Business news and advise

We all know the temptation of buying a new car. You can choose the colour and all the extra features you want, and you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that you’re the first person to drive it. It comes with the promise of trouble-free motoring and you’ll have the chance to impress your mates if you buy when the new registration plates come out.

Plenty of new car offers also help reel you in – including things like a period of free servicing and roadside assistance, payments to cover insurance premiums for a number of years, or straightforward cash back offers. They all make it sound good value.

However tempting the idea of buying a new car may be, you have to think hard about it and decide whether you really want to pay so much for a vehicle that will mainly be used for getting you from A to B.

Buying new cars are one of the main reasons for getting tied up in debt. Our desperation and desire to keep up with our peers and neighbours makes us blind to the real cost. It’s not helped by the low monthly payment figures that the car salesman tells you about and keeps you focused on.  It doesn’t sound much when you think about the monthly figure against your monthly salary.

£200 a month sounds fine, but you’re not thinking rationally when you sign on the dotted line and you forget that the £200 a month will go on for years before you get close to ever buying the car. It’s the business model, of course, and most people never buy their new car outright, they end up trading up and increasing the monthly payment on a better model a few years later.

You have to weigh up whether you’d rather the new car than be able to afford other luxuries in life – like meals out and holidays.  It depends on where you get your enjoyment from.

But many people who want a new car actually decide it’s not worth the expense in the end, and buy a perfectly decent second-hand car that they’ll keep for years instead. Even hybrids and electric vehicles are now coming onto the second hand market, so you can still make an eco-friendly transport choice even if you’re not buying new.

If you’re looking for a change of vehicle, the natural thing to do is to start poring over the statistical data to gauge performance figures, mileage per gallon, level of eco-friendliness and whatever other stats you’re particularly interested in.

But in my (practically based…) experience, this is a fundamental mistake. By far the wiser thing to do is to look at the history of each major motor manufacturer and to analyse their various track records – and to use this as your starting point

OK, you may quite logically think that “history is bunk” when it comes to performance on the current crop of cars available. And rapidly changing technology in the types of eco cars punters are chasing in ever-greater quantities for example may, to some extent, change the fundamental mechanics on which you’re making your decisions. But without history, what else have we to go on?

Of course, this is particularly true when it comes to new car offers. At least with used cars, you can read the individual road test reports etc. But there’s such a surfeit of those out there that it’s hard to sort the wheat from the chaff. Each model has its quirks and foibles which may or may not bother you. It’s all down to personal tastes and needs.

Thankfully, though it’s far and away easier to make the basic decision of which manufacturer to go for – based on objective analysis of all of the major car maker’s history and performance data. And on that basis alone, the wisest choice simply has to be a Honda.

That’s because Honda has been found to be the UK’s most reliable car manufacturer for an unprecedented six years in a row by the What Car? and Warranty Direct annual survey. And you can’t ask for much more than that. The ability to get from A to B successfully has to be the single main decision starting point for me.