Chris Harris on... bonkers used car prices

Where are all the bargains? I keep looking but I can’t find them. Even someone with the most basic grasp of economics (that’s me) is aware that the UK economy is facing a few headwinds currently. In fact, to use official language, we’re absolutely ruined and have been for some time. This should mean that fast or luxurious car prices are in the doldrums.

Only they’re not. This must be confounding some of our larger foreheaded brethren because the values of used cars have always been a useful index for how the economy is functioning. They are the second most expensive things we buy.

A six-year-old Alfa Giulia Quadrifoglio is still around £35,000. An Italian sports saloon with a reliability record that inspired the McLaren/Honda F1 era holds its value far better than the E38 BMW M5 did back in the day. It’s nuts. I’ve been looking to snag a bargain for months and unless you fancy one that’s done a little light ram-raiding, cheap cars don’t exist. It’s the same all over the market. If I was asked to tell you what my absolute used fast car bargain was for December 2023 I’d be scanning my keyboard for the “glazed expression” key. All the lumpy gear is holding firm.

And yet we are living in the very darkest of times. And we’ve been told that these cars – the ones that the market acknowledges are desirable because their values are not reducing – are already obsolete. This makes me curious because there must be a message for politicians and carmakers there. I’d suggest it’s this: “Between you, it is inconceivable that this could have been handled worse. And when you do eventually sort out your s**t, the Chinese will have stolen this industry from you.”

Any number of pious metropolitan politicians can tell normal people that the motor car should be banned, but those normal people now don’t really care about what they say. Many of them have tried an electric car and have now swapped it for one of the old fashioned ones that actually does the job of a car. And if they haven’t, they have a family member, or friend who has a horror story which has influenced them. Which means the only cars in the UK that represent huge value over their price when new are, you’ve guessed it, electric vehicles. There are currently 524 Porsche Taycans for sale on Auto Trader.

The mismanagement of the attempt to shift away from fossil fuels will be written about for generations. Perhaps at the centre of it all, the perfect case study for the academics to frame their utterly perplexed looks, will be Allegra Stratton. The former climate change advisor to Boris Johnson – who told us all to buy EVs but kept her smelly old diesel Golf because it suited her life. She inadvertently spoke for an entire nation at that moment.

The market will soften eventually. But if you want one good reason why the faster stuff could well hold for a while yet, I give you VW’s new performance EV concept, the ID.X Performance. Designed by a five-year-old who was given a shoebox and a blunt pair of scissors, it’s a rolling metaphor for the shambles the European car industry is in. Out of ideas, totally lacking in political and legislative support and, maybe soon, out of money. Because all people want to buy are cars from five years ago.