Where have all the cheap cars gone?
Discussion
There's been a few of us looking for a car of reasonable size and 'quality', a bit of moaning at prices.
There was news this week that the 'most scrapped car' is the Ford Focus.
It seems to me that we are scrapping a lot of 'not very old' cars.
Looking ar 'howmanyleft' for a few models where it's easy to identify say cars built in 2006-2008, or 2008 to 2010 etc, it seems that most models are 50% gone in 10 years, and 90% gone in 15 or so.
I find this interesting.
Is there any better data avaialble?
It kind of makes all the angst about EV battery life a little irrelevant? Maybe, separate topic!
Essentially, cheap motoring is going down the pan.
There was news this week that the 'most scrapped car' is the Ford Focus.
It seems to me that we are scrapping a lot of 'not very old' cars.
Looking ar 'howmanyleft' for a few models where it's easy to identify say cars built in 2006-2008, or 2008 to 2010 etc, it seems that most models are 50% gone in 10 years, and 90% gone in 15 or so.
I find this interesting.
Is there any better data avaialble?
It kind of makes all the angst about EV battery life a little irrelevant? Maybe, separate topic!
Essentially, cheap motoring is going down the pan.
I was debating this year on upgrading to a nice 10-11 plate ford focus petrol titanium (none of that ecoboom rubbish) but the going rate for them is still somewhere around £2.5k. Seems a lot for a 13 year old ford with generally over 100k miles on, so I've decided to run the shed 106 still!
Think you have to be lucky to drop on nowadays.
Think you have to be lucky to drop on nowadays.
OutInTheShed said:
There's been a few of us looking for a car of reasonable size and 'quality', a bit of moaning at prices.
There was news this week that the 'most scrapped car' is the Ford Focus.
It seems to me that we are scrapping a lot of 'not very old' cars.
Looking ar 'howmanyleft' for a few models where it's easy to identify say cars built in 2006-2008, or 2008 to 2010 etc, it seems that most models are 50% gone in 10 years, and 90% gone in 15 or so.
I find this interesting.
Is there any better data avaialble?
It kind of makes all the angst about EV battery life a little irrelevant? Maybe, separate topic!
Essentially, cheap motoring is going down the pan.
15 years life sounds about right for cheap-ish mainstream cars.There was news this week that the 'most scrapped car' is the Ford Focus.
It seems to me that we are scrapping a lot of 'not very old' cars.
Looking ar 'howmanyleft' for a few models where it's easy to identify say cars built in 2006-2008, or 2008 to 2010 etc, it seems that most models are 50% gone in 10 years, and 90% gone in 15 or so.
I find this interesting.
Is there any better data avaialble?
It kind of makes all the angst about EV battery life a little irrelevant? Maybe, separate topic!
Essentially, cheap motoring is going down the pan.
It's not surprising that the "most scrapped" car in 2024 is one of the best selling cars from ~15 years ago.
I don't think this is an issue of the car being able to last >10yrs. Instead it comes down to the costs involved anytime there's an insurance claim against a vehicle - Backorder on parts, the insane price of hire cars and then all the admin involved means that insurance companies write off cars so easily nowadays. If that's something like a C63 that's written off due to cosmetic issues then of course someone is likely to buy it and repair with used parts, respray etc but many less people are willing to do that with an 11yr old entry level focus and so off they go to the scrappers.
It's not just cars like the Focus.
BMW 320D SE, sold from 06 to 08, 90+% are either gone or SORN now.
Looking at the graph for the number of them taxed, attrition is fierce from about 11 years old.
Alfa 159 similar, sold from 06 to 09 in fair numbers, 95% gone now.
There's not many models of any marque which sold in big numbers for just a couple of years, to give that data of end of life vs age.
I was wondering if that data is accessible anywhere else.
Is there a graph of the number of e.g. 08 plate Minis on the road vs time?
The thing is, in today's market it's cars which would be £8k or more on the forecourt, yet they have a 50% chance of only lasting another two years?
Somebody made a fair point about write offs after prangs, surely not that many people are having accidents in these cars? But again, I'd be interested in the stats.
I feel that many people are asking a lot of money for cars with only a few years or a few tens of thousands of miles left in them.
I may be in danger of convincing myself I'd be getting much better value coughing up for something younger.
