A new car or not?

[Zak33]

I know its cars and bikes direction, but this thread belongs in here.

BECAUSE......every manufacturer is striving to get your dough....and its all done in a very round about way. Better economy, better safety, better environmental effects (read: less bad)

So....should you keep the old beast and spend more than she's worth every year on maintaining her?

Or use the money to get a new car?

I'd like each of you to think not just about your OWN car, but that of everybody you know. And when I say new....I mean a lot newer than yours. Not neccesssarily cutting edge showroom stuff, but summit way way newer than yours. That way we'll get both sides of all ages of argument.

Imagine you have a £500 Escort. And it costs £300 every year to keep it running.

Should you? Or should you buy a £5000 replacement cos it'll last a good few years longer.

Or a brand new one at £12000?

Cos every new car hs BILLIONS of pounds worth of engineering and design in it? Million Billion watts of energy to keep the factory open, all those new chemicals for Painting it, all the new plastics and the oil based products. It is a HUGE strain on the earths resources.

And yet.....an A reg Metro pumps out more stuff from its exhaust than a brand new Golf

So ...who's right?

[Knoxville]

This is very close to a discussion i had with my dad the other day, he's got a series 3 land rover with a 2.25 litre engine nothing huge like a v8 but at most he gets 25mpg from it and its cost him £300 so far this year to keep on the road, he loves it because he can work on it and maintain it himself but it'd cost much less to sell up and buy something a bit newer if only in fuel savings. He was determined that he didn't want a car though due to the safety aspect of it cos lets face it damn near anything on the roads today is gonna come off worse if he hits them. I tried to persuade him to have a diesel but he's not comfortable working on it himself. People just get used to what they've got and like to be safe in the knowledge that its all payed for and not a huge chunk of debt on the drive.

[Howard]

Many people with old cars simply can't afford to buy new ones. Or don't see the benefits if they're not spending thousands a year keeping it roadworthy.

[Zak33]

I agree on the "it costs a lot to buy a new car " theory....

but a new car has such cheap running costs for the first 3 years and is THEN worth about half what you paid for it......that sounds like a big drop UNTIL you're old car needs an engine.....and the labour to fit it.....etc etc......then the loss on a new car seems pitifull in comparison to the trouble and grief and MONEY to get the old one going again.

ANd Safety is a critical thing.....what value for your life.

You own a Citroen AZ and its worth £500 and yopu get hit by a Chav in his Nova and you all die but had you had a £9000 Golf you might well not just have survived but walked out!

What value life?

BUT......the killer is the money spent on new cars designs.....

Ask a big business what their overheads are on phones, electricity, customer care, insurance, photo copiers, stationery, heating, water, PC's etc.....

and then work it out for Ford UK! Imagine the SIZE of their photocopier paper bill! Forget everything else ...just picture their PETROL BILL!

Now......when you buy a new car....you just paid for all that. You might well need the customer care....but we are talking about over 1000 people just to organise a system strong enough to answer the phone, record your call and deal with your problem....there are MILLIONS of people in the new car industry...

can we let them all loose their jobs? Not dealers.....I mean FACTORIES! Welders, painters, machine operators...and now...programmers, IT people, designers, ....millions!

Should a manufacturer STOP production for ONE YEAR......ONE WHOLE year.....and let all their staff go?

Cos there's enough cars in the UK for the next 10 years!

If every single pre registered car, every single USED CAR on every forecourt was sold BEFORE production started again...

Planet Earth would kiss you all on the cheek

No more metal mining...no more rubber production...no more glass.....no more smelting, no more copper wire...

where is it all coming from guys?

[Knoxville]

From an enviromental point of view we should stop production of cars until we've exhausted our already plentiful supply, but we won't, there's far to many jobs supported by the industry of making new cars and theres always a chunk of the population that wants something new so aslong as theres a demand there's gonna be someone willing to cash in. On the safety issue though how much difference in a low speed collision is there gonna be between a brand new mk5 golf and a 3 year old golf thats already seen its fair share of depreciation and been worn in and a car thats lets face it the majority of people are more likely to buy as its had its years of dealer servicing and its lost the most value that it will for quite a while.

