Help picking a first car?

FlapR

FlapR

FlapR

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My mates just passed his test and could do with some advice. He's looking for something cheap that he can run without any major problems for a year (hopefully :p).


  • Budget - up to ~1.8k

  • Insurance friendly - hes 26 but just passed his test

I've never looked at cars in this price range before so I have absolutely no idea whats best to look for. Is he better buying something for around 1-1.5k and saving the rest for anything that needs doing to it? He won't be doing many miles in it, just for commuting to work which is about 15 miles a day and shopping etc.

Any help appreciated! :D
 
Insurance is largely tied to engine size, for commuting and short trips round town the cheapest is probably going to be a 1-1.2l petrol engine which would be fine for urban driving, but might struggle a bit with motorway speeds. Ford Focus/Fiesta are common options, but when I was looking I found them to have surprisingly high insurance groups compared to equivalent cars from other manufacturers (usually 9 or 10 minimum). Which might still be alright, but it's mainly a case of checking local dealers and autotrader for anything with relatively low miles.
 
PermaBanned said:
Insurance is largely tied to engine size
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Not true, the image of the car can often outweigh this.

PermaBanned said:
for commuting and short trips round town the cheapest is probably going to be a 1-1.2l petrol engine which would be fine for urban driving, but might struggle a bit with motorway speeds.
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No modern car will struggle with motorway speeds, it will not be the speed the engine struggles with, more so the level of passenger comfort - Id rather not listen to an engine sitting at 4k revs for 3 hours, but the engine will happily do that at motorway speeds without issue.

PermaBanned said:
Ford Focus/Fiesta are common options, but when I was looking I found them to have surprisingly high insurance groups compared to equivalent cars from other manufacturers (usually 9 or 10 minimum).
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They have surprisingly high insurance groups, and even more insurance costs, due to the image associated and the fact they are common with younger drivers, and so more likely to be in an accident according to insurer logic.

PermaBanned said:
Which might still be alright, but it's mainly a case of checking local dealers and autotrader for anything with relatively low miles.
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Low miles don't matter nearly as much as condition and how well the car has been looked after. Also varies according to car, a motorway muncher takes much less strain, but higher miles, relative to a poxy city car that just does trips to the shops but takes a lot more wear relatively from it.

OP, your friend needs to buy on condition primarily - make sure it has good history and has obv been well cared for. Mechanicals are far more important then cosmetics, any car at this budget is guaranteed to have a few knocks on it.
 
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Insurance being based on engine size and needing a low mileage car are the 2 biggest bits of misinformation around...both are generally nonsense
 
Completely disagree on insurance - for new drivers less powerful cars are, unsurprisingly *usually* cheaper to insure.

The effect seems to be seriously watered down for slightly older drivers though and i'm not saying there isn't the odd exception.

That said I cant see someone just looking for a car at £2k ish to be going for anything particularly exotic nor powerful anyway and would expect there to be a relatively small difference between say a 1.4/1.6/1.8 fiesta/focus/Mondeo unless the quote is into thousands regardless

Mileage just can't be read on its own with an older car- actual usage profile and tbh what has broken in the thing in the last couple of years are much more important.
 
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My first car was a 2litre Honda accord and it was cheaper to insure than the 1litre Corsa I nearly bought.

I had the luxury of full electrics and cruise control. And enough power to overtake anything I wanted.

If I was doing it again I would get a 2l mondeo or accord or vectra/similar.

Your friend isn't a teenager and a nice big car is certainly a good place to start.
 
That's all correct, of course, but it's not especially useful for someone who doesn't have the time, knowledge or experience to comprehensively mechanically check every car they go to see. Generally smaller cars will be cheaper to insure, generally lower mileage cars will have less wrong with them or be less likely to develop a fault any time soon.
 
PermaBanned said:
That's all correct, of course, but it's not especially useful for someone who doesn't have the time, knowledge or experience to comprehensively mechanically check every car they go to see. Generally smaller cars will be cheaper to insure, generally lower mileage cars will have less wrong with them or be less likely to develop a fault any time soon.
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You can't simply generalize so much so widely - especially when in this thread alone the number of people vouching for larger cars with bigger engines being cheaper to insure than the generic recommendations outweighs those in favour of your apparent general trend.

Mileage again is entirely up for debate. I'd rather a car that's on 90000 miles, of which 80000 miles were motorway miles than a car with 50000 miles, of which every single one was stop-start city driving - which would equate to knackered clutches, more wear on driveline etc.

Your first point is just nonsensical fluff, by the way. Buying on condition and amount of history hardly calls for heady heights of mechanical knowledge...
 
