Why Your First Car SHOULD Be A Second Hand Beater

So you’ve finally passed your driving test, finally you’ll be able to feel the road beneath you as you adventure to literally anywhere (and find any excuse to do so)… But there’s one small issue; you don’t have a car yet.

So you set about looking online at some cars that take your fancy; a new Audi A3 perhaps, a new MX5, a new Fiesta, or maybe even a new Dacia Sandero. Sure, they’re affordable with the finance deals that are available today, even on a fairly low income first job, BUT you should be aiming your sites lower, a lot lower, ‘second-hand-beater’ lower, and here’s why.

You Will DEFINITELY Have A Crash

Mistakes will be made somewhere along the line, whether by you or someone else, regardless of how good a driver you might think you are. I crashed my first car 3 times (none of them were my fault - seriously), twice on roundabouts where people cut me off, and another time a lorry decided it wanted to push out of a side street and pinch my cars bum. If this had happened to a new car, my already astrinomical insurance would have been even more ridiculous afterwards, but because the car was a 2nd hand sh*tbox, I went to my local junkyard and sourced spare parts. The other parties were happy to pay the few hundred pounds, so my insurance continued to gradually reduce in price. You couldn’t do that on a new car.

They Have The Strange Ability To Keep Going

Yes, stuff will go wrong (we’ll get to that in a minute), but a cheap little beater will keep marching on through all sorts on just a shoe-string budget. My little 1.0L Corsa did over 100k miles with nothing more than a simple service every year. It just kept on chugging along quite happily. What did eventually kill it (so I’m told) was having an arguement with another car, which it lost. New cars are boring in this respect, because they’ll just work - where’s the fun in that?!

You'll Learn New Skills

As mentioned above, stuff will break - sometimes all the time. But that’s a good thing in the long run, as small cars are usually very easy to fix(or bodge) back together again. Skills that you can then apply elsewhere, or to help friends (and in turn, earn beer tokens). You wouldn’t dare do this with a newer car, simply because you pretty much couldn’t.

You'll Make Life Long Friends

Continuing on from above, when stuff goes wrong, you’ll want to learn how to fix it - So naturally you’ll join a forum of some sort. I did this, and I’ve made some life long friends doing it. We still meet up regularly for coffee and a blast around some local roads in our assortment of new cars.

I hope you enjoyed this little write up. If you like my content, feel free to follow me :)

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Comments

TheMindGarage

I would say somewhere in between. Brand-new will lose value horrifically even if you don’t crash it, but a beater might die on you when you most need it. Roughly 10 years old is probably the sweet spot.

03/22/2018 - 18:23 |
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My Name is Joel

Totally agree, my old Grand Am GT will always have a special place in my heart. Awesome post!

03/22/2018 - 19:04 |
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Anonymous

not for sure about your :They Have The Strange Ability To Keep Going” reliability claim, some have really bad habits of breaking down, an older beater would be just as much a waste of money if you have to spend more time fixing it than actually driving it. and believe me I have had a couple friends end up in that hole. They would be very smug about their $500 beater but ended up spending thousands just keeping it going. That is a poor investment. That is not reliability, that isn’t a strange ability to keep going. that is having to go in for heart surgery every six months just to keep living.
a first car should also be something that you don’t have to cross your fingers every time you turn the key

03/22/2018 - 20:45 |
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Anonymous

I’ve owned my 1st car for about 9 months or so now. I could have bought a Saab 9-3 1.9TTiD or BMW 520i E39, but I went for a Honda Civic 1.6 Sport EP2, because I was due to start college a few days later, and the other garages were closed by this point. Despite being the slowest of my options, my Civic has similar performance to a MK4 Golf GTI, and I’ve never had any accidents. I’d say starting out with a higher performance car (compared to Corsa’s and 1.2 Clio’s, at least) has helped me avoid crashes, as my car has better braking performance, and handles properly.

03/22/2018 - 23:16 |
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Anonymous

I don’t know what my first car will be yet but my dad said that he would give me the X5. It would be a pretty weird first car wouldn’t it?

03/23/2018 - 11:58 |
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Stegosaurus

In reply to by Anonymous (not verified)

It’d be a bit big haha

03/23/2018 - 17:10 |
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Lucas Tekkan

My first car was a beaten up Eg Civic, not a vti. That monster had almost a million km, the only problem that i had with him was the wrecked gearbox and the clutch. Besides somr bodywork, it ran great.

03/23/2018 - 16:49 |
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Dan L

My first car is a VW Up! it’s not perfect I paid less than the going rate, however it is a top of the range one (I saved up for years) it’s just to get my insurance down really but I’m growing to like it as it has quirks a modern Golf doesn’t . Sometimes it struggles to go into 1st and reverse gear and it has absolutely no power on the motorways but I love it , I’m glad I didn’t buy a new car on finance as soon as I passed my test as it would have been a massive risk.

03/27/2018 - 10:39 |
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