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Campervan Connundrums
Hey all - we are wanting to buy a VW campervan (we are not considering other motorhomes / campers), but have a dilemma.
We live close to the new ULEZ, so older diesels will be a problem from September 2019. Also in London there are surcharges on parking diesels. There's also tax and the fact that diesel is fast becoming verboten (see recent German city bans)!
Ideally, we'd be spending less than £30k and buying a petrol 'California Beach' (no kitchen), but as petrols were only launched last year, there are no used ones, and those would be around £41k - so well over our ideal budget.
So we are thinking that we could wait a couple of years to get an older Beach or petrol VW Transporter to convert. And in the meantime buy an older diesel van that we'd sell in a year or two. Is this a stupid idea? At c.£22k for a 100k+ miles 10y old diesel will values plummet in the interim? Is it safer to borrow a bit to get a new petrol Beach instead?
Thanks!
We live close to the new ULEZ, so older diesels will be a problem from September 2019. Also in London there are surcharges on parking diesels. There's also tax and the fact that diesel is fast becoming verboten (see recent German city bans)!
Ideally, we'd be spending less than £30k and buying a petrol 'California Beach' (no kitchen), but as petrols were only launched last year, there are no used ones, and those would be around £41k - so well over our ideal budget.
So we are thinking that we could wait a couple of years to get an older Beach or petrol VW Transporter to convert. And in the meantime buy an older diesel van that we'd sell in a year or two. Is this a stupid idea? At c.£22k for a 100k+ miles 10y old diesel will values plummet in the interim? Is it safer to borrow a bit to get a new petrol Beach instead?
Thanks!
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Comments
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But surely you're looking to get one to travel rather then spend time parking up in London. I really wouldn't worry about the diesel aspect with something like this.0
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Yes, and that's a very good point. But for us it will also be an occasional (not every day) second car, and from September 2019 just driving down the road on the school run will be £10! Some London boroughs are adding parking surchrages for diesels. Also, diesels have just been banned in a couple of German cities, with other European countries considering this too.0
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One thing that might be worth looking at is a Japanese import. They don't seem to come up very often, but companies like AutoSleepers exported petrol engined VW campers (Trooper, Trident, Topaz) to Japan a few years back when nobody in the UK was buying anything other than diesel. They are now coming back because in Japan it is so strict and costly to run anything more than a few years old.
Only problem is that a Japan-spec T4/T5 will almost certainly be an auto, so you would need to factor in the extra fuel cost...0
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