When you think of buying a car for around £7,000 certain criteria come to mind… it needs to be economical, practical, easy to drive. Most people then limitedly start looking and cross overs and small hatchbacks and not luxury cars. Well in this post I’m going to talk about some of the truths and real world running costs of buying a high end luxury car over what might appear to be a more affordable alternative.
The first step is buying the car. When searching Auto Trader there are plenty of used high millage cars on offer, some cheaper than others. There are some things to look out for such as the air suspension working correctly as this can cost £500 a corner to repair, is there full service history (regular oil changes and transmission fluid every 30K), cosmetic damage, tyre ware and that all the many many bells and whistles are all still working. Careful buying in the first place is key a cars history tells a story.
The one we settled for has 99K miles on the clock, had full service history and also went to the effort of going back and checking all of the previous mot certificates to make sure there where no nasty surprises. We have now owned the car for serval months and besides one flat tyre it has cost nothing in maintenance. Insurance is very reasonable and tax is what you would expect for s 3.0L Diesel. One word of caution the run flat P Zeros on our car are very expensive to replace at around £250 each! Non run flat economy tyres can be picked up for under £80
What can’t be disputed is the sheer value for money, comfort and build quality of the S Class. Even today all of the TVs, climate control and seat adjusts work absolutely fine and the ride is some of the best on offer.