How much do you splash out on expensive car options?

Apart from metallic paint, I did not select any extras (that can be an expensive game) but chose a model with a DAB/FM radio, parking sensors and a a spare wheel (sadly not a proper one). I would have liked a rear camera to watch out for mini-bollards but the parking sensors seem adequate. I would have paid a little extra for proper steel wheels rather than alloy ones, since I know so many people who have had problems with damage and corrosion of alloys and I do want to keep my car for ten years. One standard feature that is conspicuously unused is the ability to connect a phone. I’m going to concentrate on my driving, thank you.

My reason for choosing silver-grey metallic paint is that the other colours on offer would have shown the mud more and I don’t enjoy washing cars, though I have a couple of neighbours who seem to gain great satisfaction from this activity. Having a silver-grey metallic car means that I get plenty of exercise searching for mine in large car parks. 🙂

Your example of the BMW X5 is a very good one. I have bought two of them brand new, and your figures are very accurate. If the buyer doesn’t spend thousands on certain extras (e.g. around £2000 for a built-in sat nav), the car will be very difficult to sell at a later date. It’s even worse in other European countries, where the standard equipment is much less than a standard UK model. I believe that by excluding options that 99.9% of buyers add in order to make the car re-saleable, BMW is giving a misleading indication of price. It also helps with insurance policies if all the equipment is part of the standard specification rather than optional extras.

My problem here is with BMW, not with the franchised dealers. The latter are usually very helpful with telling customers which extras to add or leave out. For example, if you want to spend around £1,000 on a head-up display, the dealers will tell you not to bother as you won’t get it back later in resale value.

My eldest son wanted a BMW 5 series diesel. Bought one secondhand for £16.5k that happened to be complete with all the extras – electric heated leather seats, self-closing doors, window blinds, all-round sensors, sat-nav and TV etc. I reckon he paid for the extras and got the car free.

Answers to the two headline questions:

a) How much do you splash out on expensive car options?

A maximum of 10% of the car purchase price. Usually metallic paint.

b) Do you think some optional extras shouldn’t be extras at all?

If a safety feature is available in a car, it should always be included as standard. How is an uninformed consumer supposed to decide between ABS brakes and an upgraded sound system? How do you know you will never need an air bag that could help save your passenger’s life?

Another rip-off by car manufacturers is deliberately fitting obsolete entertainment technology as standard so that car buyers have to pay for an optional extra to upgrade it to the current technology; they have been doing this for years. In the days when everyone had CDs and when cassettes were long gone, the standard equipment was usually a cassette player, so one had to pay extra for a simple CD player. Now that everyone has MP3s, they fit CD players as standard, meaning you have to pay extra for a USB port to play MP3s. The ridiculous thing is that the underlying cost of this equipment is the same, but the manufacturers charge a hefty premium for the current technology in order to reduce the headline price of the car and facilitate a misleading indication of price.

I usually try to buy ex-demo or nearly new, so that hopefully the previous owner has already loaded up the options, which usually don’t add a lot to the sale price.

One thing that annoys me now is that metallic paint is always extra but there are usually very few, if any, non-metallic finishes available. A couple of years ago I was browsing the Jazz and Fiesta brochures and I think each only had one non-metallic, ie. pillar-box red. About time metallic paint just became the standard option.