BMW 320D SE, sold from 06 to 08, 90+% are either gone or SORN now.
Looking at the graph for the number of them taxed, attrition is fierce from about 11 years old.
Alfa 159 similar, sold from 06 to 09 in fair numbers, 95% gone now.
There's not many models of any marque which sold in big numbers for just a couple of years, to give that data of end of life vs age.
I was wondering if that data is accessible anywhere else.
Is there a graph of the number of e.g. 08 plate Minis on the road vs time?
The thing is, in today's market it's cars which would be £8k or more on the forecourt, yet they have a 50% chance of only lasting another two years?
Somebody made a fair point about write offs after prangs, surely not that many people are having accidents in these cars? But again, I'd be interested in the stats.
I feel that many people are asking a lot of money for cars with only a few years or a few tens of thousands of miles left in them.
I may be in danger of convincing myself I'd be getting much better value coughing up for something younger.
Obviously it varies massively regionally but the cost of labour and so repairs can make a cheap car uneconomical to repair pretty easily. Just a few wear and tear suspension bits, throw in something like a bit of play in a steering rack and the few hundred from the scrapper is often the route.
With the Alfa 159 I'd guess it'll be the front subframe that'll have caused a decent chunk of them to be scrapped. Fairly expensive to replace or sort properly so off to the scrapper it goes. Shame really as I really liked the 159 I had.
People can't/won't fix them, simply seeing them as a washing machine, bin it when it breaks. Though these days if you want cheap then Facebook marketplace/Gumtree are the two more popular stomping grounds for such things, though you have to through the postings with a fine tooth comb.
People can't/won't fix them, simply seeing them as a washing machine, bin it when it breaks. Though these days if you want cheap then Facebook marketplace/Gumtree are the two more popular stomping grounds for such things, though you have to through the postings with a fine tooth comb.
OutInTheShed said:
Somebody made a fair point about write offs after prangs, surely not that many people are having accidents in these cars? But again, I'd be interested in the stats.
It doesn't have to be a prang, at 15 years old many cars are only one failed electrical component or a lost key from being scrapped. My Alfa 166 V6 was a great car until the clutch and DMF went, and suddenly spending £1500 repairing a slightly rusty Alfa didn't seem worthwhile and so it got recycled. If the ECU goes on my Saab (they tend to fail from heat exposure after a decade or two), it'll probably be the end of that too.
There's a fair bit of data that shows that both the average age and the average life of cars in the UK has been rising pretty consistently for at least the last 30 years. The PH grumblies like to think that modern cars are too complicated for their own good, will be scrapped after 6 years because they need a new headlight that'll cost a million pounds, and that the late 90s was the pinnacle of automotive reliability, but the data shows it's just not true. Any lack of cheap cars is nothing to do with there being fewer older cars on the road. I'd suggest it's more to so with higher interest rates and the inflated cost of new cars generally meaning that some people are getting off the PCP merry-go round, but unlike everybody on PH (who have the money to buy new cars cash but prefer to invest it in one of their portfolio of businesses for guaranteed double digit returns), most of them don't have a lot of spare cash and so look for a cheap car. The additional demand at the lower end of the market means they're no longer all that cheap. And the fact that they're worth more means that they are economical to repair for longer and so the average age/life will probably increase further as a result.
Roger Irrelevant said:
There's a fair bit of data that shows that both the average age and the average life of cars in the UK has been rising pretty consistently for at least the last 30 years. The PH grumblies like to think that modern cars are too complicated for their own good, will be scrapped after 6 years because they need a new headlight that'll cost a million pounds, and that the late 90s was the pinnacle of automotive reliability, but the data shows it's just not true. Any lack of cheap cars is nothing to do with there being fewer older cars on the road. I'd suggest it's more to so with higher interest rates and the inflated cost of new cars generally meaning that some people are getting off the PCP merry-go round, but unlike everybody on PH (who have the money to buy new cars cash but prefer to invest it in one of their portfolio of businesses for guaranteed double digit returns), most of them don't have a lot of spare cash and so look for a cheap car. The additional demand at the lower end of the market means they're no longer all that cheap. And the fact that they're worth more means that they are economical to repair for longer and so the average age/life will probably increase further as a result.
Lot of truth in that.The average age at scrapping is now 17 years. 06 plate.
But that's very limited data if you don't know the distribution.
