« on: 24 August 2025, 15:50 »
We all know someone, or are someone, who buys a cheap Corsa or Polo and then runs it for ten or fifteen years, gets a cheap garage to do basic maintenance when absolutely necessary, scrapes it through an MOT each year running cheap tyres and covered in little bodywork dings that never get properly fixed.
That’s cheap motoring.
Perfect motoring maybe?
Now, I’ve always thought running new cars was an expensive luxury, and in most ways it’s certainly that - expensive. Many a time I’ve heard the comment “it’s a mug’s game” which is a fair assumption maybe.
Until recently. Just a week or so ago I spoke to a colleague who showed me some quotes for work in his daily driver mk5 GTI. The estimates came to well over £3k for a suspension overhaul and a walnut blast for the cylinder head, the latter requiring a trip to AVS in Cornwall.
On top of that there’s all the other bits of maintenance over the year plus a service every 5k miles to keep the elderly engine healthy. At £100 an hour labour inc VAT it mounted up to quite a lot over a 12 month period. It doesn’t take much to run up a £500 garage bill nowadays it seems. And older cars run quite a lot of those up per year if you care for them and don’t have the skills to do a lot of the work DIY.
It got me thinking as I washed the car this morning, what’s worse - paying a fortune to buy/PCP a new GTI but having a few services thrown in or paying a fortune running an old GTI keeping it alive as the years take their toll?
Once I’d washed and dried the car I came in for lunch and noticed Volkswizard’s video on buying a “cheap” Audi RS. Despite that being the cheapest car out there it appeared very straight and with an impeccable history. But some of the bills it had run up over the years were staggering! It’s all very well saying these things hold value well when maintenance costs run to tens of thousands…
If the nice chap who owned it had run a few successive Golf R estates from new until end of warranty to ferry his dogs around in rather than an old Audi RS4, would he have spent any more money? Both do the same job with similar real world performance.
I’m talking daily drivers here, not hardly used semi-classic cars kept stored most of the time.
There’s probably a happy medium somewhere, maybe a late model 7.5 Golf that can still be warrantied?
Logged
‘25 8.5R, ‘23 8R, ‘20 8CS, ‘19 135iX, ‘19 TCR, ‘17 Ed40, ‘17 GTD, ‘15 7R, ‘13 GTI PP, ‘11 GTI, ‘09 GTI, ‘98 Ibiza Cupra, ‘05 GTI, ‘06 Polo GTI, ‘04 GT TDI, ‘05 Fabia vRS, ‘02 GTI T, ‘03 Ibiza TDI 130, ‘01 Leon 180, ‘89 mk2 16v, ‘99 Ibiza TDI, ‘96 VR6, ‘98 Ibiza TDI, ‘92 VR6, ‘88 mk2 8v, ‘92 Polo G40, ‘91 mk2 8v, ‘89 mk2 8v, 205 GTI 1.9, ‘83 mk1 GTI, ‘80 Scirocco GTI, plus some others I’ve forgotten
