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Should you purchase or lease a car?
In the past, we either bought a new or used car outright or we had a variety
of car finance options to help fund the purchase, including car loans and hire
purchase agreements. Now, car leasing plans are growing in popularity too and
this presents us with a dilemma - should we lease or should we buy? Let`s take
a look at the advantages and disadvantages of both options.
The advantages and disadvantages of buying
For many people, the main advantage of buying outright is that they have full
ownership of the vehicle and can maintain it to their own standards. Having
full ownership of a vehicle also means there are no mileage restrictions and
you can sell or part-exchange it whenever it suits you. You may also find that
you have a wider choice of car insurers when you are both the registered owner
and registered keeper of the vehicle.
On the downside, a vehicle is a depreciating asset therefore if you own it,
you take the full hit on its loss of value. This means that if you`ve taken
out a loan to purchase the vehicle, you could end up in negative equity i.e.
owing more than the vehicle is worth. As a result, you may be tied to driving
the same car year after year, rather than being able to afford to change it
for a new one. By buying outright you`ll also be responsible for the repairs
and maintenance costs after the vehicle`s warranty expires.
The advantages and disadvantages of leasing
Leasing has many benefits. As you only pay the difference between the retail
price of the vehicle and the residual length of the contract, you can afford
to lease a car that would otherwise be out of your price range. This also means
that you can regularly change your vehicle for a new one without needing to
negotiate part exchange prices or be concerned about how depreciation has affected
its value. You can also avoid the maintenance costs associated with owning
an older vehicle. For businesses, leasing also provides tax incentives.
The main disadvantages of leasing are the mileage restrictions imposed by
the lease companies - typically you`ll agree an annual limit somewhere between
10,000-40,000 miles (the higher the mileage limit, the more expensive the contract).
If you do exceed your agreed limit then an excess charge per mile will be applied
at the end of the contract. You`ll also be tied into the contract for an agreed
length of time, usually 12-48 months, this means that you can`t simply exit
the agreement or sell the vehicle because your circumstances have changed.
You`ll also need to keep the car in good condition in order to avoid charges
at the end of the lease. You may also find that as the registered keeper of
the vehicle, but not the registered owner, you may not have such a wide choice
of car insurers willing to offer you cover.
The buying process
If you do decide to buy rather than lease, and you need finance to fund all
or part of the purchase, you should organise this before finding a car. Showroom
finance deals usually work out more expensive than if you were to shop around
for a low rate personal loan, although some dealers do offer 0% finance incentives.
If you do arrange finance before you find a car, you`ll be in a much better
bargaining position than you would be if you were relying on the dealer`s finance
scheme. Once your finance is approved you are the equivalent of a cash buyer,
and this gives you much more room to haggle.
These days there are tons of ways to locate cars for sale. Far from being
tied to your local showroom, you can now buy new cars online and at car supermarkets
at discounted prices. Compare as many prices as possible in order to get the
best deal. If you do buy from one of these sources, check that the vehicle
comes with all the usual benefits that a main dealer would offer, such as a
warranty and access to a franchised dealership for servicing and repairs.
Once you`ve found a car, you`ll typically be expected to put a deposit down
to secure its sale. You should be provided with a sales contract that includes
your details, the details of the car including the purchase price and the amount
of your deposit. Always read the small print. If you are buying from a private
individual rather than a dealer, ensure you get a receipt for any payments
made.
On the day of collection or delivery, inspect the vehicle thoroughly before
you officially take receipt. Check that the car is as you expected and that
you are given both sets of keys. If you are not happy with the condition, you`ll
need to agree a resolution.
The leasing process
Once you`ve found a leasing company and chosen a car, you will be offered
a choice of leasing plans. Usually the choice will be between personal contract
purchase and personal contract hire. The former is designed for those who wish
to own the vehicle at the end of the contract, whilst the latter allows the
vehicle to be handed back at the end of the term.
