How to buy a car for a learner driver

Want some practical advice about buying a car for a learner driver? A few months back so did I, but all I could find was either ‘best cars for learner drivers’ (subhead: ‘nothing on this list more than £10,000’ – who the hell’s spending that?!) or ‘top tips for learner cars’ which contained such valuable nuggets as ‘don’t forget L plates’ and ‘buy the car for them’.

Absolutely hopeless. So using the lessons I’ve learned here’s a 12-point guide to buying a car for the learner in your life.

Same as with every other car purchase. Remembering that a generation back my first car had cost £700, I decided £1500 was plenty. My wife decided otherwise. First rule: agree the budget with all interested parties. We ended up doubling it. And adding a bit. Having done that I promptly went out and looked at a Mini One listed on Facebook marketplace at £1500.

I’m not buying a car at a sensible time – we’ve all heard what’s happened to used car prices in the last few months due to the super capacitor shortage limiting new car sales. Personally I doubt that’s felt this far down the food chain, but it’s not preventing some people asking silly money for cars and claiming that as an excuse. Browse widely and get a feel for what a realistic price is.

The Mini? Baggy to drive, covered in moss, lame at one corner, smelt mouldy. Had basically lived outside undriven for five years. But. I trusted the person selling it. This is absolutely key. No, I didn’t think it was worth the money, but no I didn’t think he was trying to hoodwink me either. Private or trade? Swings and roundabouts. I like to know a car’s provenance, so am instinctively drawn to private sellers (provisos: see the car at their house, sort the insurance so you can drive it, see the paperwork).

I did: Fiat Panda 100, Suzuki Swift, Mazda 2, Mini One or Cooper, Audi A2. Then remember you’re not buying the car for yourself but for someone you love to learn a new skill in. You want them to like the car, but don’t buy them something too precious. Or something you yourself have strong feelings about. I really fancy an Audi A2 and I do actually think it would be a decent starter car. But if it got knocked or damaged... the key is to care, but not care too much. A learner car is going to earn a ding or two somewhere along the line.

Reality bit in other areas too. Extensive arguments about the merits of the Fiat Panda go no further once my wife types ‘Panda EuroNCAP’ into Google and back comes a zero star rating. The A2 is too old, the Mini Cooper too fast (but interestingly, there’s very little in it for insurance costs between the One and the Cooper – more on that later).

We went along to a couple of big local trade centres. Really unimpressed. Wall to wall uncared for, unloved cars. They’re asking £2,000-4,000 for cars that they have clearly not put any investment into: a Seat Ibiza with the passenger door handle hanging off, a Mini with a cracked windscreen and so stonechipped it looked as if it had been aggressively shotblasted, cars with flat batteries, flat tyres, flat lives sat there flat-lining. Walk away. Even if you see something you really like somewhere like this ask yourself whether there will always be a niggle in the back of your mind that you’ve been hood-winked. Buy into the seller, not just the car.

However, it was really useful because what’s interesting is the criteria you develop – and these are very personal. We needed something with a height adjustable seat. This is because my 5’ 4” daughter has long legs and a short back. She struggles to see over steering wheels or get a proper sense of the car’s proportions and extremities. OK, OK, she could make do with a cushion…

And at this level we’re not talking Bluetooth and radar cruise. The cars I kept looking at were the VW Up/Skoda Citigo/Seat Mii triplets. The entry-level Up is called the Take Up. There are roughly ten times as many of these listed as the higher spec Move Up or High Up. However, the Take Up is super basic. It’s not just that there’s no remote locking, there’s not even central locking. And the only door with a key slot is the driver’s. Which means to let anyone else into the car the driver needs to get in and reach around the other doors.

VW is not alone here. You find similar penny-pinching amongst the Toyota Aygo/Peugeot 107/Citroen C1 triplets as well, and even stepping up to superminis instead of city cars is no guarantee of small luxuries. Settle on the cars you’re interested in with the kit you want (arguably air con, central locking, immobiliser and maybe, just maybe some sort of phone connectivity – an Aux socket probably) and get to know them. Buyer beware.