As someone who bought a first car in September at the ripe old age of 24 I can vouch for the people who are saying smaller engined cars are generally cheaper. But I also found older cars are too.

I got insurance quotes for so many different cars it's unbelievable trying everything from 1l ecoboxes to 3l estates. In the end I got a 1.4 Corsa B. The insurance was £600 which was second only to smaller engined Corsa Bs but only by a few quid. Almost every other car cost hundreds more as an absolute minimum.

As far as I could tell there was absolutely no logic behind insurance prices and the best thing for OPs mate to do is get quotes for as many different cars that fit his budget as possible and see which ones come out cheap and go from there.
 
Personally, I'd be looking at Corsa's and Fiesta's.

Have a look around and see what generally, 1.8k will get you. Go for something that appears to have been looked after, service history, receipts of work being carried out, number of previous owners, things like that. You can generally get a feel for a car when you go see one / test drive one as to whether its in reasonable nick or not.
 
Cheers for the replies.

Assuming the car is about 10 years old, is there anything here that will likely be more reliable or should be avoided completely?

- Ford Fiesta/Focus
- Seat Ibizia
- Corsa
- Honda Civic
 
The OLD Corsas were ok (early 90s ones), but after that the reliability seemed to take a nose dive.

But if you want cheaper insurance get something most new drivers DON'T have (but also not a performance car). It's all done on statistics and a lot of Corsas have ended up in ditches, or in the rear of other cars.
 
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Nasher said:
The OLD Corsas were ok (early 90s ones), but after that the reliability seemed to take a nose dive.

But if you want cheaper insurance get something most new drivers DON'T have (but also not a performance car).
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Exactly my thinking. If you look at what's cool, what's really desirable to 17 year olds, then those are going to be the higher risk cars. Of course the performance of a car will affect the insurance, but it's utterly ridiculous to think it's literally a sum of Engine CC/Driver Age * Gender. Think about what would be the least cool and desirable thing - stuff like Hondas, Volvos and the like.

My first car was a 1.8 Pug 306, shortly replaced by a 1.8TD Mondeo Mk1. Neither of which were any faster than the 1.2 Corsas all my friends seemed to like but were miles cheaper to insure. This was a while ago now but the insistence by naive young drivers that its solely down to engine size is nothing new
 
FlapR said:
Cheers for the replies.

Assuming the car is about 10 years old, is there anything here that will likely be more reliable or should be avoided completely?

- Ford Fiesta/Focus
- Seat Ibizia
- Corsa
- Honda Civic
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Civic is next size class up from fiesta/ibiza/corsa - same size as a focus.

If you are looking at Honda's, then a Jazz wouldn't necessarily be a bad shout (if you can live with the image).

Toyota Yaris is also worth considering.
 
there's no real logic to insurance prices! :)

when I was bang fresh out of my driving test -;

s2000 - 2k/year to insure
ep3 ctr - 24k/year to insure! :)

ended up with a mazda 3 2.0 sport which was a couple of hundred more than super boring eco boxes with 1.2's in them.
 
Insurance is bonkers, cost me £450 a year to insure a 2.0 Scirocco R or £770 on a Fiesta ST.

Suppose the Fiesta is more of a boy racer car with countless smash up's on the books hence the steep increase.

Damn I miss the Scirocco.

Anyway decent first car? How about a 1.4 Fiesta 06-08 plate, missus got a brilliant one a couple months ago for £2k, 57k on the clock, FSH. 1 Owner. Bargain, lovely to drive too tbh.
 
I don't think all of them are "super boring", just depends on the type of driving you're doing. If you just need to get around and not carry a bunch of stuff with you they can be a lot of fun. Drove a Kia Picanto for a while, yeah it's cheap but as long as there are no major issues it's nice and nippy. Fiat Panda, Citroen C1, Peugeot 206 in a similar vein.
 
A couple of people have said there is no logic to insurance prices but in fact there is a quite a bit of logic in risk modelling. Everyone loves a good chuckle at supposed disparity between what a rating engine throws out and the perceived risk, but the perceived risk isn't backed by huge rafts of data. The models might be flawed, the data might be too scarce to be fully reliable (especially on rarer vehicles), but they are still driven by data.

If you were getting a £24k/year quote, that is most likely a 'go away' number chosen in preference to decline to quote (there's various reasons an insurer might do this... aggregators have a lot to answer for). Basically they are saying, we really don't want to cover someone who fitted your personal profile driving a CTR, which was the type of car that appealed to 'boy racers' (whereas the S2000 to possibly more refined drivers such as Will Gill...)

Anyway as for the OP's mate, I think he will just have to try a bunch of different options and see what quotes get thrown out. Don't do all the leg work for him.
 
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