NEW vs USED

The depreciation of yesterday’s heroes set against the arrival of tantalising new metal creates some agonising dilemmas for the enthusiast. Let’s resolve them

PHOTOGRAPHY MAX EDLESTON

Another smorgasbord of secondhand seducement awaits over the following 14 pages. Guard your wallets closely, dear reader, as we assemble a host of inviting new cars, each a partner to its opposite number from the used market, and then decide, in turn, whether our money would go on the showroom-fresh new car or the extra-value, nicely run-in used equivalent.

This new-versus-used special is different because, for the first time, one of our featured used bargains is an electric car. Which means two of them aren’t, of course. We will be stopping in to ponder the prospect of a daily-driven affordable fast estate, as road tester Illya Verpraet takes you through the relative merits of a new Skoda Octavia vRS and a used Mercedes-AMG C43.

With the help of editor-at-large Matt Prior, we will also be wondering if a 12-year-old Audi R8 supercar might be the only thing potent enough to convince a true petrolhead not to blow £34,000 on a new Toyota GR Yaris hot hatch at the moment.

There will be other ‘old against new’ titbits too, some high-priced and some more real-world, collected and collated for you by Autocar’s resident used car deliberators Felix Page and Jack Warrick.

But even those of us who like our ‘new’ cars with more of a lived-in vibe must move with the times; and so, before we get to all the combustion-engined treats, road test editor Matt Saunders will start by checking in on how cheaply the practical, desirable and surprisingly dynamic-handling Jaguar I-Pace electric SUV can be bought on the second-hand car market in 2021. Then he will mull over whether it would make a smarter family buy than the kind of new electric car that the same money might buy, which comes in the shape of the Volkswagen ID 3.

Turn over for temptation, then. And don’t say we didn’t warn you…

❝They first demonstrated that an EV could be practical, usable, desirable, versatile and uniquely rewarding to own❞

The used car scene is never better than when it’s putting temptingly within your reach a car that you had imagined would be unattainable, or bringing viability to a vision for personal or family transport that might otherwise have remained a pipe dream. It’s doing that all the time, of course, right across the full spectrum of the car market – which is why we love it. But right now, and perhaps more significantly than anywhere else, it’s doing it with the electric family cars that, a few years ago, first demonstrated how an EV could be practical, usable, desirable, versatile and uniquely rewarding to own.