average?
Depends on who you are and what you do for a living.
GPs and Hospital Consultants have done really well over the last 10 years.....average GP £100K for a full-time partner (up from £60/70K) and a surgeon £120K+ Bonus for skills up to £180K in total. A nurse on the otherhand has hardly gained much if anything in the last 5 years.
Skilled North Sea oil & gas workers have seen their salaries rise 8-10%PLUS rise year on year despite the recession.........salaries are still climbing due to shortages of skilled people and lots of the early pioneers of 30-40 years ago retiring now that they are 60ish Mind you you would not get me on a helicopter trip every 2 weeks or so and living on top of a oil refinery that could go bang at anytime!
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>> And salaries have gone where on average?
>>
Arguably nowhere or even backwards, certainly since 2007, that's why I opted to be paid in AUD not GBP right now (I know this isn't an option for most people and accept I'm lucky in this respect). This will make returning to the UK at the end of my assignment financially painful but that's life.
The fact remains that cars and many other consumer goods got cheaper over a period of 10 years and they are still cheaper in the UK than they are in other parts of the world - which is probably not sustainable for the manufacturers. It will hurt British buyers of those goods as they increase in cost versus their incomes. I sincerely hope that they don't address this via another credit binge.
Is it not conceivable that the standard of living in the UK increased beyond that justified by underlying productivity and that (unfortunately) people need to get used to a lower standard of living until this is corrected ? It is happening in Greece and Ireland after all.
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One of my German colleagues is driving an F30 320d Touring that he specced to over 50k Euros using the options list. What is remarkable is that it is a company car, and he has paid the cost of everything apart from the base car, metallic paint and auto transmission out of his own pocket. The thing is properly loaded, admittedly. Heated leather seats, widescreen sat nav with DVD player, traffic monitoring, adaptive suspension, adaptive cruise with collision avoidance etc etc.
I couldn't ever bring myself to pay anything towards a car I would never own, and would forfeit any right to if I left or lost my job. If the lease company hadn't thrown in the metallic paint for free, I wouldn't even have paid for that.
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>> I couldn't ever bring myself to pay anything towards a car I would never own,
>> and would forfeit any right to if I left or lost my job.
>>
I think that depends on the company and the agreement they have. I know with our company cars scheme once the car goes above a certain level then you have to take the car with you when you leave i.e. take over the running of the car.
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>> I couldn't ever bring myself to pay anything towards a car I would never own,
>> and would forfeit any right to if I left or lost my job. If the
>> lease company hadn't thrown in the metallic paint for free, I wouldn't even have paid
>> for that.
>>
I couldn't agree more, I had colleagues who'd load GBP10K of options onto a BMW then opt for a longer (4 year) lease due to the increased monthly cost - barmy IMHO, if you worked out the numbers you'd realise you were being charged the options' full cost pro-rated over the lease i.e. they were ascribed zero residual value by the leasing company and the lessee (?) paid the cost in full.
My personal approach was to consider options very carefully and take the shortest possible lease (2 years) since HMRC taxes you every year as-if your car is new (galling on a baggy 4y/o car with 100K+ miles I'd suggest). I also liked to get the best engine variant I could so eschewed blingy M-Sports and their ilk (having made many comments about 'fur coat and no knickers 318i M-Sports in the past).
Having said all this, it's a personal choice and to those without the option of a company car such arguments must seem churlish.....
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Our lease terms are fixed at 3 years or 90,000 miles, whichever is sooner. Apart from metallic paint (which the lease company don't charge for), all options have historically needed to be paid in full at the manufacturer's list price by the employee. There is no limit as far as I know.
We have just been informed that, as of next month, the company will now pay for automatic transmission, front and rear parking sensors and sat-nav if not standard on the car. Problem is, I don't intend to still be here in 2 years time when my car is up for replacement ;-)
Last edited by: DP on Thu 28 Mar 13 at 10:15
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We get an allowance and you can choose from lots of cars and options with that. You can also pay extra towards the monthly cost of the car to get something above your allowance. Or trade down and take the difference (but pay tax and NI on it).
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>> The car though was, much much nicer than I was expecting. Very nice in fact.
>> Nicer than a nice thing in niceland actually...
>>
That's easy to say when you don't know the price!
Yes Panameras are nice inside, but they are pig ugly to look at on the outside (IMHO).
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>> as someone who for the past 20 years has
>> bought his cars privately off friends and contacts at 3/7 years old it shows how
>> little I know of new vehicle prices.
>>
I've hardly ever bought a car newer than 15 years old. In fact looking back over my motoring history the youngest car I have ever bought was also my first - a 1954 Triumph Mayflower which I bought in 1966 for £10.
I just don't get the urge to spend tens of thousands of pounds on something that will lose nearly all its value in 10 years.
I've spent £5,000 on a Series II Landrover, which is much more fun than the Discovery at ten times the price, and will probably keep most of its value too.
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You've got your head screwed on proper Mr Pope IMO ... 60,000 squid for a jamjar, got to be having a larf!
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I tend to default to £2k as a guideline for buying my own cars. It seems to be a price at which you get something fairly presentable with a bit of life left in it, and for which you can get some money back if you move it on a couple of years later. Had some decent cars over the years around this price point which have been a joy to own: Golf 1.8T GTI, Volvo S60 2.0T, Mondeo TD, Fiesta Zetec mk4, Peugeot 306 D-Turbo, Peugeot 106 XSi. All tidy, reliable and not one of them ever let me down. Still see the Golf and Volvo around locally from time to time, and the Mondeo is now in Poland! :-)
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>> I tend to default to £2k as a guideline for buying my own cars.
I'm getting towards that now my Merc is nearing 9 yrs old, but I've had since 5mths.
I just can't be done with messing around with cars anymore so everything else in the family (4 cars) was bpught new.
I was reading (on PistonHeads I think) the other day of someone who bought an S60 like yours but ditched it afer the 3rd £500 bill in a few weeks!
At the moment one of ours has an intermittant and slow pressure loss in a half-worn tyre which is annoying me but I'll probably just buy a new tyre.
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>> I was reading (on PistonHeads I think) the other day of someone who bought an
>> S60 like yours but ditched it afer the 3rd £500 bill in a few weeks!
>>
Flexi pipe on the exhaust on my car is starting to make a noise like a rattly tensioner. Dick Turpin in the exhaust place quoted me £560+fitting for a £372 part. You need to shop around with an S60.
>> At the moment one of ours has an intermittant and slow pressure loss in a
>> half-worn tyre which is annoying me but I'll probably just buy a new tyre.
>>
Just replaced the two rear tyres on my lads Granny magnet. One tyre (Good Year) was starting to perish, the other (Avon) had a slow puncture. Both tyres were about half worn, rather than mess about I bought two Continentals to match the pair on the front.
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Land Rover Discovery 4 - New prices. I haven't a clue! - Alanovich
