Ha my wife has just spent a lot of money restoring her Triumph Stag. Mind you she has owned it for nearly 50years, although it is not used daily. The thing she points out to me is that if someone smashes eg the wing, she can buy a new one, have it fitted and match painted for a quarter of what a similar smashed wing on a new Citroen C8 would cost. To which I reply, well why don’t you use it to go shopping. I’m losing.🙃
gallois wrote:
she can buy a new one, have it fitted and match painted
She can, but only for as long as new-old-stock are available or someone somewhere is making seriously high-quality replacements. Most reproduction body parts for Triumphs are junk and just won’t fit properly. Of course you can buy a ‘good’ wing from a scrap car, but eventually the supply of those will dry up. My Spitfire was much more numerous than her Stag, and even on Spitfires I’d not like to be hunting round for donor bodywork these days.
The mechanical aspects are much more easily dealt with.
At rhe moment I think she can get most parts through the Stag owners club. But you are right, some things are becoming more difficult to get and that’s her argument.🙂
Peter wrote:
We will never see a nice little practical hatchback which is electric (VW Golf, etc). And because size “scales” usefully in 3D, electric cars tend to be big because everything gets easier.
This is a strange statement. I can think of lots of existing electric hatchbacks: Renault Zoe, Nissan Leaf, VW ID3, Seat Cupra, Fiat 500E, VW eGolf, Peugeot e-208, Opel Corsa-e, Mazda MX-30, etc.
Those are more in the ‘supermini’ category than proper hatchbacks, but of course I cannot be sure what @Peter meant.
The VW eGolf is of course a proper hatchback, but then the range is extremely compromised – marketing figure of 144 miles. The power/weight/space compromise is obvious and (I think) makes his point.
The tiny electric car is workable, because the very short range and lack of useful load are not only acceptable but inherent in the use case. The much bigger car is workable, because as stated it scales in 3D and bigger = easier. The hard one to do would appear to be something like a Golf, where it’s still not very big but people expect five proper seats, good luggage space, 300+ mile range, etc.
@alioth, the reason my direct report drives his (electric) car to work every week day is because he needs to be here to do his job and earn a living, in his case meaning $700 per day gross. The fact that the electricity to power his car is provided free by others is a side issue. The free charger is BTW quite slow, to the extent that he gets only a bit more than needed for his commute every day. However by Friday he has enough to get though the weekend. It’s just fun and games.
Daily driver cars are just a tool. There was a time as a relative kid when I had a series of Alfa Romeos. That was fun, and oddly enough my plane has a connection to them through a guy that owned it for decades. But in 2022 they are just overpriced Fiats made in Frosinone, east of Rome. I still have one hobby car, it gets 10.5 mpg but isn’t driven much.
I didn’t buy a new car until I was about 40 and willing to accept the depreciation that applied – prior to that my used Alfa 75 3.0 cost $7000 when 5 years old, having cost the original owner from whom I bought it $25K. Used seemed like a better way to go. Then at 40 I needed something very reliable, very quickly and found an $18K retail car that I liked for $13K new, on Thanksgiving Day, the US holiday that is traditionally when the new models arrive. I drove it for 45K miles, then sold it to a guy at work for $10K. That seemed good so since then I’ve been buying similar new ones which I buy discounted, drive to roughly 160 or 170K miles, then sell fast and cheap to a kid after I’ve already bought the replacement. It works out more or less OK over 12 years, the monthly depreciation cost is about $150 or $200 (I pay cash for the car initially). All the rest of my monthly bills are about that amount it seems, ‘everything’ is $200 a month, so it’s one of many monthly costs and not an outstanding one. At the moment we’re also spending about $400 a month on gasoline, but again this is not a major issue in relation to having a car that does everything I might need it to do, with little to no planning or forethought – which is my priority.
I did buy my wife’s little convertible used in 2011. It was $9K with 18K miles, has 75K mikes now and is worth about $6K. So I guess part of me is still playing the old game 
The hard one to do would appear to be something like a Golf, where it’s still not very big but people expect five proper seats, good luggage space, 300+ mile range, etc.
