Worst place in the UK for finding decent shite

[Lanciaman]

I've had it.  I'm in Aberdeenshire - not born and bred here - but the used cars for here - the selection is just utter shit.  Maybe cos interesting stuff rots away cos of the Council dumping tons of salt on the roads and the farmer fuckers add to it with a billlion tons of mud from their bastarding oversized tonkas.

Honestly,, take out 4x4 carp and german rubbish, it leaves 5% of stuff on gumtree.  I look with envy at you lot down south with lovely pickings of old shite.   Zero old citroen, peugeot, fiat, alfa.  Nothing.   Have a VW, Audi or some such white good. Ugh.

Stella and red wine not helping with this post, but anyone else rival up here for lack of interesting cars for sale???

[jmsguzzi]

Definitely the climate, it seems all the best ebay shite and such like comes from right down south or in the middle of the country away from the sea air.

[SiC]

I'd never knowingly buy a car from Scotland. Well that's incorrect, it turns out the first owner of this 1100 was from Fife and spent quite a long time up there!

Supply is greater down here as the population density is much greater. However I avoid buying cars from cities as I find them mostly utterly shagged. Especially ones from around Birmingham. Generally avoid ones near me that are in Bristol too. 

[Mrcento]

25 minutes ago, Lanciaman said:

I've had it.  I'm in Aberdeenshire - not born and bred here - but the used cars for here - the selection is just utter shit.  Maybe cos interesting stuff rots away cos of the Council dumping tons of salt on the roads and the farmer fuckers add to it with a billlion tons of mud from their bastarding oversized tonkas.

Honestly,, take out 4x4 carp and german rubbish, it leaves 5% of stuff on gumtree.  I look with envy at you lot down south with lovely pickings of old shite.   Zero old citroen, peugeot, fiat, alfa.  Nothing.   Have a VW, Audi or some such white good. Ugh.

Stella and red wine not helping with this post, but anyone else rival up here for lack of interesting cars for sale???

With Aberdeen, It's the oil money. Seriously. (and the climate killing off the survivors).

There's not that much interesting up there because the rate of newer cars is higher, so the cast offs usually get punted off to scrap quicker or end up elsewhere because there's so little demand when keeping up with the Jones's means new car on finance at worst.

I've a few like minded (car wise) mates up there and they always used to come down to Dundee to look for stuff.

But...what i will say is over the past year-2 years, it's sort of flipped on its head. Dundee is now pretty horrendous for used cars too. Arguably even worse than Aberdeen now. The whole V+A, city regeneration bubble seems to have caused an oil money type scenario here too and it's all financed Audi Zanussis and Mercedes Hotpoints, the low end of the market is just the same sort of stuff as Aberdeen (except rather than a couple of hundred cheaper as it was a few years back, it's now often a hundred or so dearer than Aberdeen). The 'Shite' is harder and harder to come by.

When i'm browsing the ads and see what's available on the south coast and for how little, it's actually painful ? Things at 6-700 that would be 2 grand+ here and stuff that's 2-3 grand down there is more like 6 up here.

And usually in worse condition.

[New POD]

I believe Chester is THE place for Shite 

[greengartside]

I often found that when visiting my cousins/aunties/uncles up in Manchester in the 90’s/00’s, that there seemed to be an abundance of Scottish-plated cars rolling about there, they could be spotted a mile off by the Arsehole Shart* luminous sticker in the windows. I was always under the impression that they were starting to corrode underneath due to the harsh winters up there, then were punted down south (at reduced cost) where they would last a few years longer.. That may all be absolute bollocks but it did always fascinate me why there were so many of them.

 

*May not be the correct name.

[HMC]

E bay searches local to me generally are not that fruitful I think partly it’s the geography of being on a peninsula (Devon/Cornwall) 

All the best stuff seems the other end of the country but it feels like that for all of us at times I’m sure, depending on what it is we have on our radar at the time.

[Bren]

I live between Manchester and Liverpool. Lots of shite but not many good cheap cars - supply and demand I suppose. However I tend to look for diesel estates so it is no surprise many are at the end of their life.

