Modern Cars Are A Nightmare That Will Soon Haunt Used Car Buyers Everywhere
This may sound overly dramatic, but we might all have sleepwalked into a used car disaster and it’s way too late to do anything about it.
We like used cars, right? They give us great value on paper: loads of bang for our buck, space for our Swiss franc and tech for our, err, Tunisian dinar. Easy to maintain yourself, too. Or not, as it happens.
This has just been rammed home to me in very expensive fashion. There I was, minding my own business, when my car – a 10-year-old diesel estate and a great workhorse – gradually started running worse and worse. It turned out that an injector had failed, and on closer inspection via a handy injector testing rig at a semi-local diesel specialist, the other three were failing too. Balls.
To cut a long story short, the bill was more than half the trade-in value of the car. Parts for high-pressure injection systems are expensive. If the bill had been for crash damage, my insurer would have written the car off. These repairs aren’t driveway tasks, either. Installing the injectors is no big deal (although the rocker cover had to come off), but they need special coding and setup that only a main dealer or specialist will have the equipment for. Even if you ask your friendly local independent to do it, they’ll most likely just send the injectors off to the same specialist you could have visited yourself.
If the idea of four-figure bills that you can’t reduce by doing the spannering yourself doesn’t frighten you just a bit, it should. Remember, my car is a decade old. Most cars that have been made since then also have a high-pressure fuel injection system, with petrols having joined the fun many years ago for the sake of efficiency. That’s also far from the only palm-moisteningly costly part that could fail as modernish cars age.
Putting two and two together, here, you get bad news. Of course buying a used car is a risk; it always has been, but the incoming potential for huge bills is staggering. An injector, for example, isn’t an affordable consumable any more. For an old car you might be looking at £60 per unit. The ones in, say, a seven or eight-year-old Land Rover Discovery 4 TDV6 cost £650. Each. Plus, at the very least, garage labour costs to calibrate them properly. If all of them are on the way out, like mine, by the time you’ve added professional diagnostics and labour, you could be looking at £5000.
With surprise costs like these waiting to bend you over and insert a large cactus into your darkest recesses, how long is it going to be before any car outside its warranty period becomes a risk not worth taking? If 12 months into ownership you’re smacked with a four-figure bill, you might as well have bought new. Aftermarket warranties aren’t worth the paper they’re written on (having had two myself and witnessing first-hand the various infuriating get-out clauses), and with cheap PCP and lease deals aplenty, used car ownership suddenly doesn’t look quite as rosy as it used to.
Expand this to today’s cars. Is there something you’ve got your eye on? Something you’d like to poach from the classifieds when it gets old and cheap enough? Forget it, unless you’ve got big cash reserves. Things like the complex electrics in modern swivelling headlights or keyless entry systems, emissions-reduction systems, active driver aids and more will be ridiculously expensive to fix. Why bother at all? When the cars are a decade old, all this tech is just putting your wallet at ever greater risk of being violated.
One answer, of course, is to buy even older cars; simpler cars with simpler engines. Stuff from the early 2000s and pre-Millennium. Simpler usually means cheaper to fix. How does the saying go? The simplest solutions are often the best. When it comes to car makers, this nugget of old-fashioned wisdom has long since been forgotten. And used car buyers like us are the ones who’ll end up paying for it.
Comments
Hasn’t it always been like this? Haven’t people always bemoaned new tech is to expensive and unreliable? Whether it be moving from carburators to fuel injection, adding power windows, or creating a sensor suite to make your car more autonomous (auto braking, auto headlights, etc.); Consumers have always complained, then went and bought the cars anyway because those new features can be nice to have. Because they’re new, some will malfunction and be expensive to fix, but as time goes on - it’ll become cheaper and easier. Unless you buy a car with failing tech, in 10 years, you’ll be complaining about whatever new cars are coming out with and begging for the days of simple cars that only came with touchscreens and auto headlights from today
Almost but not quite. Last time the issue was so bad, was the time when Horsemen lost their jobs over cars. Ant that was a pretty bad time to work for the horse industry.
Early EFI Cars came with clear instructions and error codes that indicated what was causing trouble. Sure, in the beginning, the parts were not as cheap, but diagnostics was simple. Currently, what the outcry is rooted in, is that software has become overly complicated and CLOSED by the manufacturers (Thanks, mercedes).