The lease company will present you with contract under which you agree to
pay a schedule of monthly instalments (typically one to four years). At the
end of the term you either hand the vehicle back, take out a new lease on a
new vehicle or pay an agreed sum to purchase the vehicle you have been leasing.
Depending on your individual contract, you may be required to put down a deposit
at the start of the contract or pay a lump sum at the end.
Your contract with the lease company may include road tax, breakdown cover
and the servicing and maintenance of the vehicle, plus delivery and collection.
What about gap insurance
Gap insurance covers against financial loss should your car be written off
or stolen. It is designed to bridge the gap between the current market value
at the time of write off or theft and the original purchase price and any outstanding
finance.
If you are on a car leasing contract, gap insurance will protect the shortfall
between the outstanding balance and the total loss settlement offered by the
insurer.
And finally...
No matter whether you buy or lease your next vehicle, you`ll need to ensure
you have suitable car insurance cover in place. You should shop around and
compare quotes from multiple insurers in order to get the best deal - a car insurance comparison
site is the most effective way to do this. Always compare on policy features
as well as price so that you are certain that you are getting the right level
of cover for your needs
Modern Car Restoration Techniques
Whether you've found a car at a bargain price that needs some loving attention to bring it up to scratch or you just want to sort out your own car and transform it from a rust bucket to a chick magnet then you`ll probably be interested in some of the modern car restoration techniques that are available to you on the market today. It's a relatively cheap and definitely satisfying thing to get involved with and the results will put a smile on your face and hopefully a bit of cash in your pocket if you're looking to salvage the resale price of a motor that's on its last legs. Here's a few of the most basic things you can do to get into car restoration, and most of them can apply to cars of any condition in order to help maintain your car and prolong the life of the exterior and interior.
Scuff Repair
Car bumpers will take more damage than most parts of your car, and an untidy bumper can stick out like a sore thumb. However, new smart scuff repair techniques only treat the damaged area and remove the need for replacing the entire panel or bumper. Wing mirror scrapes and scuffs can also be addressed.
Dent Removal
This can be a relatively difficult process, so it's advisable to seek professional advice and assistance, especially as different kinds of dents require different techniques to remove them. Paintless dent removal techniques, which are new to the UK market, require a skilled and steady hand to repair dents by inserting rods behind the bodywork and gently massaging them out, without the need for filling or repainting.
Wheel Refurbishment
Damage to alloy wheels from curbing is unsightly, and replacement wheels will run into the hundreds of pounds, but there is a simpler way to make repairs without having to replace the wheel. Modern restoration techniques will not only remove any visible damage to your wheels but also coat them in a protective layer to ensure that further damage is lessened.
Leather Conditioning
Connolising is a technique that reconditions and re-colours worn out leather seats and interiors.
Paintwork Correction
One of the biggest problems that can occur to a car is damage to the paintwork, through stone chips, scrapes, accidents or just through the aging process, but it can be relatively simple to repair thanks to a market that is full of products designed just for the paintwork on a car. Selecting a touch up paint that matches your car's colour is essential, and you needn't worry if you`ve not got a steady painting hand as filling in a stone chip badly is better than leaving it to the potential hazard of rust, which is far harder to remove, and a badly corrected stone chip can be corrected later by a more skilled professional at any rate.
Paint Sealant
Car
paint care is essential to the maintenance and refurbishment enthusiast, and another way to help preserve and protect your car's paintwork is through paint sealant, which provides protection against UV, road salts, acid rain and many other harmful materials which damage paintwork.
Out there in the rest of world, 'cosmetic repair' seems to
becomming another name for smart repair, but we have been using the word 'cosmetics'
for a number of years and we have slightly different definitions.
Car cosmetics - by our definition, this
refers to the trim and the 'bling'. These days we expect cars to be mechanically
reliable and generally they are. You also expect a car to come with power steering,
ABS, air conditioning and most certainly a radio. They have pretty much done
it all with the extras -- alloy wheels, low profile tyres and leather upholstery
are not considered particuarly special, so now they are pushing things like
'panoramic view'.
