9:52 am, July 30, 2015
I’VE been in this this game for long enough to believe I can realistically value any car, be it fifty grand’s worth of Range Rover (and I ask anyone, why would you, when you can get a lovely old Jag for three grand?), or a £295 px bargain to clear (you’ll sell anything for that, even if it smells of cat’s pee and fag ash).
But, just recently, I’ve been wrong on a couple of occasions, and the theme seems to be with cars built in the early 1990s. To me, and to most people, I suspect, these are old bangers that, if you’re lucky, have got a bit of life left in them.
You pick them up for the standard £295 px to clear price, which effectively buys you until their next MoT, after which you put them in for the test and if it costs less than the £295 px to clear price to fix, you carry on for another year, or as long as you’ve got before some catastrophic component failure that puts the kybosh on keeping the thing going. Bangernomics – if you’re brave enough, it makes very good sense.
I had a perfect candidate for Bangernomical motoring through my hands the other week. Chopped in against a 2008 Vauxhall Corsa 1.0, which probably felt as space age as the Starship Enterprise by comparison despite being one of the dullest cars I’ve ever had the misfortune to resell, I took in a little Rover Metro ‘Nightfire’ special edition, in that gorgeous pearlescent metallic red colour that Rover used to use to disguise the fact the cars underneath were a bit pants.
The old dear had owned the Metro since 1998, when it was five years old, but had finally accepted it was time to get something with power steering. It may be as exciting as a dishwasher, but the little Vauxhall is, at least, really easy to drive. Even if you drive badly.
This one was almost unique…
The Metro was a very tidy little thing – 39,000 miles on the clock from new, and of those, the first 20,000 had been covered by the original owner. I’ve had a lot of Metros through the books in my time in the trade, and this one was almost unique in that it came with all its own wheelarches, made out of metal, matched in colour and not a patch of bog, gloop or filler anywhere. I genuinely thought they left the factory like that, but apparently not…
The service book was stamped by the same garage all the way through – originally a local MG Rover main dealer, then Chevrolet main dealer after that, and most recently the local MG Motor dealer again proving that a) they’d had a bit of crap luck choosing a franchise over the years and b) these things come full circle.
I digress. Underneath the usual detritus of pensioner ownership – a faux leather steering wheel cover, beaded seat thingies, plastic door reflectors and the mandatory mismatched hubcap – was a car that was in quite good nick, so rather than punt it out at £295 px to clear, I got my apprentice, Jason, to give it a once over, source the correct wheeltrim from hubcap mountain (we have a stash that have been taken off many a mismatched car over the years) and apply some elbow grease, polish and a bottle of ‘Retail Detail’ to the plastic bits (baby oil).
I decided to try my hand at £695. Okay, so that’s normally the kind of margin I look for on a more expensive motor, but for what it was, I reckoned that was quite expensive. After all, in today’s world of connectivity, super-safety and low emissions, who’d want a clunky old Metro with no power steering and a four-speed box?
Quite a lot of people, as it turns out. And most of them below the age of 30.
I kid you not, the humble Rover Metro has become a cult car. The PlayStation Generation (and yes, I know we’ve moved on a bit since then, but I’m talking those in their late 20s/early 30, not the yoof of today) have very fond memories of such cars, be it being dropped off at school in one as a kid, or perhaps canoodling with a first love in the back of one a few years later (after all, that gas suspension did make a Metro very comfortable…)
Whichever way, I can tell you that within an hour of the Metro going up on my website, I’d had three phone calls. The first to respond was, I’m led to believe, what’s known as a ‘hipster’. Not, as I thought, a type of underwear, but a slightly nerdy (but apparently cool because of it) young bloke with a light beard and thick-rimmed spectacles, a T-shirt that looked like it had been painted on to his bony torso and rolled-up jeans. He didn’t even haggle, and in the way that people of his generation tend to do, he paid me there and then. With his phone.
It’s a funny old world.
Who is Big Mike?
Well, that would be telling. What we do know is he’s had more than 30 years in the car trade and picked up some incredible tales along the way.
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