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 :)