The cost of running a Supercar. £30/mile !!!
Discussion
I'm one of the many, who, unless I win the lottery, can only dream about owning a Supercar. A McLaren P1 has popped up on Collecting Cars website for auction. Mileage 3,780. Service cost so far? Circa £120,000. Maybe this has been covered by warranty, but when you look at the service history, it looks like an extremely fragile car. Count me out on the lottery win then. Think I'll build up my own kit car for a fraction of that.
DRZ said:
It used to be quite a bit more, plus the new battery is half the weight and a little bit more powerful...
Yes I'm not sure if this was just a replacement of the OEM spec or the upgrade was also performed. The paperwork on the ad said the hybrid system was malfunctioning. I couldn't read the fine details on this screen but if you go on the Collecting Cars site and search for Mclaren P1 you'll find the car, the paperwork is all on there under the photos. robinessex said:
I'm one of the many, who, unless I win the lottery, can only dream about owning a Supercar. A McLaren P1 has popped up on Collecting Cars website for auction. Mileage 3,780. Service cost so far? Circa £120,000. Maybe this has been covered by warranty, but when you look at the service history, it looks like an extremely fragile car. Count me out on the lottery win then. Think I'll build up my own kit car for a fraction of that.
I think the P1 would probably be considered a Hypercar, they're considerably more expensive to buy than your average Supercar, and with more cutting-edge tech used in lower volume parts, also more expensive to run. The Bugatti Veyron is also rather pricey to keep on the road, as a similar car. You could buy a 'regular' supercar and expect it to cost an order of magnitude less to run.Secondly, car maintenance costs have both a time and a mileage component; so if you buy a car and then don't drive it, the 'per mile' cost works out higher. It's really a cost per year than per mile though, as it wouldn't clock up at that rate if you did more miles. Simple solution, buy a car to drive, not to hoard.
This leads into the fact that the P1, being a then cutting-edge hybrid, has a known issue where if it's left parked for any length of time it needs to be on charge to keep the hybrid battery conditioned; if not, you get the aforementioned £100k bill to replace it. However as a proportion of the car's value, it's actually a lot better than an ex-colleague of mine, whose Mk2 Honda Insight needed a new hybrid battery which cost about £3k, or about the same as the car was worth. If you'd offered him a battery for a "mere" 10% of his car's value, he'd have jumped at it!
Of course, a rare hypercar often goes up in value, unlike an old Insight. If you'd had a P1 from new you'd be about £500k up in value now, or about £60k/year, or about five times the mentioned costs. So it would be just as reasonable to say the car was costing minus £120/mile to run. Harry M's Zonda was also pricey to keep, but ended up costing him less than nothing to own overall.
So yeah, you should definitely do some research if you win the lottery; even if you want a 200mph supercar, there are plenty out there that won't throw six-figure bills. It's also helpful to find a good independent, e.g. V Engineering are the people to go for for P1s in particular and McLarens in general, and will keep your car in a better condition for less money than the main dealers.
The fact that one particular example of one particular hypercar racked up six figures in maintenance over 8 years doesn't mean that every supercar is so costly to keep.
On kit cars, I did start off considering them and was advised by someone familiar with the scene not to overlook the value of doors that keep the rain on the outside, heating that works, cooling, demisting etc etc. Basically his feeling was that many people spend a lot of money building a kit car which then does few miles because it's not really very usable. And as Andrew Frankel puts it, the enjoyment you get from a car is how enjoyable it is to drive per se, multiplied by how many opportunities you have to actually drive it. I'm not saying they don't have their place, just that it's worth being clear about the limitations of a particular kit and clear about how you'll realistically use the car before putting what is still a non-trivial amount of money, not to mention time and effort, into owning one.
samoht said:
On kit cars, I did start off considering them and was advised by someone familiar with the scene not to overlook the value of doors that keep the rain on the outside, heating that works, cooling, demisting etc etc. Basically his feeling was that many people spend a lot of money building a kit car which then does few miles because it's not really very usable. And as Andrew Frankel puts it, the enjoyment you get from a car is how enjoyable it is to drive per se, multiplied by how many opportunities you have to actually drive it. I'm not saying they don't have their place, just that it's worth being clear about the limitations of a particular kit and clear about how you'll realistically use the car before putting what is still a non-trivial amount of money, not to mention time and effort, into owning one.
How about this:-£84,000
Spec here:-
https://collectingcars.com/for-sale/2022-ultima-ev...
samoht said:
robinessex said:
I'm one of the many, who, unless I win the lottery, can only dream about owning a Supercar. A McLaren P1 has popped up on Collecting Cars website for auction. Mileage 3,780. Service cost so far? Circa £120,000. Maybe this has been covered by warranty, but when you look at the service history, it looks like an extremely fragile car. Count me out on the lottery win then. Think I'll build up my own kit car for a fraction of that.
I think the P1 would probably be considered a Hypercar, they're considerably more expensive to buy than your average Supercar, and with more cutting-edge tech used in lower volume parts, also more expensive to run. The Bugatti Veyron is also rather pricey to keep on the road, as a similar car. You could buy a 'regular' supercar and expect it to cost an order of magnitude less to run.Secondly, car maintenance costs have both a time and a mileage component; so if you buy a car and then don't drive it, the 'per mile' cost works out higher. It's really a cost per year than per mile though, as it wouldn't clock up at that rate if you did more miles. Simple solution, buy a car to drive, not to hoard.
This leads into the fact that the P1, being a then cutting-edge hybrid, has a known issue where if it's left parked for any length of time it needs to be on charge to keep the hybrid battery conditioned; if not, you get the aforementioned £100k bill to replace it. However as a proportion of the car's value, it's actually a lot better than an ex-colleague of mine, whose Mk2 Honda Insight needed a new hybrid battery which cost about £3k, or about the same as the car was worth. If you'd offered him a battery for a "mere" 10% of his car's value, he'd have jumped at it!
Of course, a rare hypercar often goes up in value, unlike an old Insight. If you'd had a P1 from new you'd be about £500k up in value now, or about £60k/year, or about five times the mentioned costs. So it would be just as reasonable to say the car was costing minus £120/mile to run. Harry M's Zonda was also pricey to keep, but ended up costing him less than nothing to own overall.
So yeah, you should definitely do some research if you win the lottery; even if you want a 200mph supercar, there are plenty out there that won't throw six-figure bills. It's also helpful to find a good independent, e.g. V Engineering are the people to go for for P1s in particular and McLarens in general, and will keep your car in a better condition for less money than the main dealers.
The fact that one particular example of one particular hypercar racked up six figures in maintenance over 8 years doesn't mean that every supercar is so costly to keep.
On kit cars, I did start off considering them and was advised by someone familiar with the scene not to overlook the value of doors that keep the rain on the outside, heating that works, cooling, demisting etc etc. Basically his feeling was that many people spend a lot of money building a kit car which then does few miles because it's not really very usable. And as Andrew Frankel puts it, the enjoyment you get from a car is how enjoyable it is to drive per se, multiplied by how many opportunities you have to actually drive it. I'm not saying they don't have their place, just that it's worth being clear about the limitations of a particular kit and clear about how you'll realistically use the car before putting what is still a non-trivial amount of money, not to mention time and effort, into owning one.
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