When is a car more than just a car? and where can I buy one?
Are you not afraid that if someone leans on the car that it will crumple up like crisp packet?
I saw one and they’re so wafer thin with little safety features - is this not a concern for yourself or when you have your family in the car?
I’m saying it because I seem to attract all sorts of idiots on the road and things don’t seem to be improving out there ![]()
I was given a Sandero as a ‘courtesy car’ a couple of years ago while mine had a repair done.
Never again.
It felt very unstable at speeds above 58 mph, there was no feedback through the steering wheel (in fact it felt like an elastic band was making the connection between the rack & pinion), it was thin (winding the windows down made little difference to the audible road noise) and the real ‘thing’ was the back doors. The top corner is bent over in a curve to ‘blend’ into the roofline. But when you open the back doors and bend down to get something out of the back - the top corner becomes a lethal slicing device. Seriously, I escaped serious injury but only just. Mind your forehead, eyes and ears with this design classic.
Then when you really wanted a driving experience, you put your foot to the floor. And waited. And waited. And waited some more. Eventually, the clearly-rubber flywheel caught up and slowly moved you forwards. In the age of instant/zero-torque (with EMV’s) - this beauty was at the far end of the other side of the torque scale. Sometimes a bit of grunt can help get you out of danger, but not here, oh no. I was probably easily overtaken by a passing fart.
Never, never again.
That price is for a reason. You get what you pay for, etc.
I felt relieved when it was handed back to the insurance/courtesy company. I had a smile on my face watching it drive off.
Wow, none of that sounds good at all 
My biggest concern is that you’ll be seriously injured if (god forbid) you even had a “minor” accident and it doesn’t matter how good of a driver you think you are, it’s the other road users that concern me.
So, are you arguing that buying a new car is bad debt? Or good debt?
Or is buying a Dacia Sandaero the only car that qualifies as good debt?
I’m missing some logic here tbh. Not sure what point you are making now (that’s likely down to me, not you!)
If you buy a car for £13k it was worth a maximum of £13k at the time of that purchase. So now you are paying interest on £13k and I’d expect the car to depreciate. After 3 years you have paid £15k on something now worth (assuming you can sell it) £7k. You’ve spent £8k in total ignoring other costs and factors. £8k averages out at £222 per month - or about £555 a month gross (40% tax payer).
But is it a bad debt?
Given many people need a car to commute to work to earn money to afford food etc, surely a car is a good debt?
We won’t all be driving porsches, etc but where do you draw the line?
Well break even is £555 a month or c7,000 a year. (ignoring tax, insurance, parking, petrol, service, tyres, MOT, cleaning, congestion charge, parking fines). Anything over that is a win - but you do need to eat also.
You could afford to buy one cash in like less than 9 months of saving up.
My current car does that with cceleration and it doing nothing, pretty normal for small cars wiith the base model engine.
Sure I could buy a car cash, but given how low interest rates are I could finance a car at 2% and invest the cash I would have bought the car with at 4% therefore it is better take the loan
I would not get a car loan at that rate due to my real bad credit score and lack of history. (I have no credit history) But I suppose that could work for people.
(I’m a bit Dave Ramsey btw)
It’s a £6k car brand new, thats whats so amazing about it.
Can you please stop preaching at me and accept that different people have different needs?
I’m pleased you are happy with your car, I’m happy with mine, let’s leave it at that.
So you’re buying a car at 2% above its sticker price (per year), despite it depreciating during that time, on the assumption that the market returns more than 2% on your investment, which it may not…
Alternatively, you could buy the car with cash for its sticker price, maybe less if you haggle, and use the money you’d spend on a car payment on investments…![]()