[Richard_FM]

Certainly some interesting stuff on the roads in Stockport / South Manchester near where I live, I don’t keep too close an eye on what’s on the market.

[N19]

Arguably the best places will be city suburbs - where people don't use their car daily (they get the train/tube/bus etc) but still need one for supermarket trips etc, but as it gets used sporadically it lasts longer... whereas in provincial towns where *everything* assumes you have a car, people commute some distance daily etc, they're more likely to be replaced regularly.

[cort1977]

Totally agree about Aberdeenshire.  My solution, which may not be practical for everyone, is to buy in east London and Essex.  But only because my parents live down there.

[sutty2006]

Sounds like there’s a gap in the market here. Start buying cheep shite down south and sell it all to the northerners who are clearly in need of cheep shiters. Theshadow should be selling his stock left right and centre up there! 

[rantingYoof]

Whenever I want to depress @Supernaut and @17-Coffees I load up Autotrader and tell them how many sub-£1k shitters I can reach within an hour's drive of my house (60 miles or so). I tend to get bored before I've browsed 20 pages...a similar search using one of their postcodes returns a single page of results.

[Supernaut]

Can confirm.

I'm in Aberdeen and have only bought one car locally. Everything else has come from at least 2 hours away.

[HMC]

South Wales as the crow flies comes up on autotrader as being not that far On a by distance sort from Cornwall. I don’t fly myself by helicopter to cars for sale - it reduces further the amount of stuff nearby within x amount of time away.

[captain_70s]

Back when I used to browse eBay for classic motors and lived in Aberdeenshire I sorted cars by "Nearest first" and was looking at examples in England by the end of the first page.

All the shite has been long run into the ground and destroyed by the shit climate and road conditions, the odd interesting giffer owned motor crops up occasionally but they're rapidly vanishing. The sheer abundance of pre-2000s motors south of border is mind blowing... I used to be really confused by people saying Moggy Minors and MGBs were common and boring when I was lucky to see a couple in the wild a year. I imagine the Highlands are worse, but you kind of expect that, Aberdeenshire is pretending to be part of civilisation...

The handy thing about being in Glasgow is that the North of England is no longer a million miles away and they have loads of shit cars to choose from.

[Luxxo Waftybarger]

7 hours ago, HMC said:

South Wales as the crow flies comes up on autotrader as being not that far On a by distance sort from Cornwall. I don’t fly myself by helicopter to cars for sale - it reduces further the amount of stuff nearby within x amount of time away.

This does my head in. Despite living in mid Devon if I search within 45 miles most of the stuff is in Wales, like I can just airlift it over the Severn.

[big_al_granvia]

Try being on the west coast of Scotland, the sea air turms anything not galvanized to dust in 2 years. Not the road salt but the wind coming off the Atlantic

[sierraman]

Bradford, South Wales Birmingham, Nottingham, parts of Leeds, Wakefield, Rotherham, Rochdale, North West Manchester. I could go on. Anywhere where people are skint, shit cars and skint folk go hand in hand. 

Anything ex Carcraft or any of these 897% APR CCJ No Problem! places.

[HMC]

I am creating my own small hot spot at my end of town but that doesn’t count really

[egg]

11 hours ago, HMC said:

I think partly it’s the geography of being on a peninsula (Devon/Cornwall) 

Which is the same problem in East Kent. Even though it's the less well off side of Kent (in general). Isle of Thanet is generally a good hunting ground though.

However, most of my circular radius is in the North Sea/Thames estuary. Which means I get recommended a lot of cars in Ipswich as well...

[HMC]

Anywhere within striking distance of London isn’t on the list. It may be a false impression created by @RobT @bramz7 skills as spotters, but there seems more older stuff scattered about streets still being used as transport.

But this might be changing right here and now as the latest lez/ ulez etc related laws may make it a lot harder to find them soon as they get legislated off the streets; or at least more hassle and cost to keep running one as a daily. 

