This article explains to BMW owners how to save money.

It’s well known that vehicles begin to depreciate once you drive them; the more mature they get, the kinder that pace of devaluation gets. So that as they near the end of their working life, the money they will drop slows down to a trickle. It makes sense then that probably the most cost-effective means of running a vehicle could be driving an older one. 

A friend swears using this method of motoring has ended up saving him hundreds throughout the years. His guidelines are: never ever spend fewer than £500 or it’ll more likely be a lot more trouble than it’s actually really worth; choose mass-market cruisers for example Ford Mondeos; get as lengthy an MoT as possible; steer clear of eBay, use regional adverts instead; and do not purchase impulsively.

“I purchased a dog of a Ford Mondeo on eBay for £450 one time. The cylinder head gasket went very quickly. It seemed far too good to be true from the write-up, and yes it ended up being true. I simply had to bin it,” he explained.

But please don’t allow that to cloud your view. Because he says, you gain some, you lose some. And he is presently running a winner. “I’ve got roughly about 25,000 miles from my newest vehicle, which is a 2000 MY Ford Mondeo Zetec   which cost about £700 a few years back.”

“In that time, I have perhaps put in a further £700 or more trying to keep it on the road. I have been actually fortunate with MoTs with this one. It’s actually never required that much, even though last year I needed to change the exhaust. It was still the original, on the 12-year-old vehicle, and so i can’t grumble too very much.”

He reckons 10 to 12 years of age is an excellent age and he has never worried by six-figure mileages: “These types of vehicles are repmobiles. They are built to do large mileages and many are going to have spent the first 3 years of their existence traveling down and up motorways with marginal stress put on their engines. They will likewise have been taken care of for that very first 70,000 miles or more of their life.”

There’ll, nevertheless, be an amount of good fortune involved, even though he reckons you are able to reduce this by looking at the car tyres and fluids before you purchase and studying the vehicle’s history, evidently this is simply old MoT slips.

“Tax isn’t too big a problem,” adds my friend, “as you could simply cash it in with the DVLA should the vehicle go pop. The MoT is everything though”