While they are distracting you and tempting you with all this gagetry and luxury,
the car manufacturers have been making other more subtle and cosmetic changes
in an effor to make cars look more modern. These days all the door handles,
rumble strips, wing mirrors and bumpers are colour coded with the bodywork
of the car -- just a few years ago they would have been bare black plastic.
You may also find that you car has other little cosmetic improvements, long
gone are the thick black window rubbers, instead replaces with frameless windows
or shiny metal frames.
Unfortunately, all this detail is delicate! Painted bumpers get bumped, rumble
strips get rumbled, and metal trim can become stained or tarnished.
As we said above, you expect a car to be mechanically reliable, and your expect
most of the extras to come as standard, which means that much of the value
of a used car is judged on it's cosmetic appearance. Therefore it is important
to get any minor damage to these areas fixed before selling your car or returning
it to a lease company.
Cosmetic Repair - by our definition, cosmetic
repair refers to any repair which is cosmetic in nature, i.e. it is a cover-up
and not a proper permanent repair. Most dictionaries will say that cosmetic
is 'superficial', 'not substantive', and 'for the sake of appearance only'.
Thats not to say that other companies that use the term 'cosmetic repair' don't
do a proper job, they probably just have a different definition than we do.
We think of repairs as coming in three levels, at the bottom
are cosmetic repairs and touch-ins, in the middle are smart repairs, and the
top level are full bodyshops. Cosmetic repairs are generally a compromise but
they do have thier uses, for example:
Cigarette burn repairs on fabric. The normal method of repair
is to glue fibres into the burn hole. Once done this cosmetic repair can be
visually very good, however it is delicate. One high-wear areas such as seats
the fibres will soon be rubbed away and the only proper repair is to have a
trimmer replace the damaged panel or ajust it in some way to hide the burn
within a seam. But a cigarette burn in headlinings and some areas of the carpet
are a different matter! To replace a carpet or headlinging in a car can cost
many hundreds of pounds and is not an ecconomical repair on most cars. And
because a headlining and most of the carpet recieve little or no wear, even
a cosmetic repair can last many years.
The damage shown left is a prime candidate for cosmetic repair.
It can't be done with smart repair because there isn't space to get a spraygun
under the area without taking the bumper off which will push the cost up significantly.
When standing next to the car you can't see this because it is pretty much
underneath the bumper. When you stand back enough so that you can see it, you
are far enough away that a touch-in is virtually invisible. You sometimes find
that the manufacturers don't finish these areas to the same standard as the
rest of the car because they are hardly seen and won't rust (they are plastic).
This customer decided to have a full bodyshop repair instead
of a cosmetic repair because the model is one sought after by enthusiasts.
Another use for cosmetic repair is on key scratches. If somebody
keys the side of your car the only way to deal with this properly is to repaint
the whole side of the car, unfortunately this can cost £550-£1200.
It's well worth spending the money to do it properly if you have a car worth
thousands of pounds. But there are plenty of cars on the road that look quite
respectable and have many years left in them that are only worth £1500.
In this case they don't warrant spending this kind of money and so to stop
the scratch from rusting and make the car look a bit better, a cosmetic repair
is perfectly acceptable. This would involve buffing out the lighter scratches
and touching in the deeper damage. This could make a significant improvement
for as little as £25 per panel. The actual improvement will depend
on
the the extent of the damage, the position and the colour of the car -- we
have been able to make huge improvements on some cars such as this
one done for AutoCar Magazine. This is one of the few times we will
carry
out a cosmetic repair above knee height on the car.
Although this kind of cosmetic repair is still very visible when you get close
up, this is partly due to the position, key scratches tend to be high on the
bodywork. But in other cases where you may have run over a brick or scuffed
the sill on a high kurb, the closer you get to the car, the less visible these
areas are (unless you are on your hands and knees), and so a cosmetic repair
is probably the best option on the majority of cars.
