Need help deciding how to finance a car as a PhD student

Ebe_Scrooge

19AC wrote: »

Thanks, that's really helpful. Any suggestions for reliable car models and the maximum mileage I should consider?

That's a difficult one to answer - you really do need to buy on condition and history. Don't fret too much over mileage - with the caveat of being wary of something that's got extremely low miles for it's age. Popping to the shops once a week and doing nothing else is not good for a car.

The general consensus is that Japanese cars tend to be pretty reliable, but that is a broad generalisation. You can get a good example or a bad example of any car. My last car bucks the trend - it was a Peugeot 307 HDi, a little 1.6 diesel. You'll hear lots of horror stories about French cars - I bought it with 50,000 miles on the clock, ran it for 4 years doing 700 - 800 miles a week (with a very heavy right foot !). All I ever did was change the oil regularly, it never missed a beat. At about 200,000 miles the turbo started whining, turns out it was a cracked fin. I was wanting a change anyway, so changed it at that point before I got hit with my first ever big repair bill. I looked online a few weeks ago out of curiosity, it's still taxed and MOT'd, so presumably someone out there is driving around in a real bargain :-)

The point being, you don't have to spend a lot to get a reliable car, and pretty much any car should last for ages with a little basic routine maintenance. Gone are the days when a car would not be expected to go much past 100,000 miles.

foxy-stoat

Spend £3,000 on a 7-8 year old Corsa with no more than 60,000 miles - you will get years out of that.