Are you hanging onto your car longer than usual?

[Hugo Stiglitz v2]

I'm on my second lease car. It'll be final one then I'm switching back to a old used car.

I would not buy a new or nearly new car now due to:
- Nanny tech
- The hideous new prices compared to the quality.

Edit - the nanny tech is a real killer for me. I drove a new work car last week. It bonged just over 30mph EVERY TIME. I constantly glanced down, even when I thought 'that's the mph warner'.

On my lease car i can turn off lane assist, etc etc etc but then on ignition restart it all reactivates. So I've given up.

Edited by Hugo Stiglitz v2 on Saturday 30th November 09:11

[Paul Thorpe evo]

As with many products, manufacturers had a good excuse to put prices up c RPI in 2021,22,23.... which meant 20%+ increase for same car even though their actual costs may have only gone up a few % in those 3 years.

The biggest disgrace was Mobile SIM card suppliers increasing 20% over same period when their fixed costs had barely changed !!

Public are wiseing up to it on cars, esp if using their own money to buy rather than the (no more than 'borrowing the car') lease/chunky balloon finance route.

I'm unlikely to add/buy any more next few years.

[Noesph]

I have had my 09 Twingo GT for 12 years now, or a third of my life. (It will be on 123456 miles tomorrow or Monday. I bought it with 30K on it).

The trouble is it's not worth much anymore, but everything on it works. And it's never let me down. Another side of it is that I know the car like the back of my hand. I know its mechanical and electrical systems, I know how it is put together in my head. It's pretty old school in its design too, so it's pretty easy to repair and maintain. To keep it going by an amateur / home mechanic. It's hard to give that up.

I do think I would be genuinely gutted when it dies. I've had it for such a big chunk of my life. (I've gone through 5 different jobs, 3 homes and 2 relationships while I've had the Twingo). When I moved out from my parents, I moved out using the Twingo. When I bought my first house, I moved pretty much all the smaller stuff in the Twingo. It's been on holidays all around the UK and Ireland.

Because it feels like such a part of the family, and we have had it so long. I think I would be more likely to try and keep going than the average owner. (Even if it doesn't really make financial sense, we just have a lot of history together).

(I do think it helps that I drive different cars and vans through work though. So I still get to try out different cars without any cost to me).

Edited by Noesph on Saturday 30th November 14:56

[Gtamaddog]

I've had my E46 330d for 11 years and I have done nearly 120k miles in it during my ownership. It is on 212k miles now and I'd be happy to keep driving it indefinitely, I don't really care about the age or mileage of a car if it runs well, but the rust it eating away at it, especially the driver side rear arch and the driver side jack points. I can deal with a fair amount of mechanical work, but I have no experience with welding or paintwork. I want to keep it indefinitely because I've owned it a third of my life and it has been part of many family occasions (sentimental value), and I genuinely like driving it (it is a manual). The problem is I no longer want to drive it in the rain or when there is salt on the road, so it sits on the drive a lot of the time waiting for a dry day (seemingly quite rare this year) which seems like a waste of what has been a great car. It isn't the model that all the classic car hunters will want in future, but I'd be pretty damn sad to send it off. On Facebook I've come across a local chap who does welding and part of me wants to ask what sort of cost I would be looking at to weld in a new wheel arch and tidy up the jack points, but even as a one-man band I feel like he would throw a price at me that I couldn't justify.

I bought an E92 335d about 18 months ago and while it is a pretty decent car now that I've put new shocks and suspension arms on it, I just don't feel as at home in it as I do in the E46 and the autotragic box bothers me at times. It is my first automatic and maybe the way it behaves is normal for a box of its vintage, or maybe it is on its way out and I'm looking at a big bill somewhere down the line. I can't see the E92 staying anywhere near as long as the E46.

I have recently had fleeting thoughts about getting rid of both cars and getting something a few years newer than the E92, but petrol and manual (possibly not a BMW), and that would be a car I'd keep until the wheels fall off and I'm forced in to an EV. However, such thoughts instantly remind me of how my dad sold his E28 525i manual many years ago and has always wished he had kept hold of it despite having had a number of good cars since then.