When you buy a new car, you want to make sure it stays on the road and functional. However, some things are beyond your control. Someone could crash into your car through no fault of your own. The car could develop a fault without your knowledge. Someone could even steal your car. Despite these risks, you can make some decisions that affect how reliable your car might be. You can choose what car you buy in the first place. Does buying a more expensive car actually make it more reliable, or are cheaper cars a safer bet?
Expensive Disadvantages
According to a recent survey, more expensive cars might not have any advantages when it comes to reliability. Indeed, ‘Luxury’ cars might even be the least reliable of all. Of people who spent an average of £53,510 on their new cars, almost a third (32%) had suffered a fault within three years. This is the most of all the classes of vehicle included in the survey.
In contrast, only 17% of ‘city cars’ – vehicles worth on average £10,882 – had suffered a fault within the same period of time. Cars rated in the ‘Luxury’ class were on average twice as likely to develop a fault as the cheapest class were. This pattern was also reflected through the survey, with more expensive more likely to develop faults than cheaper ones, in any class. It seems expensive cars are not necessarily reliable cars.
Reasons for Failure
Why do so many expensive cars go wrong? Reliable cars tend to be ones where there aren’t many things to go wrong. With many expensive cars, this is not the case. Luxury car owners are most likely to report issues with on-board software, entertainment systems, built in sat-navs and other electric faults. Comparatively few owners of cheaper and more reliable cars had these issues. This is likely as a result of these cars not having these features in the first place. If you want your car to be reliable, one of the best things you can do is to avoid making it too expensive!
Despite all your efforts, something might still happen to your car that causes it to be written off. In these circumstances, you could lose a lot of the value of your vehicle when you claim on your insurance.