Buying a modern used car for under £10k is almost impossible

The other week, I was talking to Peugeot boss Alain Favey when he said something about car buying that got my brain whirring. 

“We ask ourselves every day whether to do a £20,000 electric city car, but Peugeot has no plans to go further down than an E-208,” he told me. 

“The petrol A-segment cars we sold in the past have disappeared from the market, and they didn’t cost £20,000. Today, the entry-level price segment is covered by used cars in good condition.”

He’s not wrong. The 108, a badge-engineered baby hatchback co-developed with Toyota and Citroen, used to be Peugeot’s smallest car and it cost from around £10,000 when it went off sale in 2022. Yet the cheapest new car I could find on Peugeot’s UK website recently was a 208 Allure petrol for £24,155, or £321 a month for four years with a £5,465 deposit. Ouch.

My daughter won’t be learning to drive for a few years, but I’m already pondering what we’ll get her – I can’t help myself! We already know it’ll have to be a used car, so I fired up Auto Express’s Find a Car service to have a look at what we could consider for her first wheels.

There were 162 E-208s on the site and the pretty, pre-facelift 50kWh car with the high-class interior would probably get past the Gabriella style police. I saw a few 20k examples around the £12,000 mark, and one in that knockout yellow for £9,495, but with triple the mileage. Promising.

To make her a more skilled driver, though, we probably need a petrol hatch with a manual gearbox. VWs are cheap to service, so what about a three to six-year-old Polo? To minimise insurance, I looked up 1.0-litre five-door hatches, and several around £9,000 with 45-75k miles caught my eye. SEAT Ibizas were slightly better value.

Which got me thinking, what about the Spanish brand’s Arona baby SUV? The site had 13 cars for under £10k, including a 2018 red and black 1.0-litre example that had covered 44k miles. Perfect for packing in her mates and with slightly better visibility.

Alain Favey’s right that the used car market delivers, but we need enough manufacturers making affordable cars to feed the vehicle parc. And by the way, you can pick up a tidy 108 wearing 60,000 miles for about five grand, but plenty cost almost twice that. Aside from electric cars, used car prices still look pretty firm to me… 

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