linnfomaniac83
I bet you can’t wheelie a unicycle!
This, a Golf or Focus can be quite reasonable... or potentially a BMW 3 Series. I changed from a Peugeot 106 1.5d to a BMW 320i years ago and paid about £400 less a year in insurance!
Cheap banger for badge conscious 1st time driver
- Thread starter Alex S
- Start date
Sue Pertwee-Tyr
Accuphase all the way down
Interesting. In which case, I commend the Lexus IS200 to readers, too.
Rockmeister
pfm Member
maybe somethong old and french or an alfa...much more reliable than people think...?
Alex S
carbon based lifeform
Haha, one of my cars is an IS200 (Sportcross). If Aviva’s underwriters agree to waive an over 21s rule she can be added to my policy for £3,800. I’ll check if BMWs are similar value.
The IS cost me buttons and not a single thing has gone wrong in five years. It has a good chassis and a very smooth but underpowered straight 6. I’m going to slap a turbo on it. Then we can talk insurance.
Cav
pfm Member
How old are you and are you a first time driver?
linnfomaniac83
I bet you can’t wheelie a unicycle!
I’m 35 and I’ve been driving for many years but I had a 106 for a first car, my brother had a Clio and we both had BMWs as our second car, within a year or so of passing and paid less on them than our little underpowered hatchbacks! I went from paying £1050 to £650. Granted, things may have changed now and insurance for young drivers is ridiculously expensive, however insurance isn’t necessarily cheaper on small hatchbacks. At one point, a Ford Focus was one of the cheaper cars for a new driver to insure. A friend of mine wanted a 1.25 Fiesta for his first car, the insurance was over £2k, he got a quote on a 1.6 MK1 Focus and that was about £1700, still painfully expensive but way cheaper than the smaller and less powerful Fiesta. Another friend who’s learning to drive (albeit he’s in his 40s) has a 1.6 Focus and he got insured on that for under £500.
I think it's more complicated than that, the insurers have computer models of risk vs owner vs location. In my own experience I could insure a Caterham 7 for half the price of a crappy Volvo worth £300. One did 0-60 in under 6, was worth a fair bit and had no security. The other, well it kept the rain off.
SteveG
pfm Member
Very true. We got my daughter a Honda Jazz as her first car and she liked the fact that when driving late at night she never got stopped, unlike many of her friends who were driving more interesting cars.
linnfomaniac83
I bet you can’t wheelie a unicycle!
This is my experience, when I wanted a bigger car (for my second car), I had quotes on all sorts of stuff, I wasn’t necessarily looking for something flashy and got quotes for all manner of mundane family hatchbacks... then just out of interest, got a quote for the BMW (the car I really wanted but thought I wouldn’t be able to insure), it was one of the cheapest... about £700 cheaper than a Peugeot 307 (yep, I considered buying one of those)... I bought the BMW... managed to scrape the funds together for a high mileage 1999 e46.
JensenHealey
pfm Member
All my daughters have been using a 10 reg Ford Ka 1.2. It still only has a little over 30K miles on it. They moan it is not cool, but I just tell to get on with it. With heated windscreen and air-con it is hardly slumming it. And they can fit 4 in. Insurance is with black box that can reward them with up to 100 miles per month extra miles. They usually get around 85 miles a month so they are not doing too badly. My indulgence is to pay their fuel bills - about £32 to fill up at Tesco.
Currently being shared by my younger twin daughters. Cost £1400 for BOTH of them as new drivers - not a bad result - when most of their male friends are paying sometimes a lot more than that for one.
They know of one girl at the same college who recently passed her test and drives a new-ish Range Rover Evoque. Another girl they know was gifted a virtually new Audi A1 on passing her test at 17. Both spoilt single kids.
Currently being shared by my younger twin daughters. Cost £1400 for BOTH of them as new drivers - not a bad result - when most of their male friends are paying sometimes a lot more than that for one.
They know of one girl at the same college who recently passed her test and drives a new-ish Range Rover Evoque. Another girl they know was gifted a virtually new Audi A1 on passing her test at 17. Both spoilt single kids.
I dunno. I remember a schoolmate of mine whose father had a great outbreak of common sense. He got his 17 yr old son a Steyr Puch Haflinger, then available for loose change. This thing had 4WD and a massive 700cc of raw power. If you had enough road you could eventually wind it up to about 50, maybe 55. The thing was though that because it was unique (how many have you seen, ever?) it was a cool car for a 17 yr old to drive, in spite of the fact that it never went fast enough to get him into trouble.
I still think that that was an inspired purchase. Sadly now they are in short supply and very expensive, you are looking at 3k to 5k and up, and parts/service are difficult. In addition most of them are over 30 years old so they are hardly going to be a good choice for a novice driver or mechanic.
It's a shame that there are no modern equivalents that spring to mind. Then again, what could you insure something like a small Daihatsu 4x4 or a Suzuki SJ410 for?
They do suffer from corrosion. Mind you, you can't blame a 17 year old kid for not knowing how to inspect the underside of a car. I'm not even that confident that I would spot that specific fault, I certainly didn't know they had a subframe. If pressed I would have guessed at the arrangement on the old Fiesta that had a rear beam and Panhard rod hanging off Mac struts and a pair of trailing arms.
On my Mum's Ka the rot was around the fule filler and I susoect that it goes from here into the sills, at which point it is MoT death. I've certainly seen a few older ones with patched sills, they seem to be one of the few cars these days that ever needs sill welding.
davidsrsb
pfm Member
I am always seeing young drivers in KL in rear ending accidents, the common denominator is that they are driving older cars without ABS.
I also see plenty of fancy new cars totaled, we have a crazy insurance system that allows 18 year old rich kids to drive daddies BMW.
The middle in sensible recent cars don't seem to have so many crashes.
I also see plenty of fancy new cars totaled, we have a crazy insurance system that allows 18 year old rich kids to drive daddies BMW.
The middle in sensible recent cars don't seem to have so many crashes.
No, the common denominator is that they are either too fast, too close or not paying attention, so they brake too late.
davidsrsb
pfm Member
Driving too fast, too close to the car in front is something young male drivers do. A boring car with good brakes is less likely to mean this becomes an accident.
Braking effectively with non-ABS brakes needs skill, so I disagree with the ancient car recommendations in this thread.
Braking effectively with non-ABS brakes needs skill, so I disagree with the ancient car recommendations in this thread.
gintonic
50 shades of grey pussy cats
I believe that ABS brakes have been mandatory on new car sales in the EU since 2004.