Bangers are back

Wednesday 08 April 2009

Something strange happened the other day. I was minding my own business, having a cup of tea in the kitchen and making the most of the unseasonal snow that had prevented me from driving to work when a strange apparition appeared on the street outside – and then stopped right outside my house.

This presence looked just like an immaculate, late model Rover 800. But, of course, I don’t believe in ghosts so I knew that such a thing was impossible – 800s have long since descended into the basement of bangerdom, most likely to be found in teetering piles in scrapyards, or parked on the lawn at the rough end of council estates.

Just as I was thinking that a time-portal had opened up from 1999 the Rover’s door opened and my mate Roger – the canniest banger-buyer I know – climbed out grinning like the proverbial south Manchester cat and waving for me to come and have a look. Roger’s ability to sniff-out a decent set of sub-£500 wheels is almost legendary, but even so this S-Reg Rover 825 looked a cut above the sort of clunker he usually buys.

Up close it looked near-mint, with a few stonechips on the front of the bonnet to show for its age, but otherwise most of a showroom shine still gleaming. And the interior looked like it had just left the factory – I even expected to find plastic wraps over the seats – with the button-strewn dashboard making it clear this was a top-spec version. The only noticeable problems were a strong musty smell and the fact the stereo digital display had clouded over. Both of which turned out to be clues as to why it was so cheap – the 800’s previous, elderly owner had given up driving a few years ago and the car had been sat in a garage ever since.

The engine had been turned over occasionally, but otherwise it had been left to go a bit moldy. Anyway, it turned out that the guy had just been shunted into an old folk’s home, leaving his son in charge of flogging the car. Which is why, with no MOT and two flat tyres, Roger had snapped it up for a canny £450.

For the money he ended up with a 1999 Rover 800 with just 28,000 miles showing, a fully stamped service history, two owners on the V5 and more toys than that shop with ‘R’Us’ in its title – including barely-creased leather trim. With two new tyres and a lightbulb it sailed through its first MOT since 2005 and, with a forest of Magic Tree air fresheners and the heater turned up to full, he’s confident the musty aroma will go soon.

Over a cup of tea, Roger admitted that until he found the 800 through a friend of a friend, he’d been struggling to find anything worth driving for his self-imposed £500 limit. Because it seems that, as the top of the market continues to struggle, demand for bottom-end bangers has suddenly soared, and cars that would have struggled to fetch £500 a year ago are – if accompanied with a fresh MOT – suddenly worth up to twice that.

The boom in demand for clunkers is logical enough when you apply some mental throttle to the situation. People still need to drive, even if they can’t get credit or scrape together a deposit when an existing car dies. Hence the sudden enthusiasm for anything that comes in under the magic £1000 mark. Roger reckons that until recently it was possible to hedge yourself against the increase in prices by deliberately looking for a big, thirsty car – most bargain buyers are looking for small, fuel-efficient motors – but as the price of petrol and diesel have started to fall, even gas guzzlers are starting to increase in value.

Then there’s the persistent rumour that the Government is planning to introduce a ‘scrappage’ incentive of the sort that’s already been tried elsewhere in Europe. Basically, this encourages the owners of old cars to trade them in for something newer and cleaner by giving them an artificially high part-exchange value – maybe as much as £2000 if the example of some other countries is to be believed. There are certainly some traders flogging these things with the slightly dubious justification that punters ‘will get their money back.’

I’d never suggest buying a cheap car for any other reason than planning to run it into the ground, but I must admit that picking a banger does make a good deal of sense in the current economic climate. And, if Her Majesty’s Government does decide to bring in scrapping incentives, one of the ironic side effects of increasing the value of older cars will be to make them more attractive to buyers who want to actually look after them. For too long we’ve had the ridiculous situation where cars get scrapped because they encounter a (relatively minor) bill that’s greater than their official value.

Whatever the environmental thought-police say, I reckon that we’re doing the planet considerably more of a favour to carry on using an old car for a few more thousand miles than it is to scrap it while it still has life left in it to buy a new one. And I can’t think of a better way to weather the economic downturn than with a well-chosen banger.