Quote:
Originally Posted by john.wigley
Never having owned a DERV 'Mike 700', I am unable comment upon their suitability or otherwise. We once considered a diesel 700, but it had been sold when we went back for a second look. On the other hand, we have driven over 800,000 miles since buying our first Volvo in 1984.
I would also be interested in what you consider a 'low' mileage user. Like you, in the past I've driven upwards of 40K p.a. on business, and for years averaged around 20K. These days, we drive around 10K spread fairly evenly over three cars, so around 3 - 4K per car per year. I consider that 'low', but even that is high in relation to my late MIL, who only averaged 1 - 2K p.a. latterly.
For me, it is not the fuel costs so much as the fixed costs that hurt. At 3K p.a., fuel cost is a very small part of my motoring budget. My fixed costs on the other hand have risen from 20% of my total motoring bill to over half of it! There is more to economy than the price of fuel!
Regards, John.
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Hi John,
I guess it depends a lot on which make & model of car you have as much as whether or not it runs on petrol or diesel, for example, the purchase price premium on a diesel model of my particular car is around £820 only, and as the difference in Insurance ( 16E for diesel, 21E for petrol ) is likely to neutralise this premium over a 3 or 4 year period, we are left with mpg only, and the difference here over the petrol model is around 11 mpg..
With diesel , at the pump, being a little more expensive than petrol this also is likely to neutralises the gain in mpg, so it is quite likely, that costs over say 3 or 4 years are not really much different?
It maybe that the difference will begin to show at high mileage’s, it certainly did when I was doing 45000 ish a year, but at my current mileage of around 10,000 pa. I doubt that I will see a difference.
As far as performance is concerned the petrol model has a top speed of 130 against the diesel’s 131, but has a 0-62 time of 7.7 sec. compared to the diesel which comes in at 7.9 sec ( both 7 speed auto boxes ), but the torque of the diesel is quite a bit more, and having tried them both, I decided to go for the diesel.
I have had 4 Volvo D5’s and 1 Volvo D2 since 2005, together with one 1200cc petrol engined Qashqai, so I guess that I am just used to Diesel engines, and this may have influenced my decision to go back to diesel for the VW!
All bar one of these cars has been leased ( I paid cash for the XC 90 - redundancy money ) on a personal lease basis, and deposits and monthly payments have been very similar for both petrol & diesel, so depreciation hasn’t really affected me, but it is possible that a diesel car will depreciate more , nowadays?