According to FlightRadar24 (an essential app purchase) last night a 1979 Fairchild Metro II flew over my house. This is an aeroplane which is still in viable revenue-earning status after 35 years of maintenance. I also know that DHL routinely fly thirty-year old 757s out of my local airport. The idea that these old birds are kept running made me wonder, yet again, why doing the same thing with cars seems to be becoming such a minority sport.
So I’ve been having another of my brainwaves. Welcome to the first of my ideas this year for potentially losing a sensational amount of money.

Some people can’t be stopped changing their cars on a seasonal basis according to fashion, boredom or simply the desire to spend all their money as quickly as physically possible. Nothing wrong with that. In fact I’ll say a huge thank you to them for keeping our car industry (and our finance industry) alive. At the other end of the spectrum are those who will move from one old beater to the next, drive them ’til they’re used up and throw them away at the next inspection, never spending a bean apart from on fuel and insurance (and some folk still think this is optional).
I’m somewhere in the middle. I love new cars but the economic model of purchase and depreciation has my inner Scotsman in a cold sweat. If I had to replace my car I would want to buy something that I knew I’d want to keep for a long, long time, so I might as well let somebody wealthier than me absorb that initial cliff-face of depreciation. I’ll buy it at three years old when it’s nicely run in.
Trouble is, the kind of car I want is much older than three years old. In fact, I’m pretty sure that the car I’d want as a nearly-new car is an E39 BMW 5 Series, and the youngest one of those is now eleven years old.

And so we move onto my hypothesis, and what could be the acorn from which a mighty oak of financial ruin and despair could grow. Bear with me for a moment and tell me if there’s even a nanopercent of reasonable logic to my rambling.
A new 5 Series starts at $50,000. A very nice, late E39 is probably about $5,000 and is still a really, really good car. But the problem with buying an E39 now is that it could well be beset by all manner of awful hidden woes which have been sidestepped by their most recent custodian. Complexity is the enemy of resilience, and old age withers us all.
So, let’s talk about re-manufacturing. You don’t want a car which keeps eating ball-joints, bearings and bushes. Any E39 will have taken plenty of potholes through its chassis, so lets change them all. Maybe even the dampers and springs. Suspension components aren’t the most expensive things in the world, and they put up with a huge amount of punishment so deserve special attention. We can change the brake pads and discs while we’re at it. By now we’re probably looking at a $2000 bill.
We’ll do a diagnostic test on the engine and transmission and thoroughly check for signs of potential leakage. In fact, we’ll do this first as an opportunity to reject anything which looks like being more trouble than it’s worth. A damn good service with new filters, plugs and oils will be performed so that the car starts its new life on a firm maintenance foundation. Allow for $1000+ worth of repairs as necessary.
A lot of what’s left to do is cosmetic stuff. The interior is likely to be well worn by now, and replacement trim parts will probably be needed, but there are loads of E39s in junkyards from which these can be sourced with relative ease, and there’s always the BMW parts network to fall back on if necessary. By the way, when scouting for potential base cars for this project we’ll try to avoid anything with a sunroof, and steer clear of cars with the factory navigation system. Who wants a fifteen year old satnav? It’s just another thing to go wrong, anyway.
At the end of all this we’ve probably got receipts for over $10,000 including the car. What we now need is somebody willing to buy it for enough money to give us a profit. But, wait, nobody will buy this if all it is is a grotesquely overpriced used car, so it’s going to need a pretty ironclad warranty. So, let’s give it one. We’ll put $3,000 aside, per car, for warranty repairs. We won’t cover wear and tear items, just big stuff. We’ll also write into that warranty that a condition of its issue is that we reserve the right to EXCHANGE the vehicle as we see fit, for equal value of course. That’s up to the buyer’s discretion.
So now, all we need is somebody willing to spend $20,000 to buy a 2003 E39. OK, there’s nobody out there insane enough to do this. In fact anybody who’d even consider it ought to report themselves to the authorities right now to get themselves checked over before they hurt somebody.

But what if this was a NEW E39? Well, there’s no such thing, but this is as close as you’ll get. HOW MUCH marketing would it take to convince people that buying a “new” E39 for $20,000 and keeping it for years and years at least as much financial sense as buying a NEW F10 5-Series, losing $20,000 immediately and then having to do exactly the same thing again in three years time? Especially with the aforementioned ironclad warranty that I’m sure will work out brilliantly.
It needn’t even be an E39, I just use that as an example because I’m comfortable with them. Name your car, the principal would be the same. Classic car specialists routinely carry out restoration work and recommissioning when they sell a £300,000 vintage Ferrari, the only difference here is the value of the base car . I’m just applying the same logic to the real world, on a car which will need to be reliable and enjoyable on a daily basis. And a “restored” E39 with a MASSIVE warranty behind it ought to be just the ticket.
I’m floating my business on the stock exchange next Monday.
(All images stolen from various corners of the internet. If you recognise one and want it taken down, please let us know).