Private vs trade

Sovereign_Hunter_999

A £3k car from a dealer will be a £1500 trade-in with a bit of cleaning up, since the dealer needs to make some money. It may come with a warranty but it'll be virtually useless given the age of the car. 

At that end of the market it's arguable better to buy private because you can see the original state of the car, talk to the actual owner of the car and get an idea of how well it's looked after. 

But you need to be careful here as well because at that end of the market there's a pretty significant chance the seller is a dealer pretending to be a private seller to avoid any warranty or business tax. Tell-tale signs are that they can't meet you at the V5 address, or some story about how they bought it for the wife but she doesn't like it, or it's being sold on behalf of an uncle who's out of the country. Those cars are best avoided.

WellKnownSid

+1 for private.

We've had some success with a few cars bought at the very bottom end of the private market (£400-500) for things like learning to drive / first car / etc.

Find a popular car with four decent tyres that's stuck rotting under a tree due to a known major electrical fault that effectively writes off the car.  Renault UCH, Citroen PAS, Ford Instrument cluster that kind of thing.

Crack open the soldering iron and fix the fault £0
Bloody good clean £0
Stick on a new cam belt and water pump £90 + lots of swearing
Oil, filter, air filter, plugs £50
Wiper blades, brake and suspension parts to get through an MoT £120
MoT £50
Use the car for learning to drive / shopping / as a station car to shakedown any gremlins
Replace any random stuff that pops up

Six months and 3-4,000 miles later we're probably around £750 into the car so we stick a fresh MoT on it and sell privately for £1,500-1,800 ready to go.

Obviously you need to be keen to get your hands dirty and we've been lucky that none of the cars have needed anything that a degree in electrical and electronic engineering couldn't fix.  Something as simple as needing four new tyres though can quickly blow the budget so that's something worth looking for.

photome

If your father knows a lot about the motor trade, wouldnt it be wise to have him look for you

Mildly_Miffed

WellKnownSid said:

Find a popular car with four decent tyres that's stuck rotting under a tree due to a known major electrical fault that effectively writes off the car.  Renault UCH, Citroen PAS, Ford Instrument cluster that kind of thing.

Crack open the soldering iron and fix the fault £0

You make it sound so quick and easy...

If it was, then why would the vendor be throwing a good car away?

WellKnownSid

Mildly_Miffed said:

WellKnownSid said:

Find a popular car with four decent tyres that's stuck rotting under a tree due to a known major electrical fault that effectively writes off the car.  Renault UCH, Citroen PAS, Ford Instrument cluster that kind of thing.

Crack open the soldering iron and fix the fault £0

You make it sound so quick and easy...

If it was, then why would the vendor be throwing a good car away?

I have a couple of diagnostic reports where the owner has just paid £90-£130 for the garage to tell them it needs a £1500 module + £300 to fit / program up.  They just tell the owner to scrap the car (because the cam belt / service / MoT is also due at an additional cost of £800).

In most cases those modules are coded to the car so one from a breaker's yard will never work unless you replace about ten different modules plus the immobiliser system.  Sometimes de-soldering the EEPROM will let you flash a new config - to be honest I've never tried because a component level fix is usually possible.

Quite often it's the case of newer lead-free solders not reaching a high enough temperature plus mechanical strain on the circuit board because of how connectors are routed in the car onto the board resulting in a lifted track or dry joint.  Sometimes it's just a blown electrolytic capacitor (or five!) as a result of trying to crank the engine with a dying 12v battery.  Both are simple fixes and the car will be alive again soon enough.

Frozen_up_north

Basically there are three types of motor trader.
1. Main dealers who sell new and manufacturer approved used, plus occasionally other brands of used cars.
2. Garages with servicing and MOT facilities that sell cars on the forecourt.
3. Traders that sell cars from a “corner plot” and have no service facilities.

The latter are the bottom of the pile and are unlikely to have a meaningful warranty.

Your best bet is to talk to one of the “2” type of garages and explain what you are looking for.

Mildly_Miffed

WellKnownSid said:

Mildly_Miffed said:

WellKnownSid said:

Find a popular car with four decent tyres that's stuck rotting under a tree due to a known major electrical fault that effectively writes off the car.  Renault UCH, Citroen PAS, Ford Instrument cluster that kind of thing.

