Guys & Gals,
Went to my local friendly Citroen dealership today, and test drove a unregistered 1.6HDi VTR+ five door C4. Extras it had were leather trim, heated seats, metallic paint and fixed full length sunroof. It would be registered on an '05' plate.
List price for all of this was £17,870 (scary for a Citroen!).
I've been offered £2000 for my 156k VW Passat 1.9TDi 'S', which is a 1997 model on a 'R' plate.
Incentives include £1600 cashback from Citroen, and the dealer has offered to throw in metallic paint for free, along with another £300 off for good measure.
So, the price of the car is £15,645, and the cost to change is £13,645.
What do you guys reckon? Could I squeeze more out of this?
Cheers,
DB
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£15050 from drivethedeal.com. Do you really want the full length glass trim and leather seats? These alone amount to £1650.
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Should have said full length glass roof.
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Depreciation will be a killer on this deal, surely?
The basic car (without the xtras) is £13.2k on drive the deal, and prices are likely to fall further as the C4 ages. The extras will add very little to resale, so after 3 years it'll be worth what? £5k?
That's 10.5k depreciation in 3 years. Might as well just burn the money.
Am I the only one who has suddenly realised what a huge chunk of income we spend on depreciation? I look at upgrading my 3 yr old yaris to another new small car and then think that surely there's a better way to spend 5 grand. Like a year off work, for example.
Sorry, I digressed ... :-)
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IT is a huge chunck of income!!!!!!
but for some reason we do it(dont now why'image i s'pose?)
There is no other reasaon i can think off.
we are all daft?
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The trick is not to do it! Cars are so reliable now compared with the bad old days and withstand mileage well.
Take advantage of some other poor sod's misfortune with depreciation and get a 3-4 year old car for £5,000. OK it will still depreciate but at no where near the same financial ammount. If it becomes unreliable sell it and get another one!
An Astra or Focus will (arguably) give as good a drive as the C4 (especially the Focus), the choice out there is massive. If you just desire a new car on the drive with a new number plate fine, but you are paying for it!
Why not get the older car and spend £200 / £300 on a cheap private number plate to diguise it's age?
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'If it becomes unreliable sell it and get another one!'
What happens when you end up paying 5 grand on the 3-4 year old lemon that someone has just sold due to it's unreliability?
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'If it becomes unreliable sell it and get another one!' "What happens when you end up paying 5 grand on the 3-4 year old lemon that someone has just sold due to it's unreliability?"
Wow, well if you managed to get a 5 grand bill you will either have done something spectacularly unlucky / bad, or have had the whole car go up in flames. That's the time to 'phone the insurance company.........
Seriously though, I have never heard of a 3 year old car with average mileage doing something that dramatic.
Worst I heard of was £1,200 for a new gearbox on a Vectra driven by a collegue who insisted you could regularly change gear without using the clutch (like you can on a motorbike) "if you get the timing right" - He obviously didn't. Wonder if that is why he has so many kids...............?
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Bought a golf gt tdi (lovely)with MY money and im scared to take it anywhere!!!I love having a new buthhh(smells good though)
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Dont do it!!!!!!!!!!
As with all new Citroen models give it 12 months and they will be discounting big time.
I bought a citroen picasso 2 years ago, and managed to get a brand new model with a list of 16250 delivered to the door for 12000. When this model had just come out you had no hope of gaining discounts like that.
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There are big discounts already on the revamped C5, which is much better value than a C4, at the moment.
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>>'If it becomes unreliable sell it and get another one!'
>>What happens when you end up paying 5 grand on the 3-4 year >>old lemon that someone has just sold due to it's unreliability?
You inspect the car thoroughly when you buy it, or if you don't know your onions you take someone who does.
That way you don't buy a lemon.
There would be more lemons on the market if people gave a monkey's about depreciation costs and didn't buy again after three years just to have a new car. As it is, most 3 years old cars on the market are perfectly good - it's just that their owners want a new one!
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With most new cars coming with a 3 year warranty these days I think there is a mindset that if you change every 3 years you will never land yourself with hefty repair bills. We're odd creatures - when a car starts to get expensive with repairs the usual reaction is to 'cut your losses and get shot'. A £500 or even £1000 repair bill sounds horrendous.
