The first ever Top Gear Cheap Car Challenge (Buying Cars for less than £100) made me realise something.
Posted by GiftedGeordie@reddit | thegrandtour | View on Reddit | 46 comments
This is going way back to early Top Gear, I think Season 4; I was bored and just watching old Top Gear's on iPlayer and I came across one of those episode long cheap car challenges (I think it might have been the first one they ever did) where they bought road legal, taxed cars for less than £100.
I was just watching that and wondering "Well, if you can buy a road legal car for less than £100, why aren't more people doing it, especially young drivers that need to save as much money as they can?"
Granted, driving around in a £75 Rover 416 GTI probably isn't anyone's idea of a dream car.
Sure_Comfort_7031@reddit
Those cars fell apart a bunch and lasted basically the length of the challenge and that's about it.
Yes you can get a 100£ car but good lord they're a mess.
Also, cash for clunkers wreaked havoc on the used car market. Those cheap cars were traded in for 500-1k £ or something, and bricked, so the whole lot of functional, usable cars in the cheap end was completely bricked, instead of sold off for cheap and maintained.
Chance5e@reddit
Jeremy had the right idea turning old cars into furniture. They’re worth more when they’re not on the road.
futureidk3@reddit
Hammond recently did a little video where they made old cars into Garden Furniture/decorations. It was neat.
Panda_Panda69@reddit
Can you watch that somewhere that isn’t discovery plus? As I don’t feel like spending money for another subscription just for one program. On Amazon at least there are 3 for me. (TGT, the Farm, and our man)
Disturbed_Bard@reddit
Sail the seas matey
futureidk3@reddit
As far as I know the show is region locked. You can find some low quality versions online if you really want to. YouTube has plenty of clips as well, like the video I’m referring to above.
TerritoryTracks@reddit
What now? If I remember correctly the only car that suffered mechanical problems was Jeremy's Volvo, which broke a fan belt. Sure, there was a bunch of stuff in the cats that didn't work, gauges, clock, stereo, etc, but none of it essential to getting around. The only reason the cars didn't last longer was because the last test was a crash test.
graytotoro@reddit
The Audi was on borrowed time. The Stig suggested it wasn’t mended properly.
Crowlands@reddit
Besides the scrappage system having taken a chunk of supply out of the secondhand market back then, you also have so many people leasing more expensive cars these days, so even when those reach the secondhand market the starting price is so much higher than when people were trading in cars that they could afford to buy.
weirdoldhobo1978@reddit
Also cars in general are just lasting longer and holding their value better. 25 years ago anything with over 100k on it was basically scrap. Now cars are lasting 200k+ fairly regularly.
And dealers can sell their trade ins to each other via the internet instead of just accumulating them on the back lot.
Washingtonpinot@reddit
You’re forgetting the “TV magic” of Top Gear. All their specials give the viewer that sense of accessible adventure and fun, but…the production company pays for the van(s) of tools, supplies, parts and occasionally mechanics that follow behind them and make sure they have a show in the end.
Lele_@reddit
The mechanics are not an occasional presence.
That's one of the reasons Wilman said it took 1200 hours of footage to get 1 hour of finished product.
RAYquaza0903@reddit
https://youtu.be/bP7s7woIM3c?si=jZEp_PtxaiM9ZvXG
weirdoldhobo1978@reddit
Well that was 2004, just off the 90s economic boom when new cars were flying off the lot and there was a huge surplus of trade-ins just sitting around.
And that's what we did, not quite for as cheap as Jeremy did, but if you could scrape up a few hundred bucks/quid you could get a working car. Might not work for very long, but it worked.
But that was 2004, and in the immortal words of J. May "That was ever such a long time ago, though."
dreadassassin616@reddit
The government also brought in a scrapage scheme, giving people money for their old cars to be scrapped. A lot of people traded in cars because it was easier than selling to some rando and you didn't have to haggle over price with them. Unfortunately this meant a lot of cars that were still perfectly road worthy and would be excellent cheap cars were removed from the second hand market. Therefore second hand prices went up due to less supply.
ColonelDSmith@reddit
2004 wasn’t that long ago.
Wait. Shit.
TheLordVader1978@reddit
Ya, try not to think about it too much.
peaceluvNhippie@reddit
My brother kept buying cars like this at that time, he called them Gillette disposable cars
weirdoldhobo1978@reddit
A dealership where I grew up used to have a $5 Mystery Car Sale when their trade in lot go to full.
They'd advertise one car for $5, but not which car, so you had to walk through the trade in lot and guess which was the $5 car.
Actedpie@reddit
Did it not have a listed price displayed on it?
weirdoldhobo1978@reddit
They all had their regular price on the window but one was secretly $5 and not its listed price, that was the trick.