Back then, any guy with sufficient knowledge in electronics could trace the logic out. Now, you have general purpose processors, and you can only decompile and guess, what that software is doing. Yes, it caused some outcry, as the “carburettor tuners” were left unemployed, but majority felt relief from the introduction of DTCs.
And then the touch screens… Why can’t car manufacturers work with any of the mobile phone manufacturers that actually know the tech and user interfaces. And the pitfalls of digital security. Latter is what grinds my gears the most…
Make old cars too expensive to fix so people will just buy new ones. Hooray for consumerism :/
Perhaps some kind of environmental protection directive could force manufacturers not to charge so much for repair work.
Never been so proud of my two barrel carburator ^^
I heard the European Union wants to ban Planned Obsolescence and France is already on boat banning that but im not sure about car’s expensive electronics failing in its lifetime fits that descriptions. Can someone give me an insight?
They have to do something, to get their reputation out from a mud. (Thanks VAG and your dieselgate). Some say that PSA and others are getting caught aswell… PSA schenanigans are why France is so onboard with this (just a speculation though)
if you buy a used 100.000 car then you need to maintain a 100.000 car - no matter how cheap you got it for!
Yes, but to go back to a car from the 90’s is just as risky as buying a complicated new car. Sure parts will be cheaper, but we’re talking about cars that are ~20 years old now. Parts will break, rust is more prevalent, paintwork worse off, and most 90’s cars weren’t the safest…
How old is considered old enough to be simple? I like having electronic fuel injection and computers in the car, like the cars from the mid 90s and onwards, but modern cars with a plastic engine bay are a little much.
Yeah,im the city and on normal roads i also drive calm, i only push my cars on mountain roads and passroads (got great passes here in switzerland like for example the flüala pass)
Sounds like you got taken for a ride. I’ve yet to see replacement injectors that require special “coding” to install. Unless your adding different sized injectors there should be no need to do anything other than replace or clean/verify flow rates/replace.
You can’t even replace the battery if you don’t teach the new one from special software… (looking at you, BMW!)
You have written down my thoughts exactly and you’ve managed to set the words in order :D
But are there any analog cars out there that are either brand new or just out of warranty? Only GT86 comes to mind. But that is the question. What else is out there?
This exact issue is what i am struggling with right now.
My daily is early 2000’s Audi A4 (B6). It is new enough to have modern’ish creature comforts and tell you what’s wrong, yet old enough to have mechanical critical points. From High Pressure diesel pump to “old-school” torsen mechanical AWD. Sprinkled with electronics here and there but nothing that leaves me stranded. Plus it’s still quite safe, specially in the average car scenery we have here. Airbags, -curtains, stuff that is not present even in some brand-new low end new cars.
But age starts to take its toll. I live in “european rust belt”. I’ve been taking good care of it and this car has delivered. It’s easier to list the EU countries i haven’t visited with this car, than the ones i have been to. From Finland, to southern Italy, to Amsterdam.
But what if something happens to it? This car has been rear-ended badly once. It was on the verge of a write-off, but insurance decided to restore. What will be the next car that can offer me something similiar. I had a fun comparison with that Audi and an E39. Light bulb replacement in headlight. 15 minutes in a gas station with a cigarette brake for E39. But a good hour worth of disassembling the whole head-light unit from the car to replace a light-bulb in a garage for the Audi. Not a fun thing when you’re far away from home, driving in a winter night. And the Audi is old. Megane’s from that era are even worse.
And the “Fancy stuff” they put in. My colleague’s brand new škoda has a touch interface that controls EVERYTHING. And it doesn’t work on very cold winter days. Fun eh? No climate control or radio even to steer your mind away from freezing buttocks. Hell even the Demuro’s review of a $1.7 Million 918 Spyder revealed, it has a touch interface that is slow and basically unusable in this day of age. Is an aftermarket entertainment unit possible? No. Specially when you have muriad of critical functions integrated there.
Not to mention that i’d rather be in a 2016 civic than in a 1996 E38 when someone makes a disasterous miscalculation on a wintery highway… What brings the balance? What is new enough but cheap and safe enough? New Suzuki Swift SX4 has an AWD and it has a warranty. But driving comfort… Well. No. And depreciates like the devil. GT86? Analog RWD but have to wait till the forest roads are swiped from heavy snow? Or stick to old ones? Audi B6/B7 Quattros and-or E46 X-Drives and hope that history has been kind to them until i can afford the depreciation of a car under warranty?
Topics
Sponsored Posts