I always said that I would never, ever, pay more than £20,000 for a car. The most I have paid to date was the last purchase - the S211 (at £15,000), so there is still a long way to go before I risk blowing that bubble.
I just don't get the new car thing. Of course that may be just a case of "you can take the man out of Yorkshire"
, but then again...
I have to say that I also once told myself I'd never pay more than £20,000 for a car (or £1000 for a number plate, but that's another story), although I broke both bubbles many years ago.
I've only ever bought two new cars - the first for less than £5000 (yet it was very much the
voiture de jour at the time). The bubble-bursting point came in 1998 when I was sitting in the dealership speccing up my first MB, an A170 CDI. This was before the unprecedented downward price adjustment that all MBs underwent in the late 1990s, so list price was a hefty £17,890 and "discount" was still a dirty word.
Of course, it wasn't going to stop there. I had to have the A-Class's two signature features, the louvred sunroof and the clutchless transmission. And it just wouldn't have been right to forego metallic paint and leather upholstery. I ordered heated seats, mainly because I didn't want blanks in the switch bank.
The folding mirrors were a bit of a novelty item (but very useful all the same). And then it needed a music system, and being that it was 1998 I plumped for a Mini-Disc head unit with a 6-CD changer.
Oh dear. Throw a few more bit and peices into the mix and the meter finally clicked round to £21,602.45 (I have the order form in front of me). For an A-Class. 13 years ago.
Up to that point I'd never spent more than £5000 on a car...
Four and a half years later, while visiting my dealership I spotted a three-year-old silver SLK200 on the forecourt, which looked brand new and was priced at £20,000. Compared with what I'd paid for the A-Class this seemed like a bargain, so I made an impulse purchase there and then. At that stage I was still of the opinion that £20,000 was as much as I'd really want to pay for a car.
Fast forward two years, to 2004, and I was at my dealership to view the then-new (R171) SLK. In my head, the upper limit of what I'd be prepared to spend on a car had moved to say £25,000, may be £30,000 at a stretch. But decently-specced 350s carried price tags of well over £40,000. I briefly looked at a Crossfire in the adjoining showroom, before deciding to stick with what I had, until nearly-new SLKs became available.
A year later, after hunting high and low for a car with my desired spec, I bought my current SLK for just short of £36,000. While this was a saving of about £8000 on what I would have had to spend to get the same car new, it still meant pushing beyond my notional £30,000 ceiling.
So here we are in 2011; my notion of how much I'd want to spend of a new car has crept up to around £40,000, yet a new SLK specced the way I'd want it coming in at 50% more than that. Grrrr. Right now, there's no way I'd spend more than maybe £45,000 on an SLK.
So, as per last time, I will bide my time until decently-specced examples filter through to the used market. The problem with doing that, of course, is that you're unlikely to find the spec you'd actually have chosen in the first place, so you have to be prepared to compromise.
