The death of British motoring

Grimsby car docks

The other day I took my ageing 1.8 Vauxhall Insignia in for a service. It wasn’t the best of news. There’s wear and tear commensurate with an eleven year old car but the mechanic reckons the steering rack is leaking and so is the gearbox, and it needs a new timing belt. That’s probably going to cost quite a bit of money - more than half of the car’s actual value.

I originally paid around £8,000 for it when it had 35k miles on the clock and it was as good as new. It was a really sound buy. It has thus far cost me nothing at all in repairs, and it reliable as an AK-47. It also handles really nicely. I think it’s a little underpowered for a car its size but it does have a few sweet spots, and its road holding is better than anything I’ve had before. Despite what people say about Vauxhalls, it’s a really good car.

Repairing it is a tough decision because, economically speaking, it’s toast. The sticking point for me, though, is it looks perfectly fine for a car its age and I really like it. I especially like it now I’ve spent a month or so looking at the alternatives on Autotrader. The market is shit. There is a serious drought of good second hand cars. Inflation’s a bitch too. I don’t think you’ll find a car of a similar calibre now for under £10k.

The problem is that in order to meet emissions standards in the last few years, car manufacturers have put smaller engines in and employed wet belts, making them mechanically temperamental, far shorter lived, and much more complicated. I keep thinking I’ve spotted the ideal replacement only to dissuaded by the YouTube reviews.

It used to be that you could take a punt on older cars. Prior to the Insignia, I bought a high spec bargain basement Mondeo for £3,000, which I thought was a steal given that it only had 83k on the clock. It wasn’t until a month later I discovered it needed an entirely new ABS unit from a Ford garage which cost £2k. All the same, I did get £5k of value out of it. It soldiered on for many years without any problems, and it wasn’t a bad looking machine either. I may not pick mechanically sound cars, but I do pick lookers.

I wouldn’t do that now though. A higher mileage car just isn’t worth the risk. I’m now looking at cars the same age as my Vauxhall but with lower mileage because I don’t trust anything made after 2017. I know the answer to this is just to suck it up and buy a Mazda 6, but I just don’t like them. I don’t ask for much in this life, so I at least want a car I enjoy looking at.

Essentially, because the government spent the last decade punishing manufactures for producing combustion engines, the pipeline of reliable and affordable engines has dried up. The used car market is a desolate wasteland, which is a serious problem for the millions of drivers who can’t afford new cars. You can buy an used EV but that’s an even bigger crapshoot than buying a one litre turbo-charged wet belt Ford Focus. It’s no fun for dealers either who are sitting on vast stocks of unsellable cars.

Interestingly, I’m now seeing a lot of 2014 era high spec Japanese imports in immaculate condition going for reasonable money, and I expect that’s what will keep the used car market going for a while. The UK market feedstock just isn’t what it was.

All in all, the EV mandate coupled with emissions controls and ULEZ has been a disaster - not just for the car industry but also for the environment (if you care about that sort of thing). Vastly more resources are going into worse cars that last half as long. Gone are the days of a family Volvo or Mercedes estate that would clock up over 250k miles. The industry is now stuck making cars that people don’t really want, and can’t afford, with piss poor range. We now learn that Mercedes-Benz is to halt all further investment at German facilities.

There is more bad news for the industry in the pipeline too. The latest Tory policy on welfare reform says they will end VAT reliefs for lease payments paid by claimants for cars with no adaptations, and for Motability when it resells its fleet. Motability confirms that just 95,000 of its cars are wheelchair-accessible vehicles, or adapted vehicles. This is 11 per cent of the 850,000 Motability cars (Motability factsheet, January 2025).

While the Tories claim that will save the treasury a billion quid, it’s seriously bad news for car dealers who use the Motability scheme to offload otherwise unsellable cars. It is an indirect industry subsidy but the writing has been on the wall for Motability for some time, not least because it’s proving wildly unpopular for those of us who work hard and have to make do with ten year old Vauxhalls.

The upshot is that dealers will be left holding stock that tanks in value by the day, while people like me cling on to their clunkers. That then leaves thousands of pre-registered new cars sitting rotting on the docks, meaning the profit evaporates before they even reach the forecourt.

Consequently, with Labour being Labour, soon enough they will gradually outlaw our old cars in the hope that we’ll buy new ones. That, though, isn’t going to happen no matter how much they discount them. We still can’t afford them.

While the government is set to ease off the ICE ban for now, it still leaves the industry in limbo, still stuck having to make suboptimal engines, while (thanks to EU energy costs) European EV producers are being eaten alive by cheaper, better Chinese imports. As such, it looks like Europe is on course for a full blown auto market depression that could even wipe out familiar brands we thought would be with us forever.

For petrolheads like me this is singularly depressing. Circa 2012, so long as you didn’t mind higher milage and the potential for a nasty surprise, £7k would buy you a reasonable spec Audi A4 or BMW. Now it doesn’t buy very much at all, especially now that all the good cars have been discontinued in favour of bloated SUVs with tiny engines.

Many of us petrolheads warned we could end up like Cuba, keeping ancient classics alive with whatever parts could be scrounged, and it seems we’re getting there. If, though, the government moves to charging by the mile and taxing us out of our ICE cars, I might end up scooting round Easingwold on a tuk-tuk.

The supreme irony here is that it was only a decade ago when remainers were issuing stark warnings that if we left the EU it would kill British car factories, only for Europe to collectively decide, unprompted, to kill off one of its most successful industries entirely. As with many other economic maladies of our time, it is wholly self-inflicted.

As to what I’m going to do, with the Insignia, I don’t know yet, but little did I know when I was buying it that it might be the last decent car I ever bought. What a bloody mess!