Yeti strips off for 60,000 mile examination

[beej]

Interesting arguments re: used vs new & low mileage vs high.

A different angle on the argument: I once worked with someone who owned a business/lease car (Subaru WRX). He drove it a lot, and drove it hard. However, he rarely would make up enough km's to reach the minimum required for certain fringe benefits taxes in our country's tax system (I don't know the full details, but lots of people I know who drive business cars mention that this is common knowledge). So he found a person who would regularly 'whiz' the odometer up above the required minimum each time. Said person apparently does this as an off-the-books job for 3 days a week, spends the other 2 + weekend doing not-much-else, and makes more than I do working 5. Apparently 70% of his work is whizzing odometers forward for FBT, the remaining 30% is whizzing them back for used car brokers. And apparently there's a market in forged service books as well.

A few years and a different job later, and a colleague asks me for help in looking for used cars. We went to a few places who, if they didn't have the right car with the right mileage, said they could get their hands on one through their 'extensive network'. Both dealers called the next day - miraculously having the car with almost the perfect mileage, gearbox, engine combination we were looking for. In the showroom! I could've sworn that one of them was actually at the other dealer the day before, but with much higher mileage on the odometer, and now freshly polished & detailed.

Made me wonder - back in the day it used to be hard to wind an odometer back without all the numbers never lining up properly again (I tried it on an old Datsun as a teenager since I wanted to start at 000000 once I put a new motor in place). Nowdays it's all digital and likely impossible to tell.

[Kie]

It's simple arithmetic, not guesswork about what might or might not go wrong on any car.

Take a car like one I have my eye on at present. New price £56,000; average price at 2 years old: £23,000.

Difference between a new one and a 2-year-old: £33,000

Difference between a very high-mileage example and a very low-mileage one: £5000.

It's age that destroys price far more than mileage. Therefore the huge bargains are in older cars with the lowest possible mileage, provided the condition is outstanding, which on an ultra-low-mileage car it often will be. In this case, pay the £5000 to save the £33,000. (And the figures above also show why this strategy is not one to trade on: it's for buying long-term keepers.)

Well not realy because high milage petrol turbo engines are one to steer clear of.. and the higher the milage of a car the more t=chance you have of things like warf in the gearbox (new gearbox needed) which you wouldnt know unless you drained the gearbox of it oil while you was havin a look at it lol. also things like that abs module could fail with a cost of £3000 and it could have every single service done at main dealers and still things like this can crop up.. the higher the milage on a vehicle the morwe change you have of mechanical parts failing.. the older a vehicle the more chance you have of an electrical part failing but there are bargains to be made in say a 3 year old car with 32k on the clock as this is when a car has depreciated the most from new it tends to depreciate slower after this because of the warrenty has usualy ran out