Buy at a police auction
Risk takers could bag a bargain car by scouring police auctions for cheap motors. The Government recommended online auction site is www.bumblebeeauctions.co.uk and the prices for sold cars do look good. A low-mileage 1999 Alfa GTV 2.0 TS went for £1655 against a book price of around £2000, while a battered but running 1995 Mondeo sold for just £4. The chief drawback is the lack of history, documents and comeback. Do criminals get their car serviced at the recommended manufacturer intervals? If you're lucky, the answer's yes.
Get the trader to fix any spotted faults within the price.
You'll save the price of fixing a fault later if you can get the trader to do it for free. Independent traders often try to reduce their bills by waiting for sellers to point out problems. If they don't spot them then that's one bit of work they don't have to carry out. Usually if you alert them to, say, bald tyres or a sticky electric window, they'll be willing to fix it within the price. Just make sure you haven't already agreed a price. Do that and the cost of sorting the problem will be tacked on.
Buy an LPG-converted car
At 52p a litre, liquid petroleum gas is a very cheap fuel to run your car on. The conversion to fit a second tank and connect it to your injection system costs more than £1000, but plenty of cars have already been converted, making them a great used buy. Autotrader lists around 700 LPG-converted cars, starting from as low as £400. The engine uses around a third more LPG than petrol, so fuel costs aren't halved, no matter what the seller says, but there's still a saving to be had. Around 1300 garages sell LPG in the UK.
Buy from a supermarket
Supermarkets work on the pile-em (park-em?) high principle, and are often the cheapest place for used cars up to three years old. Motors are sourced from fleets, hire companies or the manufacturers themselves, given a cursory once-over and then priced to sell. Famous names include Motorpoint, Car Giant and Carcraft and all stick to a similar formula. Sales are low-pressure, there's little or no haggling and test-drives are either brief or non-existent.
Avoid buying from franchised dealers
The cheapest second-hand car will never come from a franchised dealer. They make good money from their used car business and do so by charging top dollar. They do that by guaranteeing the quality via approved used schemes, but even cars they sell outside these quality-control schemes will be offered with some sort of warranty. This gives peace of mind, but leaves precious little in the bank account. The exception to this rule is for nearly new cars. For reasons not dictated by used-car economics (eg pre-registering to meet targets), the dealer becomes the best place to shop.