Worth knowing that you won’t pay much more for higher spec versions. The used car industry is still obsessed with age and mileage, so there’s often only a hundred quid or so between low and mid-spec versions of cars of identical age and miles.

I don’t have any inside knowledge here, but you don’t tend to hear horror stories about rust and reliability these days. Car firms need to engineer small cars properly because the volumes are high and margins are slim. They can’t be having warranty claims come back to bite them.

Issues are likely to be on a case by case basis. It doesn’t matter how well engineered a Honda is if it’s been driven by a muppet who’s slipped the clutch since day one, and it matters not how fully galvanized a car is nor how long it’s anti-rust warranty if it’s concealing crash damage. It’s up to you to find a straight car.

You might care, chances are your offspring won’t. But they might well care deeply about image and how they’re perceived. Out goes the Daihatsu Sirion, Suzuki Alto, Vauxhall Agila and Honda Jazz. Beyond that the key things are ease of driving and cheap insurance. The end.

This is what it all boils down to. Tax will vary a bit depending on emissions, but is unlikely to be more than £100 a year. Most city cars with small petrol engines do between 40-50mpg. And the insurance band doesn’t actually make much difference. Yet.

This is because they’re learning and need to have you/another responsible adult in the car with them. So expect the quote to come back at something like £350-£500 for the year. But do get a rough online insurance quote BEFORE you buy the car.

The difference comes when they pass their test and are driving solo. That’s when everything changes and the costs rocket into four figures. That’s when you need to shop insurance carefully. Some firms limit newly qualified drivers to daytime driving only, or fit black boxes in the car, or monitor through an app. It’s clever, and brings down costs, but needs keeping an eye on.

Done your homework, identified the cars that’ll work for you? Look broadly and be prepared to move fast. VW Ups pop on- and off-sale so quickly the Large Hadron Collider would struggle to identify them.

Auto Trader is the best base point, but don’t limit yourself. A lot of private owners choose to list through Facebook Marketplace, Ebay or Gumtree. Browse widely – research at home is easy, comfortable and can save masses of time in the long run.

Is it straight? That’s the question you need to ask yourself. From bodywork to steering, is it as you expect? Don’t listen to excuses from the seller – trust yourself or take along someone who knows cars. Have a good poke around it: anyone can clean a cabin, but it’s amazing how few clean under the boot floor or in the engine bay. Make sure the MOT is up to date, the lights work, the engine idles smoothly and that the exhaust gas smells/looks right. That tells you what’s going on inside (ideally start it from cold). Look, there is no foolproof guarantee of buying a clean car. Go with your instincts. Be prepared to walk away.   

I ended up buying from a trade seller. He had a Seat Mii Sport that he’d bought through auction. It had done 80,000 miles over the last seven years, but a look at the logbook showed that it had been serviced like clockwork and the mileage had been racked up by just one owner very consistently – 12-15,000 miles each year. And the V5 revealed they lived in a house with a name, rather than a number. Only the driver’s seat showed much evidence of use. I could be wrong, but balance of probabilities (or at least the story I told myself) is that it had been used to commute to a train station.

You’ll have looked at a lot of cars (I think I looked at about 15, drove about 10 of them), so you know what you ought to be paying. Be cheeky. Knock 20 per cent off. Settle on 10 per cent.

The car I bought had one mis-coloured lightbulb, a fractionally squeaky fanbelt, slightly bent parcel shelf and a sharp dent inside the boot. These are points you can use to bring the price down a little.

Done the deal? Assuming you’re not driving it away there and then you’ll probably need to pay a deposit (usually no more than couple of hundred quid – get a receipt). When you return you’ll need to have the funds sorted and insurance in place. Get the New Owner strip from the V5 document and all the logbooks/manual paperwork. The actual V5 should follow a couple of weeks later.

Congratulations, you have a new car.