Thoughts on a car deal

OpenToSuggestions said:
The colours vary in price, but the red one would be £13,180 + £199 admin fee. The interest rate is poor but you get £500 added to the cost if you don't use it.
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Did everybody else miss this? It's a £14k car, not a £12k car (Maybe £13.5k car if you do the playing the finance thing).

If it was indeed a new £12k car, then yep, fill your boots, absolute bargain.

But as said, the actual total ownership cost of the completely new car might not be that much more, without being "pressured" into a "when it's gone, it's gone" sort of deal.

At least rodenal sees it.
 
It's £13180 + £199 admin fee for the one he is considering. +£500 for finance stuff unless cleared. It's STILL a £13,479 car. So a full grand more (almost £1500 more than the £12k being bandied about).

Which was pretty much my point.
 
I had a look around a while back and all of the seats seemed absolutely horrendous inside, even the higher trims seems very basic and extremely plasticity inside.

I did like the interior on the newer focuses tho.

Didn't realise the new Mazda 3 were 3 years old already.

The Vauxhall looks canny for the money tbh have you checked I'd your employer is on the partnership scheme? The scheme might actually be friends and family roo
 
Worth noting that the car on that deal doesn't come with sat nav...so I imagine it doesn't come with a proper infotainment screen, instead you get a nasty red display like something from 20 years ago.
 
xs2man said:
So not quite as cheap as £12k, but still seems like a decent enough deal for a new car. Of course, the new model is £3300 more expensive (Broadspeed), and about 30 BHP less (albeit with the smaller 1.6L 136BHP engine, or £2700 more if you go for the 110 BHP, but why would you? Apart from for economy reasons, but even so, the 1.6 will likely be better than the 2.0 here).



It doesn't seem, to me at least, as fantastic a deal as the others appear to be making out. Not if you could drive the brand new model for an extra ~£800 or so over 3-4 years. Maybe even less if there is a significant difference in VED.
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Just had a quick look at mpg stuff. The 2.0 will never be a 60 mpg car. You'd be lucky to average 50 mpg, although I suspect it will be worse . The 1.6 should be better. I think it would be reasonably safe to assume 5 mpg better with the smaller, newer engine.

So based on todays fuel prices, and 22k per year, with a 5 mpg gain with the 1.6 (55mpg vs 50 mpg), you could save around £200 per year in fuel costs, (a small difference of 3 mpg here, so 47 vs 55 gives an extra £100 per year though, so worth considering). Plus £80 in VED by the looks of it. Insurance may be cheaper too, but I couldn't calculate that for you.

So £280 per year, over 3 years that's £840, or £1120 over 4 years. Thats a LONG way into covering the extra £1600 or so that it would cost to run the newer model over that period. I reckon somewhere in year 5 is the break even point (depending on if there is any insurance savings), but by that time your well over 100,000 miles anyway.

The point is, as good a deal as this looks on surface, I would give serious consideration to the prospect of just buying the new model. It may not actually cost much more at all when you look at TOC.
 
A few facts
The GTC is the three door version of the previous generation. There will not be a three door version of the current (NEW) Astra. I had a couple of them through work and they were actually quite nice.

The New Astra is a pretty big step up though. It drives so much better in almost every way. Depending on the spec you will get OnStar too which has some nice features such as mobile 4g hotspot.

If you are paying monthly then you can probably get a better deal on a new car vs the old provided you don't want to own the car outright.

For example
https://www.bristolstreet.co.uk/new-car-deals/vauxhall/astra/

Don't be put off by the 1.0T engine. Its really nice and very efficient. Quite torquey too for such a small capacity. The newer car will hold value better but it won't look as sporty.
 
Put a deposit down.
The red one cost a bit more, but I hated the yellow.
I know some will argue either way on this, but my plan is to take the finance then clear it with a cheaper bank loan when my 6 month probation is up at work.
Really wanted the spanking brand new car with the full 3 year warranty :).
There are many bad car deals out there but I have done my homework and feel this is a strong one.
 
OpenToSuggestions said:
Good points everyone. Having looked at the new model comparison the old model is SRi trim and the new model is Design trim.
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Well no. The prices I got from Broadspeed, and did the comparison with, were for the SRi trim, in the 3 door hatch, with the more powerful 138 BHP engine. So was as close to like for like as was possible.

But I see you have gone for the other one anyway.
 
xs2man said:
Well no. The prices I got from Broadspeed, and did the comparison with, were for the SRi trim, in the 3 door hatch, with the more powerful 138 BHP engine. So was as close to like for like as was possible.

But I see you have gone for the other one anyway.
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I wanted to go for this one :).
Thanks for your help though, it was good to obtain a different perspective.
All I do is trundle down the A50 each day. I just needed an adequate car to slap 60-100k miles on, by that point it will be worthless. Managed to haggle a year's tax (£110) on the Astra as it isn't included as they're pre-registered.
 
[TW]Fox;29341981 said:
Hang on, they are pre reg!?

That rather changes things surely as it isn't new now its technically used..
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Registered today by the dealer. This offer was always clearly to get rid of a surplus of old GTC Astras for the new model.
The only ones left that weren't registered were autos, which have awful MPG compared to the manual.
 
Visited the dealer yesterday and sorted everything out. I will pick the car up in 1-2 weeks.

The spare wheel was £255 as the car doesn't come with a jack, spare wheel or even a wheel brace! No thanks.

The only extras I bought were the mats.
I am 99% certain on this, but the safeguard paint and interior protection, gap insurance and minor damage cover I passed on as they're overpriced crap?
 
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Gap insurance is important but not at dealer prices, do some quotes, it'll probably cost about 2 quid a month!

The protection stuff is mainly crap - if you wanted to spend a few hundred quid on it then get a detailer to apply some quality products to it
 
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