Fancy a bargain? These are the sub-£1k used cars we found this week

You know that smug feeling when you walk away from an auction having bought something for a fraction of the original list price? This Mercedes-Benz CLK200 may be up for £1,800 at present, but the most recent bid at the time of writing still sits well shy of this week’s budget. Go on… you know you want to.

A slightly different option in a similar age bracket to the Merc is this Volvo V50 estate. It’s an ‘R-Design’ in an eye-catching shade of metallic blue, with 18in ‘Medusa’ alloys and roof rails. Considering it hasn’t even crossed the 100,000-mile mark yet, we reckon it’s good for a few more continental road trips.

The auction for this Alfa Romeo GT JTS concludes at the end of this weekend, and the current bid still sits shy of £1,000. How could that not seem tempting? It’s not like old, used Alfa Romeos have a bad reputation or anything. But even if they did (which they definitely don’t), this doubles up as quite the front yard ornament.

And not just any Citroen C4 at that either, this one’s a Seb Loeb special edition. That means black paint and fancy vinyls across the sides, while certain exterior trim has been highlighted to give it a sportier feel throughout. It is a 1.6-litre diesel four-pot, though, so may not be as exciting to drive as the name suggests. Bother.

How well has the Coupe aged? Though it wasn’t quite the roaring success Hyundai hoped it would be, there are still many healthy examples roaming the used car wilderness, like this one. You even get leather seats and a glass sunroof included. Win!

Aside from some wear and tear to the seat bolsters - which is perhaps to be expected in a 173,000-mile car - most of this Jaguar XJ’s cabin still looks fairly fresh. The same can be said of the exterior, with that long, straight silhouette being hauled around by a sizable 3.2-litre, 216bhp six-cylinder engine. Thrifty motoring at its best, we’d proffer.

This auction will end later today (Friday), and there are still no signs that the highest bid will reach anywhere near the original two-grand asking price. Should you decide to put in a reasonable offer, you may just walk away with one of the more interesting Pug designs in recent memory… for next to nothing.

Or you could invest the money in an E46-generation 3 Series drop-top with a manual gearbox. It’s quite surprising that a car in this condition is being sold for under a grand - and even more so considering the amount of work that the seller has put into it over the last few years.

We included a C6 in one of our used car round-ups a few weeks ago, but seeing what looks like a better one pop up for an even lower asking price meant we couldn’t ignore it this time around. The C6 remains one of the greatest saloon designs of the Noughties era, and the 2.7-litre V6 isn’t half bad at mile-munching either. Do think of the bills though...