The Rotting Majority: Why Good Old Cars Are Almost Impossible to Find
There is absolutely no shortage of old cars in Ireland. Hop on DoneDeal on a random Tuesday and you will find approximately four thousand of them, each one photographed at an angle that hides the dings and rust with a perfect description as having “a few small issues,” and priced by an owner who clearly believes sentimentality is a legitimate valuation metric. Believe me when I say that we have the dreamers call our phone number looking for the “best price” on their old heap.
What there is a shortage of is good old cars. Well-maintained, properly cared-for, honestly presented old cars. Those are rarer than a sunny August in Mayo.
The reason for this isn’t that complicated. It is one of the most predictable outcomes in the history of human ownership — most people are absolutely terrible at looking after things and most especially, looking after cars.
Consider the economics. When a car is new, it gets washed, serviced and even loved. The tyres are checked even on a rainy Wednesday on the M7. The oil is changed on schedule so we won’t upset any warranty issues. A scratch on the door becomes a crisis from an Agatha Christy “whodoneit”. Fast-forward eight years and the same car has developed a worrying knock that the owner has been “keeping an eye on” for fourteen months. The service light has been on so long it has become part of the interior ambiance when driving at night. The NCT is six weeks away and the car is about to fail on three separate items that could have been sorted for fifty quid each two years ago by the local young lad, but no one bothered.
This is the natural lifecycle of the average privately-owned car. Love, followed by tolerance, followed by neglect, followed by DoneDeal.
And here’s the thing — cars are extraordinarily good at taking the abuse while still going on with life. A modern car, even a mediocre one, will keep moving long past the point where it was designed to. The engine will rattle but run. The brakes will still mostly work. The gearbox will complain but oblige. This is a feat of engineering brilliance that has had one unintended consequence: it has allowed owners to avoid confronting the true state of their vehicle for literally years at a time.
The result is a market flooded with cars that are technically alive but spiritually broken. They have lived full, difficult lives. They have been driven hard, serviced rarely, repaired cheaply, and handed between owners who each assumed the next person would sort it out.
Meanwhile, the genuinely well-kept examples — the ones with full dealer service history, no advisories, new belts, known owners, and honest mileage — vanish almost immediately. They sell privately within twenty-four hours, usually to someone who has been searching for six months and pounces the moment they appear. They sell at a premium that looks insane until you consider what the alternative looks like.
The alternative is the DoneDeal car. The one described as “mechanically sound” by a man who has not opened the bonnet since the second Obama administration. The one with a freshly-applied coat of polish so thick it could be structural.
Why is this? Partly it is money. Regular servicing costs, and when budgets are tight, the car suffers first. Partly it is knowledge — a lot of people simply do not know what their car needs, and have never been told. Partly it is psychology. Once a car drops below a certain value, owners mentally write it off. It becomes a tool rather than an asset, and tools get used until they break.
The cruel irony is that a little attention early — a timing belt here, a set of brake pads there — would have kept that car genuinely good for another decade. Instead, a hundred small neglects compound into one very large, very expensive, very unsellable mess.
And so the market splits cleanly in two. There is an abundance of cars that have been used up. And a desperate, permanent shortage of cars that have been looked after.
The good ones were always out there. Someone just had to care enough to keep them that way. And as it turns out, that someone is rarer than the car.