[Zak33]

On the safety issue though how much difference in a low speed collision is there gonna be between a brand new mk5 golf and a 3 year old golf thats already seen its fair share of depreciation

not much.....andthats a good arguement too.....but what I mean is SHOULD that punter buy a new one....the one with a 3 year old Golf?

Prob not......

but should a person with an F reg Astra that is just rotting away.....have a new cambelt, the sills welded up.....the disks changed with the pads, 2 CV joints, 2 new shock absorbers... a new exhaust from the down pipe all thew way back to the ...err...back etc etc.

Cos a lot of people do! And yet..maybe...maybe they are right to do so....cosmaking all those parts is WAY better on the environment that building a NEW GOLf, just so someone can buy it, part exchange a 3 year old car........to be sold to someone with a 6 year old car.....who part exchanges a 306 for the bloke with the knackered Astra to buy!

The chain reaction is driven by the new car.....if its sold, SOMEONE buys the older cars......and down that goes....to the next user.....etc etc...

and not enough cars are being scrapped.....and when they ARe scrapped.....its just to rust away. The parts are used for the other few F reg Astra's .....they aint smelted down ! Well...not often.....SO....

we have a load of landfill

There are sufficient cars out there to do the job for YEARS!

But should we carry on with out circa 1997 cars..not too old....not young tho ?

[joshwa]

It gets to a certain point with old cars, where I don't think they're worth repairing, eg an H reg Renault 5 - that needs £900 spent on it to fix the engine or gearbox etc, isn't really worth it - it may as well be given to a garage or someone who can get it running for much less - and the person who's car it is should just spend £800 on another old bangor - but perhaps one that's a couple of years newer... unfortunately some people would spend the £900 the get their car fixed... even if it's only going to last another 1 or 2 years... and cost £300 every year to keep running...

There must be a sweet spot somewhere in the life of a car, whereby it's VERY good value, eg £2-4K but it's going to last 4/5 years with no money spent on repairs... then after 4/5 years you can spend the same amount again on a car that isn't going to break down...

But saying this, surely it's better for the environment if you buy a car and then keep it for 10-15 years that way you only stop using it when it's completely unfixable...

[turkster]

Interesting thread. I was just thinking about this the other day.

I am nearly sure that the amount of energy required to put a new car on the road causes more pollution than continuing to run an old car with high pollutin rates for many years. In fact you could brobably run a 10 for a shocking amount of years before it caused as much pollution as making a brand new SUV.

There is nothing wrong with spending £900 fixing an old car, after all that is also providing jobs for people. Look at classic cars they cost a good bit to keep running but peopple still run them.

I think probably one of the main reasons people buy new cars is because of the status involved. How much better do you look driving an Audi A3 than a 92 Ford Fiesta? A friend of mine wants to buy a flashy 4x4 mainly because it will impress the engineers on site. As archaeologists it would have some practical benifit but that is not his main concern. These things cost a lot to begin with and use a lot of fuel.
Like most things today the car business is driven by capitalism not common sense.

[Crazy Cricket]

To focus on the environmental side of things, and forgive the shaggy nature of this post, I need sleep!

As far as the environment goes, in a nut shell all cars are a bad thing.

If as 99% of the cars on the road yours uses a reciprocating i.c engine, it's at best just over 30% thermally efficient. Be it a blown chain driven Frazer Nash, or a shiny new H.D.I derv.

Electric cars still need power stations, and even renewable sources of electricity not only provide a smidge of power, but involve heavy industry in their making. Combine this with the lead acid batteries they require...

Bio fuel, seems like a good idea, certainly clean, but just think if all the cars in the western world alone used it, we would have to turn half the land on earth over to sunflower production!

