5 Cars With The Most Expensive Options Lists

Ticking boxes is one of the joys of buying a new car. But not all options lists are equal. Some cars are pretty spartan affairs and rely on the customer picking extras to make them better. Some manufacturers offer truly ridiculous optional extras you'd need to be a hatstand to even consider.

So we've been having a play with manufacturer website car configurators to see just how much more expensive we can make a car with its options list.

1. Jaguar F-Type V6

It's fairly easy - prestige brand = prestige options at prestige prices. The baby Jag may be quite a pricey purchase to start with, but boy does the Coventry outfit give you some boxes to tick.

So of course we're going to start off with the £2,945 performance seats in premium leather - and because button pushing is so tiresome we'll have the £1,550 memory seat pack to go with it. Braking is important, so let's go for the Jaguar Super Performance Braking System at a reasonable £2,500.

Of course you don't really want people focussing on the fact you've bought the baby Jag, so you'll need a grand's worth of wheels (to fit over those hefty calipers), £2,770 of carbon fibre bits to stick on the outside and one of the premium paint finishes - the amethyst is a snip at £1,250.

Slightly less reasonable is the carbon fibre engine cover, weighing in at a whopping £1,920, along with personalised sill kick plates at £750. Heaven knows what you're going to do with those when you sell it on. We've not even got anywhere near the three grand's worth of electrics in here - air con, cruise control, reverse parking sensors, blind spot monitors and Xenons.

In total you can spec over thirty grand of extras - enough to buy yourself five complete Dacia Sanderos...

Base car cost: £58,520 Total car cost: £88,763 Increase: £30,243 (52%)

2. MINI Cooper S 1.6

If there's one thing Mini is famous for, it's the marque's ability to fill niches that never existed and then to charge a packet on options. On the original R50 MINI One, even a glovebox was optional.

Mini's not quite as miserly these days and even the entry model "Mini First" has some refinement, but that options list is still extensive. With this base Cooper there are all sorts of visual upgrades so that your car looks like the more expensive and more powerful John Cooper Works version (£3,660), but to complete the look you'll need the JCW leather dashboard (£805).

Naturally you can't afford to be without the Media Pack option for the satnav (£1,560), an electric sunroof (£695) and the all important Park Distance Control (£245) so you don't scuff the £720 paint job. In total we managed to tick nearly eleven and a half grand of options on an eighteen grand car...

Base car cost: £18,200 Total car cost: £29,690 Increase: £11,490 (63%)

3. Audi A1 1.2 TFSI SE

It's a bit of a cheap shot to go for a range's entry model and tick as many boxes as you can, but Audi's options list is vast and they're getting less and less generous with standard kit - cloth seats on the range-topping S-Line?

So the first box ticked on this boggo A1 is to get rid of that nasty interior for a nice leather one (£1,225) and that steering wheel really needs to be replaced with a sportier one covered with suede (£615). Being an Audi, of course it needs Xenon lights (£945).

But we wouldn't want to lose our A1 in a car park full of other, silver A1s, so we've gone for one of Audi's exclusive paint finishes - a rather fetching, £1,840 shade of purple. We didn't quite succeed in doubling the price of the car, but only just - and we didn't even tick the extended warranty box...

Base car cost: £13,145 Total car cost: £25,480 Increase: £12,335 (94%)

4. BMW 316i ES Saloon

It might look like I'm picking on BMW a bit after the Mini earlier, but they are separate marques with separate options lists - and BMW's is much, much sillier. I've even gone up the range into BMW's best selling car, rather than the entry level, bought-for-the-badge 1-series.

The big shock here is that the most expensive single optional extra is the automatic gearbox at £1,550 - we thought manuals were dead, but BMW is apparently trying to price the third pedal into contention. Even the 19" wheels were only £1,320.

Aside from that, pretty much everything is leather or electronic - which sounds like a damned good night in. Adaptive, rain-sensing, automatic Xenon headlights are a £1,200 option with the Visibility Package while the entire navigation system along with multimedia and internet functionality is £1,990 all-in for the Media Package (though the TV function is another £825). We went for some lovely beige leather at £1,295, while the paintwork was a nice shade of blue for £695.

The tick-every-box approach doesn't quite reach Jaguar levels of extravagance, but on a much cheaper car we rack up almost the entire car's value again in options. In fact excluding on-the-road costs (tax, registration) and VAT, the options actually marginally outweight the car they're on.

Base car cost: £23,185 Total car cost: £45,675 Increase: £22,490 (97%)

5. Porsche Cayenne

Porsche, it turns out, is the motherlode. Combining premium options with well-beyond premium prices on aspirational motors, it's the perfect storm of overblown options lists. The entry level Boxster can easily be specced to more than its own value, as can the Panamera - but the Cayenne takes some beating.

There are so many amazingly pointless boxes to tick it's practically an insult to even attempt to say which is the most pointless. I might point to the £5,463 carbon composite brakes, but in terms of the value-to-cost ratio, I'd say the £3,941, 21" wheels would be worse. Even they look like a bargain compared to paying £1,206 to have your air vents made from leather.

When you're quoted £158 to have your key painted the same colour as your car, you know you're in too deep. Small wonder then this Pokemon attitude to option lists results in well more than doubling the price of this behemoth.

Base car cost: £45,561 Total car cost: £109,462 Increase: £63,901 (140%)

Any cars we've missed? Hit the comments.