You were interested in buying a used Land Rover, of course they’re going to try and soak you. People that are good with money generally don’t buy used Land Rovers.
They generally segment out the bad-with-money crowd by the ridiculous financing/lease surcharges, not new vs used, right? (If anything, I'd say the bad-with-money people will unnecessarily prefer new over used.)
Landrover is a double whammy here, as it is a luxury badge (which typically puts you firmly in the overpriced parts and labor category) and has middling-to-poor reliability...
Per model costs can only be reliably measured for old models. New models are usually difficult to predict. I think more generally product brands are becoming harder to use as predictors of good reliability.
Disclaimer: I now avoid anything except 2nd hand Toyota - but New Zealand car market is weird due to 2nd hand imports from Japan
Used luxury cars in general aren’t a great deal, since you typically pay higher maintenance costs on a luxury car. They’re lower volume cars, so there are fewer parts made, leading to more expensive parts. Replacing the airbag suspension compressor in a Land Rover costs $5k+, each of the (four) suspension airbag costs a few thousand dollars to replace and they usually need replacing after 100k miles.
Financing rates are how people who are bad with money with bad credit get fleeced, 17% 7 year loans for instance. There are people that are bad with money but have good credit, you fleece them by flattering their ego with an $1895 ‘executive concierge service’.
My Lexus tends to be cheaper to run than my Nissan. But it is also old enough that it is mostly interchangeable with a Camry for parts
In the next 6 months he had to
- Check engine light on. Checked multiple time. Never went away
- Replace engine gasket
- replace rear diff
- replace rear axle (did the dealership broke this?)
The worst thing was, he actually bought warranty from the car dealership, but they managed to weasel out every single item.
Pardon me if I am on the grandparent's side.
As the ol saying goes, nobody sells a vehicle they're happy with (of course people do, but they're predisposed to pawn off a dumpster fire by concealing the smoke with bags of tricks). With the used market such a shit-show right now it's almost no point to buy used anyway -- I finally just bought a new Toyota because the used ones with 100k+ miles were selling a few grand under MSRP.
Also, morality aside, the resale-ability of your Collora is on the exact opposite end versus a used Land Rover.
A $30k BMW is way more expensive than a $30k Toyota.
With Lexus you are cherry picking a bit though, their maintenance costs tend to be in line with other Toyota's, among the cheapest of all.
They are an exception though, for luxury badges. The germans are mostly terrible for this, and the "premium" american badges are pretty bad too.