It was bait to get people to come in and look at stuff that wasn't moving off the lot to make room for more trade ins. It was usually one of the worst cars on the back lot.
kapjain@reddit
Because one would need to put lot more than £100 worth of time, effort and money to keep them running after purchasing them.
backifran@reddit
When looking for my first car in 2009 my dad's colleague was selling her grandmother's car - a J reg Rover Metro for £75! Had 7 months MOT!
God knows how it passed as the brakes didn't work and it needed "some" (alot of!) welding for it's next MOT. Passed on that and got a 1998 1.2 Clio for £450 with 78k miles - it did me for about 18 months until I'd saved up for an almost new Fiesta Zetec S.
wosmo@reddit
My first car was a £60 mini. Those days are loooong gone.
Borkton@reddit
Ask your insurance company.
Strive2Achieve1@reddit
You sure you watched the episode? Cars were dead 5 miles in. That’s why.
SopaDeKaiba@reddit
Around that time, my friend bought an old ass VW Rabbit for a couple hundred bucks.
No AC or heater, just air that blew from the vents. Of course,bit was ugly too. But the best part was, if you pressed the brakes to hard, the horn went off until you removed your foot from the brakes.
We worked at the top of a hill. You could always hear that guy leaving work.
AddisonNM@reddit
Working as a mechanic, a customer bought a car and Olds 88 -he couldn't afford the labor to fix. He sold it to me for $25 Canadian. I spent a week and just under $100 in parts. I just had time to get it registered and plated on Friday. On the weekend it was stolen and wrapped around a tree down the street.
As the kid who stole it was a minor, a youth organization sent me a cheque for $280 for my trouble. I did okay.
beefymennonite@reddit
When I was in high school in 2009, I bought a 97 Ford Taurus for $300. I drove it for a summer until I took it in to get a tire patched and the mechanic told me that the axel was unstable and it could cause my wheels to fold under the car at any time. Anyway, I didn't die, but I could have.
The_Bored_General@reddit
Well for starters it was the early 2000s, about 20 years ago, so things were a lot cheaper.
Also with at least the budget supercar one, the cars were awful and not really fit for standard use
zetecvan@reddit
A Rover 416 GTi is quite collectable now. If you'd bought one for £75 back then, it would be worth ten or eleven times that now.
kapitaalH@reddit
Depends on whether it has a full tank of gas or not
Wallio_@reddit
I popped. Take my upvote.
1000LiveEels@reddit
My friend test drove a $100 car his neighbor was selling and there was grass growing in the engine. Also the brakes didn't work.
Richybliss@reddit
Have you seen the state of the used car market? If you can get a car with MOT for under a grand nowadays you’ve done well.
eagledog@reddit
It's also the time where they could go to a car lot and buy a car for £1, so maybe not the most realistic picture of the market
Necessary_Reality_50@reddit
No idea to be honest. When I was poor I was always driving around cheap cars.
Nowadays people can get car loans though and because people are shit at finance, they think although they can't afford 5000 for a car, they can afford 100 per month forever.
scottlapier@reddit
This is so true. People don't have a lot of financial literacy. I remember getting into an argument with my ex, she bought a 7 year old car and financed it for $500/month for 8 years...
SNAiLtrademark@reddit
On YouTube, AutoAlex buys cars for almost that cheap, even still.
LloydChristmas_PDX@reddit
You can’t find a car in the us for <$1,000 that runs long enough to get it home.
Alexander8046@reddit
Most of the time when buying a car young people will need to worry most about insurance, which will likely be over £2k yearly if they've just passed their test. Add on fuel, tax, MOT/service, unplanned repairs, maybe street parking charge, maybe ULEZ/congestion charge/toll roads, and actually buying the car turns out to be one of the cheaper parts of car ownership. If you’re already spending that kind of money for a year then you might as well spend a bit more on a nicer car that's in better condition and won't need as many costly repairs later on. Plus the depreciation on older and cheaper cars under eg £3k is almost nonexistent, so you pretty much get your money back when you sell it.
silent--echoes@reddit
We had a 416 growing up. Loved it. Massive upgrade from the Lada we’d had before, which I was deathly embarrassed by at school. Now I think the Lada is actually pretty cool, bet it’s still going out there somewhere
HoveringPorridge@reddit
I wish I could get a 416GTi for £75. The last decent one I saw go in for auction a couple years ago went for £4850!
Getafix69@reddit
It's possible I remember being really pissed off when my dad sold his (actually good condition but admittedly a strada) for £20 or something silly like that to someone who just happened to be dating one of my cousins (not even family).
True I was only a child but I know I could have done much better even selling the wheels.
Rev_Dean@reddit
Did you watch all the way to the end of the challenge? I feel like they effectively answered why super-cheap cars weren't the best bet.
GiftedGeordie@reddit (OP)
Now, technically, Jeremy's Volvo did work afterwards. Although considering that Volvo was 80,000 tonnes, that's not really a surprise.