Likewise the average age of cars being 9 or something is a mix of brand new right through to veteran.
Just to really mess with the data, there's an awful lot of SORN for some models
There's some graphs here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/vehicle-l...
There are some graphs 2/3 the way down showing age distribution.
Kind of suggests most cars are scrapped in a fairly narrow age range of 13 to 17?
But many diesels are gone younger.
OutInTheShed said:
It's not just cars like the Focus.
BMW 320D SE, sold from 06 to 08, 90+% are either gone or SORN now.
I'm not too surprised, that era of 320D had the N47 engine that is known for suffering cam-chain issues which are expensive to fix because someone at BMW decided putting the chain on the back of the engine was a good idea! BMW 320D SE, sold from 06 to 08, 90+% are either gone or SORN now.
So once they are 15 years or so it's more likely to happen, and more likely to be uneconomic.
My daily is a pretty worthless Cat N 2005 330i that still drives great so I might as well just keep it!
Mr Tidy said:
OutInTheShed said:
It's not just cars like the Focus.
BMW 320D SE, sold from 06 to 08, 90+% are either gone or SORN now.
I'm not too surprised, that era of 320D had the N47 engine that is known for suffering cam-chain issues which are expensive to fix because someone at BMW decided putting the chain on the back of the engine was a good idea! BMW 320D SE, sold from 06 to 08, 90+% are either gone or SORN now.
So once they are 15 years or so it's more likely to happen, and more likely to be uneconomic.
My daily is a pretty worthless Cat N 2005 330i that still drives great so I might as well just keep it!
I know of one still going strong at 195k miles, lots of body electrics issues though, and some structural rust.
I have a bet with the owner that he'll not make the 200k miles badge.
The engine is the best bit TBH.
I guess there were certain genres of cars of that era which are killed by miles as much as by time?
Repmobiles which did 60k before their first MOT, high mileage commuters, drivers with a tendency to drive to Brittany on a weekend etc.
If you get close to 200k miles, you can't complain IMHO, unless it's a Cairo taxi or similar.
OutInTheShed said:
It's not just cars like the Focus.
BMW 320D SE, sold from 06 to 08, 90+% are either gone or SORN now.
Gone or SORN or possibly living its final years in Eastern Europe. BMW 320D SE, sold from 06 to 08, 90+% are either gone or SORN now.
I bought an ex-demo 320d in 2008 and ran it for six years - it was a really good car.
But a lot of 320ds had a tough life, clocking up big mileages as repmobiles in the first few years, and then being run on a shoestring by cheapskate owners as they got older. Snapped timing chains killed a lot of them off, as already mentioned.
Regardless of brand, there is not much appetite for a 15+ year old diesel car and all the stuff that can go wrong with them (turbo, DMF, EGR) especially with ULEZ in London and other clean air zones elsewhere in big cities.
15 years is roughly the lifespan of a modern car. It’s weird for middle-aged guys like me to see cars like the Mk1 Focus and E90 3-series in scrapyards (or on the banger racing track), as I still think of them as “quite new”. But they’re old cars now, and most of them are life-expired.
I think it's lifestyle choice for most people. Nobody wants to be seen in an old knacker these days. The latest brand new SUV just fits their image better.
We live in a throw away society.
Old cars make more sense for those people who do their own maintenance as the cost of garage services has rocketed just like anything else. Years ago most people would've been quite happy to tinker with stuff at home but they generally can't be bothered anymore. It's easier to just move on to the next lease or PCP and forget about it.
I love to see old cars on the road that have been looked after. They're much more interesting and I'm sure they have plenty of life left in them.
We live in a throw away society.
Old cars make more sense for those people who do their own maintenance as the cost of garage services has rocketed just like anything else. Years ago most people would've been quite happy to tinker with stuff at home but they generally can't be bothered anymore. It's easier to just move on to the next lease or PCP and forget about it.
I love to see old cars on the road that have been looked after. They're much more interesting and I'm sure they have plenty of life left in them.
OutInTheShed said:
The thing is, in today's market it's cars which would be £8k or more on the forecourt, yet they have a 50% chance of only lasting another two years?
That’s the thing that’s bonkers about prices now - if costs are anything like that, you might as well lease a new one and save yourself a lot of angst.Wonder what’s happening with used prices in the rest of Europe these days? They used to be much higher than ours.
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