Fuel cells the future? Well not quite, you still have the big other problem, a lone person using a ton of car and a lot of road space to get from a to b, which are quite often far apart. There's an ever increasing amount of cars on the road, there's a steady increase in the amount of roads.

It's simply not sustainable in the long run.

And that I feel is the real problem, the long run. Politicians can't seem to see beyond the next election, when what we need to do is build a plan for the next 100 years.

All they ever seem to do is punish car ownership with ever increasing taxes, with out offering an alternative, good for the coffers, which is why they do it, but not the planet. Car ownership should not be punished, but rather replaced.

We need to look at the wider picture, cleaner power, lot's of investment into hot fusion research, the only real feasible clean electricity resource, a working mass transport system, replacement of the long commute with housing and areas of employment within easy reach of each other, and that's not going to even start in the space between two elections.

And that's just cars, the A reg metro in it's 20 odd years on earth hasn't sput out a fraction of the pollution a budget airline does in a day...

[iMc]

Id love to be able to afford a new car. I own a Citroen AX and am i student. To get it through the MOT this year cost just over £200 (entirely new front brake discs, rubbers, pipes etc, new lambda sensor, and some other niggly bits). Now realistically its only going to last one more MOT max, so thats hopefully at least 18 months more out of it.

When that time comes im gonna have to make the decision of buying another old, cheap car to last 1/2 years or buy a new one and be prepared to pay back the money over a few years. Its a big dilemma but as it stands right now i cant justify spending £6000+ on a new (safer) car.

What im trying to say is that people in my position cant really think about safety and the environment as its hard enough just being on the road, and trying to stay on it, in a crap car (with insurance and tax etc).

[Honoop]

I like this conversation - because I dont think there is a wrong or a right answer. Having seen both sides of the arguement in that in the past 7 years I have owned all of the following:
D Reg(87) Nova 1.2
Y Reg(83) Golf GTI Cabrio
M Reg(95) Escort
51 Plate (01) Focus 1.8 TDI
03 Plate Fiesta 1.4 Zetec
From the personal financial point of view I started at the bottom and worked up, my first car cost me about £850 was cheap to run/insure etc and I was at college so it served my purposes. My current car on the other hand is economical, has a 4* ncap rating, is even CHEAPER to insure than my first car (cos of NCB) but costs me more - because its Financed, but I earn more so owning a new car is a luxury I like to have and is something I aspired to. My Fiesta is also better on the environment because it has lower emissions due to being Unleaded (as I know all modern cars are but an 83 Golf GTI isnt) and Ford go to great lengths to ensure that as much stuff in their cars can be recycled as possible.
I know that the factories are BAD and are raping our planet of its health - but it doesnt stop the majority of people off of buying a new(er) car. And there is no way that Mr Ford/Vauxhall/VW etc is going to stop from making them - because otherwise he is poor and no better than the rest of us!!
The truth of it is that you cant win - you have to do what serves your purpose because there are so many arguements for and against it. Government reward you for having a newer eco-friendly car by making your car tax cheaper - but Friends of the Earth curse you for assisting the factories in polluting our lovely planet.
So if you want to do the best thing - Walk, but where's the fun in that??

[Joel]

i agree that it works both ways, because the old clapped out car, gets taked to a scrapyard, and yes occasiionally some bloke might need a left rear bumper wingnut at some poit, they are likley to be sat rotting for years, so which is better on the environment, the new car thats used up a lot of resourced to make, but probably very efficantly, or the heap(s) of sh*te that used to be cars, sat seeping oil/fuel/rust/genral mank into the ground its stood upon.

i think i would prefer an older car rather than a new one, and i think its why a lot of people prefer older cars, is the fact, their often easier to repair, parts are easy to get via scrappies/motor shops, and a lot of people prefer the ease of fixing it themselves, cheaper, and more fun, if your that type of person.

personally i hate the people who buy a new car every year, its not so bad with the new reg system, but the old one, i knew a guy who bought a new car every year, just so he could have the latest reg. thats just wasteful