Exactly. Little electric cars have basically no useful range but that is OK for the “mission profile” That’s why I say they work ok. They also charge at home easily, overnight. And you don’t need a charger, which costs a load of money, not to mention £500+ for an electrician to install it, and you do need an electrician if you want to apply for the EV grant 
(nice bit of trade protection/lobbying there). The electrician will refuse doing the work if the existing wiring does not comply with current regs (more ££££ to be had – a real test of the customer’s env credentials ). A proper big charger needs 3 phase … £5k for a 5m run, which by regs has to be underground now. I have pre-wired the house for that but don’t need it right now. And they are feasible in numbers, because you can charge them within the typical household average allowance (some 10-20kW) which would absolutely not support a street full of Teslas doing any mileage.
The stuff about types of cars to impress (or p1ss off) the neighbours depends on the social stratum where you revolve. Not far from here is a £1400/year “tennis / health club / gym” place, where the entry level is a brand new one of these (which is also the entry level for any £5k/term private school)
and if you want to make a statement about your environmental credentials (despite burning vast amounts of energy everywhere else) then the entry level is a Porsche Taycan. Gosh, just googled it, it uses 800V internally. The mechanics working on these need rubber gloves When I was 13 I was building pirate radio transmitters and we used to power the output stage (2×807) from 700V DC. One proposal was to use the electric railway supply (700V DC) but we backed off that – got too scared. The Taycan accelerates incredibly fast. I can’t help being amused when I see the drivers of these; most are so obviously not earning the money. Actually I meant to say they are not doing a job which pays enough No idea how many of these cars are bought on credit, but probably most since here almost all cars further down are bought on credit, and disposed off by the leasing company after the 3 year term… hence a lot of cheap used cars.
Except in the current bubble used cars are not cheap. You can sell some rare cars for what you paid for them a year or two ago. Lead times for cars are sometimes very long, presumably due to the chip shortage, which is largely the result of obscene car maker “supply chain management” practices (another story).
Those examples show more linear depreciation than would be seen in the UK market. The UK market has nearly all of the depreciation in the first half of the car’s life, most of it loaded into the first few years – for this reason (and because it is when company car fleets dispose of them) three years old is a popular timepoint. I prefer six to eight, as the price has really started to tumble and these days the difference between a three year old car and seven year old one is minimal. It is often said that you lose up to a third of the value of a new car the moment you drive it off the dealer’s forecourt.
My CR-V listed at something like £24k new in 2009. When I bought it seven years later with ~75k miles on it, it was £7k. Previous owners therefore took about £200 a month in depreciation – totalling some ~70% of the new price – but again that was not linear and the first owner took by far the most. I will take less than £60 a month depreciation (10 years’ use, no resale value) but probably less than that because when it approaches end of life I will likely get ~£1k for it selling when I know the next MoT test will throw an uneconomical-to-repair problem. Here I am helped by the fact that any car with a valid MoT (our safety ticket) has a certain minimum value – probably around £500. At the very bottom of the market values are determined mostly by how many months MoT there are to run on the assumption it’ll fail the next one in a costly way. Again fortunately for me, there is no shortage of young drivers without much money who don’t understand this part of the market.
I find the used market works well for me and I am not enthusiastic about changes that might lead to higher used prices and shorter overall vehicle lives.
The UK market has nearly all of the depreciation in the first half of the car’s life, most of it loaded into the first few years –
With one prominent exception: old Landrover Defender … some of the well maintained at around ten years old are back to a level near former selling price new.
The car financing here (I work above a big dealership so I get to hear a lot) works on the basis of the first 3 years’ payments absorbing the depreciation over those 3 years.
The finance company does well out of it anyway because they bought the car at roughly retail minus 25%. So the profit is guaranteed.
Does anybody know how the battery life risk is accounted for on electric car financing?