Obviously I’m not thinking so much of a 1952 Riley RME but more say a late 1980s hatchback that falls strongly into the shitezone. For instance the environment  that found the Sierra bASe @BorniteIdentity being used as a daily for so long around London would seem to be less likely to happen as time goes on.

Someone who is more clued up on this might be able to fill us in.

[Skizzer]

The South Wales / Devon thing works both ways. I can see Exmoor and Lynmouth from the top of my back garden, but not well enough to check the sills on a mk3 Escort Ghia.

In my experience, the best place for buying decent shite is @Vantman’s house in Kent. (Not that handy for Aberdeen though, I’ll grant you.)

[rob88h]

11 hours ago, sutty2006 said:

Sounds like there’s a gap in the market here. Start buying cheep shite down south and sell it all to the northerners who are clearly in need of cheep shiters. Theshadow should be selling his stock left right and centre up there! 

Very true. I did this with my wife’s Rover 100. We couldn’t give it away in Essex, but when I listed it from my parents area It got snapped up in minutes by a bloke from Wakefield. 

[rantingYoof]

1 hour ago, HMC said:

Anywhere within striking distance of London isn’t on the list. It may be a false impression created by @RobT @bramz7 skills as spotters, but there seems more older stuff scattered about streets still being used as transport.

When @Supernaut and I went to the motorshow a few years back, which was sorely disappointing, we left the show and wandered the affluent streets in the area trying to spot superchod (i.e. things perfect for the low cost big liability thread). 

We weren't disappointed and after a few random streets were seeing stuff left right and centre (one particularly memory is of an entire street full of Range Rovers). 

However, the other thing we noticed at the time was that there were loads of mid to late 1990s and early 2000s generic tat about, often rust free but dented to fuck. Checking number plates later we noticed they all had silly low mileages and probably never left London, probably never getting out of third gear. A fair few Audi A2s, actually, which we both like.

It was a rather entertaining afternoon, until we got stopped by a private security person outside a particularly posh crescent of houses who suggested we delete the previous dozen photographs we'd taken in a way gave us the impression that, if we didn't, we would probably not be leaving London that day.

[Supernaut]

2 minutes ago, rantingYoof said:

It was a rather entertaining afternoon, until we got stopped by a private security person outside a particularly posh crescent of houses who suggested we delete the previous dozen photographs we'd taken in a way gave us the impression that, if we didn't, we would probably not be leaving London that day.

I remember that. The guy was actually very polite and well-dressed but incredibly threatening at the same time.

Seemed like an interesting sort to have a pint with, bet he had a few stories.

[Tadhg Tiogar]

9 minutes ago, rantingYoof said:

... a private security person outside a particularly posh crescent of houses ...

Security contractors are a common sight on the wealthier streets here. The residents have long since given up on the Met, so hire their own. There's a street (all big detached houses, many of them with kosher-compliant kitchens) near me that has a contractor in a marked car constantly cruising up and down.

[Shite Ron]

2 hours ago, sierraman said:

Bradford, South Wales Birmingham, Nottingham, parts of Leeds, Wakefield, Rotherham, Rochdale, North West Manchester. I could go on. Anywhere where people are skint, shit cars and skint folk go hand in hand. 

I live in South Wales and have only bought one car here I the last 10 or probably 20 years and that was my girlfriends modern BMW, the rest of the cars came from all over the country, drove the Granada home from Haywards Heath in February then bought two from Evesham which is pretty close at around 100 miles, most good cars seem to be in the South East, usually Essex or Kent. I think that wherever I lived it would end up being miles from where the car I wanted was but I have always travelled to buy cars and not restricted distance for the last 20 years at least.

[Richard_FM]

I did wonder if the south coast & other places with a high population  of retirees would be good as they would be more likely to keep an older car going until they got too old to drive.

[Kringle]

Southend-on-Sea area is utterly shit for this. Unless it's a 2010 white Qashqai, whatever it's called that you want then you're fucked. Get yourself near Romford and you might pickup a Nissan Primera woo hoo.