Having said all that though, we merrily go off and lose anything up to £10,000 by trading in for a new model and drive off smugly with another 3 year warranty.
The sad fact is we have been conditioned to accept savage depreciation as 'the way of the world', while big repair bills are taken as an affront to common decency and fair play!
I read in a magazine once about a Merc owner who kept his cars for many years and insisted on getting them dealer serviced even when old. He maintained that in the long term it was still the cheapest way to run a car.
My C5 will be 3 years old in May - wonder when I'll bottle out.......?
Graeme
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If you can afford a new car, whether outright or on monthly payments, go for it!
I like new cars. As a chartered accountant maybe I should know better, but economics aren't the only consideration. I've had new cars since 1971, roughly every 3 years apart from one (first and only Fiat, 1981) where one year of unreliability was enough. This apart, I like to run them in sensibly and benefit from the warranty.
It just depends what your priorities are. We've lived in the same house for 30 years: extended, but never moved. Boring perhaps, but we've had new cars instead, and enjoyed them.
The problem with nearly-new is that it might have been:
- a hire car (probably caned)
- a dealer's demonstrator or courtesy car (ditto)
- one which the first owner has despaired of, like our Fiat.
There is no way of knowing - you just have to hope you're lucky. Yer gets what yer pays for.....
But I do agree that if you do buy new you've got to go for a car that will hold its value - the ones that the magazines quote as still worth 50 % of cost after 3 years. I don't know why Citroens drop so quickly - I've never had one but there seem to be a lot of very happy owners on this forum.
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Any figures quoted for residual values have to be based on the actual purchase price and not on rrp, otherwise, such statistics are worthless. I suspect that is one reason that Citroens are often shown in a bad light in this respect when, in fact, they are often excellent value for money, even when purchased from new. The C5 is the best example of this at present, where the actual purchase price is around £4000 less than the rrp, for some of the range. With some of the competition (Skoda, for example), one would only be getting a few hundred pounds discount.
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With most new cars having a three year warranty you can buy a two year old car with the balance of the warranty. If you then keep it for eight years and get it dealer serviced absolutely by the book you should get little or no trouble and the depreciation will average out to a much smaller amount per year. OK you will have to pay for wearable items such as tyres, batteries, brakes and cambelts but that is part of running costs. Still a lot less than the depreciation on a new car.
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With most new cars having a three year warranty you can buy a two year old car with the balance of the warranty. If you then keep it for eight years and get it dealer serviced absolutely by the book you should get little or no trouble and the depreciation will average out to a much smaller amount per year.
Dealer servicing doesn't necessarily mean that it will be well serviced and one will certainly pay much more than is needed for labour charges.
My experience with Citroen main dealer servicing, in particular, doesn't exactly fill me with a great desire to use them again, if I can avoid it.
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>>Citroen C4 - is this a good deal?
No.
As an earlier reply indicated, you will be paying for options that will have a negligible value come resale time. If you really want the leather seats and the sunroof then fine but if not then don't pay for them.
Good luck!
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Good example of the C5 discounts available, and why the depreciation appears to be higher than it is:
Based on a previous discussion thread on here, asking for opinions, and eventually my own desire to get one, I have just put an order in for a C5.
The list price (2.0 HDI 138 Exclusive) was £22420!!! This includes Navidrive and The New Lane Departure Warning System, which WILL prove a pain(!) but may save my life one day.
However, after not much investigation work at all, looking at internet dealers, I found 3, including "Drive the Deal", that offered me around £17800. All 3 were within £40 of each other, sourcing from main dealers).
I took this to my local dealer and within 5 minutes he agreed to match it, saving me £4610 on list.
I think (hope) that this is a good deal, I get the impression I could have saved even more if I'd agreed to purchase from a direct broker, but am happy with the combination of discount and local service.
Therefore, if the car is worth, say £9000 in 3 years (it won't be, I do higher than average miles, but I use this as an example), then this will be calculated as a savage 60% depreciation. The reality is that I'd only be 50% down, which is average for the sector.
A lot of money still, I know, but I spend half my life in my car Mon-Fri and consider it worth the money.
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