Looking at Autotrader,I can have a tasty e class merc or 5 series on my drive for pittance.Even suggested to Jane she could sell her Fabia vRS and have a fully leathered second hand Freelander on the drive and put the

Not sure if it's to do with credit - I mean, how many people do you know who purchase exec cars out of their own money rather than getting them on a company car scheme?

You also might find that the reason there is a lot of these cars in autotrader is that no one is buying them because they're expensive to run and the high number of gadgets means that the likelihood of something expensive breaking is relatively high. This in turn leads to fairly hefty depreciation...

Rob.

Biggish cars, and especially executive cars have always suffered from pi$$-poor depreciation, because most people who buy them see them as status symbols, so not only do they want a posh car, but they want a NEW posh car! OK, so a few people will get private plates, but a lot of people like that will want to make sure that not only do they have a Range Rover to pose in, but that it's an 06 Range Rover...

Others of course will be company cars that'll have been returned to the leasing company at the end of the three years, but they of course will mostly have astronomical mileages. This isn't always a bad thing though, as long, regular journeys don't wear the engine and transmission anything like as much as short, infrequent ones.

Some makes do better than others in terms of depreciation (e.g. Lexus), but others like M-B and Jag have had a bit of a reliability problem in the recent past, which has hammered their resale values.

But if you get a good one with FSH, you're onto a winner IMO. If it wasn't for the crazee cost of insuring something like an A6, I'd be well up for it!!!

I've been looking at some of these cars lately and it seems the only real penalty is that if you're after a diesel they all tend to have pretty high miles on them as I guess they were the "rep-mobiles" and the proper execs could afford to run V6's and V8's which seem to be much cheaper.

Certainly food for thought

Chris

Been thinking the same myself recently. After a debate around Saabs on the Fabia Forum I checked out the cars at my local Saab dealership. For approx px value of my car plus a grand I coud have a 2-3 year old 9-3 Sport Saloon, with abour 20k miles on the clock, many extras and a 170bhp 2.0t engine. Throw in an extra £500 for a remap and that's a pretty awsome package for approx £1500,which I'd probably spend on useless bits for the Fabia (like Polo rear wipers, W8 light units) anyway over the next year..............

Hmmm, plenty to consider there