Crack open the soldering iron and fix the fault £0

You make it sound so quick and easy...

If it was, then why would the vendor be throwing a good car away?

I have a couple of diagnostic reports where the owner has just paid £90-£130 for the garage to tell them it needs a £1500 module + £300 to fit / program up.  They just tell the owner to scrap the car (because the cam belt / service / MoT is also due at an additional cost of £800).

In most cases those modules are coded to the car so one from a breaker's yard will never work unless you replace about ten different modules plus the immobiliser system.  Sometimes de-soldering the EEPROM will let you flash a new config - to be honest I've never tried because a component level fix is usually possible.

Quite often it's the case of newer lead-free solders not reaching a high enough temperature plus mechanical strain on the circuit board because of how connectors are routed in the car onto the board resulting in a lifted track or dry joint.  Sometimes it's just a blown electrolytic capacitor (or five!) as a result of trying to crank the engine with a dying 12v battery.  Both are simple fixes and the car will be alive again soon enough.

I do actually understand exactly what you mean in that reply. Even so, that's stuff that's well above what I'd even consider getting into, unless the car was something really special and an absolute bargain. For a two-grand-trolley? Nah. Life is WAAAAY too short.

For Joe Average-TwoGrandBuyer, though, you might as well be explaining Quantum Physics to the cat in Chinese.

Goudy

Well, at first I wouldn't worry about dealer or private.
I'd want to narrow down the type of car I actually want/need.

A quick search on everything on Autotrader with price set between £1000 and £3000 soon throws up cars I know I would avoid buying no matter what (like a Chrysler 300C and a Kangoo 4x4 Trekka, they both have expensive trouble written all other them).

And a few that would interest me purely on budget, running costs, repairs etc (Fiesta 1.25, Yaris or Auris, Focus 1.6)
I could probably keep one of those running on used parts alone for a couple of years for peanuts.

I'd sniff around the internet and see what problems these suffer from before actually viewing anything, then work out the best way to buy one, dealer or private, but distance would be another factor, I would want to travel hundreds of miles of a private sale if the was a car at a dealers I thought was just as good locally.

But saying that, I'd be pulled enormously to what I already know is a good little cheap car with few major problems and I have experience of (Fiat Panda) and go and buy one of those.

WellKnownSid

Mildly_Miffed said:

WellKnownSid said:

Mildly_Miffed said:

WellKnownSid said:

Find a popular car with four decent tyres that's stuck rotting under a tree due to a known major electrical fault that effectively writes off the car.  Renault UCH, Citroen PAS, Ford Instrument cluster that kind of thing.

Crack open the soldering iron and fix the fault £0

You make it sound so quick and easy...

If it was, then why would the vendor be throwing a good car away?

I have a couple of diagnostic reports where the owner has just paid £90-£130 for the garage to tell them it needs a £1500 module + £300 to fit / program up.  They just tell the owner to scrap the car (because the cam belt / service / MoT is also due at an additional cost of £800).

In most cases those modules are coded to the car so one from a breaker's yard will never work unless you replace about ten different modules plus the immobiliser system.  Sometimes de-soldering the EEPROM will let you flash a new config - to be honest I've never tried because a component level fix is usually possible.

Quite often it's the case of newer lead-free solders not reaching a high enough temperature plus mechanical strain on the circuit board because of how connectors are routed in the car onto the board resulting in a lifted track or dry joint.  Sometimes it's just a blown electrolytic capacitor (or five!) as a result of trying to crank the engine with a dying 12v battery.  Both are simple fixes and the car will be alive again soon enough.

I do actually understand exactly what you mean in that reply. Even so, that's stuff that's well above what I'd even consider getting into, unless the car was something really special and an absolute bargain. For a two-grand-trolley? Nah. Life is WAAAAY too short.

For Joe Average-TwoGrandBuyer, though, you might as well be explaining Quantum Physics to the cat in Chinese.

To be fair it'a great experience for the kids "yes you can do basic maintenance on a car".

As far as Schrödinger was concerned - she both enjoyed and didn't enjoy the experience.