Whats the formula to buying the right car for you?
In a word - complicated.
I make a shortlist of cars and work out the cost with all the desired extras (e.g. parking sensors). Then I rate them against my buying criteria. Each of my criteria has a weighting from 1 to 10.
Each car has a total score consisting of (rating x criteria value).
A worked Example:
Criteria are Purchase & Running Costs (8 points), Comfort (8 points), Looks (7 points), Practicality (6 points), Performance (5 Points).
(I am not interested in image, handling etc, but I accept that other people will inwant to include them if they do the same exercise)
My shortlist could be a BMW 320d and a Ford Mondeo 2.0. I score it as follows:
Costs (8 points), BMW 5 - Mondeo 8 (so, BMW 5 x 8 = 40, Mondeo 8 x 8 = 64)
Comfort (8 points), BMW 6 - Mondeo 8 (so, BMW 6 x 8 = 48, Mondeo 8 x 8 = 64)
Looks (7 points), BMW 7 - Mondeo 7 (so, BMW 7 x 7 = 49, Mondeo 7 x 7 = 49)
Practicality (7 points), BMW 6 - Mondeo 9 (so, BMW 6 x 7 = 42, Mondeo 7 x 9 = 63)
Performance (5 points), BMW 8 - Mondeo 6 (so, BMW 5 x 8 = 40, Mondeo 5 x 6 = 30)
So BMW get a total of 219 points, and the Mondeo 270 points. A clear majority (ooh! Topical!)
Of course you can have as many cars as you like in the shortlist, and extra criteria. If you have a spreadsheet application on your PC, doing all the calculations is easy.
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