Project Petrolhead

Waft. I love a bit of waft. A big luxury saloon or coupe that’s designed to convey you from point A to point B in sumptuous comfort (and at considerable speed) is right up my street. Unfortunately, I am relatively skint, so the quarter-of-a-million-pound price tag of something like a Bentley Flying Spur or Rolls-Royce Ghost is lightyears away from my price range. However, there is light at the end of the tunnel; Depreciation.

Famously, luxury car values drop like a sack of bricks being pushed off beachy head the second they roll away from the forecourt, so if you’re willing to ferret around the classifieds, you can find some pretty serious bargains. A 2006 V12 Mercedes S-Class? Fifteen grand please. A similarly aged BMW 750i? Even cheaper. You can even pick up some genuine performance icons like the Bentley Continental, Aston Martin DB9 and Maserati GranTurismo for under the £20,000 mark.

Any sensible Martin-Lewis-alike will immediately tell you to… err… not do that. As the old adage goes, if you couldn’t afford one new, you probably can’t afford one used. The thinking behind that is that these cars were vastly complicated to build and eye-wateringly expensive to run when they were new, so would more than likely be ruinously expensive to run as a worn-out, over the hill, used car bargain. Take a Rolls-Royce Phantom for example (don’t mind if I do!), Should the fuel pump on your 6.75 litre V12 give up the ghost (no pun intended), you’ll need to shell out around £1600 for a replacement. Need to replace the suspension on a Continental GT? That’ll be £2300 PER CORNER please! And then, there’s the running costs. A Bentley Flying Spur might be tempting at nineteen grand, but a 15mpg thirst means that it’ll drink its own value in fuel every 20,000 miles.

So, it’s a gamble then? Well, not necessarily. If I were to put my money behind a new car, I could put my fifteen grand down as a deposit on something like a Ford Puma, in which case, I’d be sending Ford a cheque for £400 pounds a month for the next five years. If I’m prepared to do that, what’s to stop me from putting that £400 per month into an account that I don’t touch until it’s needed? That way, I’ve got the funds to deal with the problems as they arise and as a bonus, I’m not locked into driving one drab, boring SUV, I’m driving something full of power, prestige and peeled cows.

So, can you justify buying a car like this? Not really. I’m not thick (despite what some people will tell you) so I can recognise that buying a car that you know is going to break for the sake of driving a cool car is just silly and definitely isn’t sound financial advice. In fact, it’d probably be cheaper in the long run to simply set fire to ten thousand pounds (if, indeed, you could still set fire to money, bloody plastic notes!) but then again, life is short and the road is long, so why not travel it in a car that makes your heart flutter?

*Prices correct at time of writing. And I can’t be bothered to update them when they change.