Nobody is perfect, and a little while ago one of our team removed an air freshener from a car while valeting it. Unfortunately he put it back upside-down and the essential oils ran down the dashboard. We were actually unsurprised by the damage it caused to the painted plastic trim as we have seen many cars with this kind of problem.
I'm sure you are wondering... we took full responsibility for the damage caused, and had OCS replace the damaged piece of trim. Great care should be taken with air freshners that contain a liquid fragrance, spillages can be costly! We were lucky on this occassion that the peice of trim was removable.
A few days before this a customer brought a car to us with air freshener damage, this time from the famous 'Magic Tree'. As these are so well known and so widely used you would think that they would be safe, bat they aren't. They are okay if you hang them from your rear-view-mirror because then they won't be touching anything. But People hate having them dangling about when they are driving and so attach them some place more discreet, often hanging over the dash. As you can see from the photos below, the essential oils in them will eat into plastic.
The other type of air freshner that can be a problem are the ones that have double sided sticky tape on them. It's not a good idea to put any stickers on your dashboard. The solvents from the adhesive can migrate into the dashboard leaving them swollen and discoloured.
We don't advise against air freshners, but you do have to be careful with them.
This is 'Modern' Connollising, so called because although the method is much the same as used with what you might call traditional Connollising, the products used are modern. Formerly, cellulose based dyes were used, and while very strong they were prone to drying out and cracking over time. They were far less flexible, as-was the leather, which was often 1.6mm in thickness over a bed of stiff horse hair. These days, hides are split so that they can actually make as many as 10 hides out of one -- this thinner leather is also subject to more wear as we tend to do far more miles and are less likely to garage our cars which would protect them from UV light at least some of the time.
Not so long ago we shunned modern dyes in favour of the dyes used by the Connolly Leather Company because frankly, none of the modern colours were very good. They had a tendency to wash off, peel off and seemed to be aimed at quick cover-ups. But the latest dyes are very strong, hardwearing, with good pigment and have the flexibility to withstand plenty of rubbing and squashing. This makes it suitable for leather on all brands of car from Fiat to Ferrari. Of course, luxury cars like Rolls-Royce and Bentley have the very best quality leather - often this comes from Scandinavia where barbed wire fences are outlawed and the temperate climate means parasites are less of a problem. This results in hides which are pristine and require very little processing. These hides are not split multiple times and then stamped with a grain - the hides used are thick and have natural grain.
Unfortunately, video is not the best medium for showing the condition of the leather before-and-after, but the photos in this Rolls-Royce article show a similar kind of restoration. You will see that on a car like this, the leather is done in two stages, inside the piping and outside the piping. Finally, the piping it's self is finished by hand.
We can't give away all our trade secrets, but the process involves:
Cleaning in detail.
Keying the leather with abrasives.
Repairing any damage with flexible resin.
Two applications of base coat by sponge.
Three applications of base coat by spray gun.
As the colour of leather changes over time, the colours cannot be bought in a bottle, they need to be hand mixed and matched by eye which takes great skill and experience.
A few years ago we decided that we needed to add leather recolouring to our list of services, and having found the right man to do it, we started advertising the fact that we did 'Connollising'.
Although I didn't invent the word, I will claim credit for reviving it... there are now lots of companies saying that they do it, although only a couple can really claim that they were trained by Connolly Leather and use the original products.
At the time, most of the products on the market were pretty poor standard and only a cover-up, lasting only until you tried to condition or clean the leather, at which point they just wiped off in many cases -- it was this problem that got us onto the subject in the first place! So we insisted on only genuine Connolly methodology. We feel that the only way to get the car back into the condition it was in when it left the factory is to use the same methods they used at the factory.
