Am I right to conclude that people have lots of money
Yes. We are all rich because we stopped paying ex-pats winter fuel allowances.
and that a car is old at 14 years of age?
God yes. Old, potentially financially ruinous if it is anything remotely interesting (i.e. not a Nissan Micra), probably rusty and will need constant work.
If we turned the clock back say twenty years would the results have been the same then?
Well, if the moany lot who go on about how they could buy a house for £3500 back in 1976 and that was only 2x their annual wage are to be believed, you all had
much more money back then. And a 14 year old car would have been crushed already after the engine had died, the chassis had rotted clean through and it had left you stranded on the road-side 50 times in the last 30 days
In reality, though:
In 1996 I owned (briefly) a 1978 Austin Allegro; an 18 year old car. It was hopelessly knackered, rusty, leaked enough water through the corners of the windscreen to fill the footwells, the hydro.. I won't call it what we called it.. the Hydragas suspension was shot, 4th gear synchro was dead, and it wouldn't start unless you bounced it downhill.
By contrast, the 2003 Toyota MR2 I used to own (so now 16 years old) is still on the road - it isn't rusty, the engine didn't skip a beat despite having a
hard life on track (until very recently when IIRC it's most recent owner killed it outright), doesn't leak etc etc..
Cars are much better. People have more disposable income *or* are more apt to take finance (ignoring the statistical outliers that are the curmudgeonly old buggers who hang out here
) and prefer their cars to be like their kitchen white goods - they work, and when they are a few years old and there is a risk they might not work, they change them for new ones that don't have a risk of leaving them stranded without clean knickers. IMHO, anyway.
Author
Topic: Price of cars and newness (Read 5011 times)