10 Cool Used British Cars For Under £10,000

If our audience data is to be believed, then there’s a good chance that you, like us, hail from Britain. Or you’re possibly American but don’t mind hearing about lots of cars you can’t buy with their prices listed in ‘pounds’, which you were pretty sure was a measure of weight, not money. What on earth is a kilogram, anyway?

If you do hail from the land of perma-cloudy skies, Wetherspoons, and steadfastly refusing to get on board with the rest of Europe and drive on the right, then there’s a decent chance you might have considered picking up a British car at one time or another. If the idea of something from our often turbulent car industry does tickle your fancy, we’ve put together 10 of our favourite British cars you can buy used for under our usual budget of £10,000.

X308 Jaguar XJR

Not a fan of Jaguar’s new direction as a brand? The X308-generation XJR, produced from 1997 to 2003, might be more up your street. This is a properly Brunellian car – if it were a person, it would wear a stovepipe hat and have lavish sideburns.

The last of the old school XJs, before they started being made out of some fancy-pants new material called ‘aluminium’, the X308 is a charming bruiser with its olde-worlde looks inside and out paired with a 4.0-litre supercharged V8 making 370bhp.

Land Rover Defender

Come on, you don’t need us to explain this one, right? The original Land Rover Defender – originally called simply the 90 or 110, depending on wheelbase – is pretty much visual shorthand for Britain. Pretty much any scene from film or TV set in the UK countryside will establish as much by showing one of these things barrelling along a narrow lane.

Such a legend it is that, since production finally ended in 2016, prices have started to get rather silly for what is – let’s face it – a pretty agricultural bit of kit. You can still find them for under £10k, though. At this price, they’ll usually have the five-cylinder TD5 diesel engine, a quick Google of which reveals people either think is brilliant or rubbish – sometimes both at once.

MG ZT 260

In the very dying days of MG Rover in the early 2000s, the company decided that what it needed was a V8-powered version of the Rover 75 saloon and its sportier twin, the MG ZT. The company was so cash-strapped, though, that the best solution was to buy in some 4.6-litre V8s from the Ford Mustang and bodge the 75's front-wheel drive chassis to accommodate a propshaft and make it rear-wheel drive instead.

With a meagre 256bhp, neither the 75 V8 or the much easier-to-find MG ZT 260 would know which way any of the German sports saloons of the day went, but they certainly have a distinct, wafty charm. They’re kind of like thatched cottages with big V8s strapped to them. Lovely.

M100 Lotus Elan

Sadly, the good ship HMS Lotus Elise For Under Ten Grand has sailed, and if you want a sports car built in Norfolk for four figures these days, your choice is pretty much just this: the M100 Lotus Elan.

With front-wheel drive and an engine sourced from Isuzu of all companies, it’ll probably never go down in history as one of Lotus’ all-time greats, but it is still a Lotus. FWD or not, the reborn Elan was still one of the better-handling sports cars of its day, and in 162bhp turbocharged form, it was decently quick, too. Also, pop-up headlights!

TVR Chimaera

Prefer your British roadster V8-powered, rear-driven and with a different sort of regional accent? From the mean streets of Blackpool, allow us to present the TVR Chimaera, AKA the last TVR that seems to reliably be findable for under £10,000.

With various flavours of Rover’s aluminium V8 under its imposing bonnet, it was a TVR through and through: unapologetically brawny, slightly tainted by the smell of glue and glassfibre, and the only driver aids being how quick the driver’s reactions were. We love them.

Rover Mini

Like the Defender, the original Mini is cinematic shorthand for ‘this scene is set in Britain’ (or Turin, in that one instance). We won’t bore you with the usual list of cliches about this car, but there’s a good reason it’s still such an enduring part of UK culture.

Enjoying a 41-year production run, plenty are still available for under £10k, but your best chance of finding a good one will be to track down one of the late Rover-badged cars from the ’90s. All of these had the bigger 1.3-litre engine, and fuel injection and a five-speed gearbox became options. They still look and feel like a Mini, though, and that’s what’s important.

L322 Range Rover

The great thing about getting an older Range Rover – especially the L322, produced between 2002 and 2012 – is that unless they’re massive nerds, people will just assume you’re doing really well for yourself, even if it cost absolute buttons to buy.

Okay, it’ll only cost buttons to actually run if said buttons are platinum-encrusted, but Rangies are nonetheless extremely lovely cars with a superbly broad range of talents. There are bucketloads of L322s available at this price, with both petrol and diesel engines, so do your research and pick what’s right for you.

Bentley Turbo R

If looking rich on a budget is what you’re after, though, you can’t really ignore the temptations of smoking about in an old Bentley. Take the Turbo R, one of many models powered by Bentley’s spectacularly long-lived V8, which is properly referred to not as a 6.8-litre, or a 6.75-litre, but a six-and-three-quarter-litre, thank you very much.

As the name suggests, it was aided by a turbocharger here, and while the Turbo R hails from an era when Bentley would never do something so uncouth as quoting horsepower numbers, over 300bhp and an endless swell of torque seem on the money. Will it make you look rich? Yep. Will it in fact bankrupt you? Erm, why don’t you go for it and come back to us on that one?

X150 Jaguar XKR

Everything on this list has been a bit old-school so far, so how about something hailing from the last time Jaguar was trying to push forward into the future? Underneath, the second-gen XK (that’s the X150, chassis code fans) was largely the same car as the Aston Martin Vantage, and it was arguably just as pretty.

Its chassis and body were aluminium, and in high-performance R guise, it had a hearty 4.2-litre 414bhp supercharged V8, later upped to 5.0 litres and 503bhp. For a £10k budget, there’s a staggering amount of both coupes and convertibles around with remarkably unscary mileage. Possibly reliability niggles aside, it really is hard to see what the catch is with this one.

Some sort of Westfield

Yeah, you can just about find a Caterham for under £10k, but it’ll probably be a high-miler with some sort of weedy old Ford engine. Plenty of other companies have entered Lotus Seven lookalike competitions over the years, most notably Westfield.

Sure, its cars were never quite as refined as Caterhams, not least because they were far more likely to have been supplied in kit form and built in a residential garage by a pie-fuelled man named Terry. That, however, means you can generally get a bit more performance per pound, plus bask in the smugness of not going down the obvious route.