However, the Connolly leather company has been gone a long time and the method of leather processing used by modern car manufacturers has changed... maybe not improved, but it's certainly different. I'll save the details for another article, but the point is that Connolly type cellulose paints are no longer used, so we now use the acrylic dyes which are pretty much the same as used in BMWs, Porsches, Aston-Martins etc. We call this 'Modern Connollising' although it has no connection with the Connolly company ('Connollising' has come to mean 'leather recolouring' and is in fairly common usage within the trade).
The Aston-Martin in this article was completed using the Button method, which is amazingly durable and much tougher than any thing else on the market. We call this 'Buttonizing?'; it's more expensive than other methods, it takes longer but as it is so durable, we would recommend it for low-slung prestige sports cars which will receive a lot of wear as you climb in and out of them. It's also good for convertible cars as their interior is at risk from the elements. We maintain that Buttonizing? is tougher than the original finish.
We can't give away all our trade secrets, but the process involves:
Cleaning in detail.
Application of Keying Agent.
Application of strengthening agent/resin.
Application of base coat by sponge.
Two applications of base coat by spray gun.
Application of lacquer mixed to correct finish.
On this particular car, the original leather was fairly good and it would be strong and serve as a good base coat. In some cases, the seat would be sanded right back to the bare leather which would then get several coats of base coat applied by sponge but it wasn't needed on this car. Sanding down the leather also serves to help the new coats to key. As leather fades and stains, the colour is matched by eye so that it doesn't look 'too new' and matches any other trim that hasn't been recoloured, but in this case the colour used was simply black. The top-coat/lacquer is also mixed with the right amount of matting agent to give the right amount of satin finish.
Apologies for the poor quality of this video. Our video
camera was out on loan and this film was taken using our normal stills camera,
this is the reason for the poor quality, and not as some people have suggested,
because the cameraman had been trying out the happy-herb found in the car.
The customer had bought this car and then noticed the
cigarette smoke smell and so brought the car to us to remove it. We did
our three stage Odour Removal service on it and the customer went away
happy. We called the customer after a week as we always do
and they said they could still smell the smoke. So we got the customer
back so we could make a second attempt.
To remove odour, you need to remove the source of the
smell. This can make cigarette odour removal very difficult as tar and
ash can get in all sorts of hard to reach places. The only sure-fire
way of dealing with it first time would be to dismantle the interior
of the car and clean it all in detail. Of course this would make the
cost of the service absurdly high. And it's overkill because we can get
rid of these odours in 95% of cars without going to the nth degree.
So instead we carry out our normal odour removal system for cigarette
smoke and then call you after a week. If you still have the
problem, only then do we invite you back so that we can start taking
the interior apart.
With any kind of odour kill treatment, there is a risk
that we don't get our products on target on the first attempt and if
this is the case, we will ask you back and have another go. Or if you
are some distance away, we may send you products that you can apply yourself.
Usually this is all part of the service and any additional work or product
are free of charge, but with cigarette odours and some spillages it's
slightly different because any failure of the first attempt will almost
certainly require dismantling parts of the interior on the second attempt,
and for this we charge an hourly rate. If it turns out that the problem
is caused by Wacky Tobacky, then there may be an extra charge for this
as we need to use special chemicals to remove the residue produced by
Cannabis.
In this particular case, when we started taking things
apart, what we found was lots of tobacco leaf mixed with a strange green
leaf with a pungent odour. It's rather worrying really, that the previous
owner of this vehicle thought they were capable of driving under the
influence, when in fact they were so stoned that they couldn't roll a
joint without spilling all over the place.
At a certain time of the year we do a lot of paint spillage clean-ups.
Elsewhere on this website we recommend that people keep certain useful items
in their car. One of these items is a couple of bin liners. They are really useful
if you make impulse buys at the garden or DIY centre [...]
And to prove it wasn't a fluke... here is yet another car we treated with Supagard long ago. This one is 5 years old and looks like a new car [...]
Auto Trader seems to get mentioned around here most day. Our Private customers use it, Trade customers use it, we use Auto Trade... it's high time we shared some of our secrets and showed you how to get the best out of it [...]