Depreciation is the ultimate double-edged sword of the car world. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, it’s the measure of how much value a car loses as it ages. You buy a new car for, say, $50,000, and by the time you go to sell it in four years, you’re only able to get about $32,000 for it. The rest of that money is gone, paid as a tax to the car gods for the privilege of owning a nice vehicle.
And so the car will continue to depreciate until, after a decade or more, it ends up in the hands of the latest „I Bought The Cheapest [previously expensive luxury car] In The USA, And It’s BROKEN“ YouTube channel. But this means that cars once well outside the realms of affordability for the masses are now starting to get within reach. If we shop carefully, we could find ourselves buying and owning something we could only ever dream of, provided we are prepared for a whirlwind of potential issues and ruinously expensive maintenance costs.
Two such depreciated gems come to us from the damp islands of the United Kingdom, the country that basically invented heavily depreciated cars. Both the achingly gorgeous Aston Martin V8 Vantage and the equally gorgeous but slightly more modern Jaguar F-Type sports coupes have come down in price harder than a rack of dress shirts in a clothing store going out of business. They might as well be sold with „Clearance! Everything Must Go!“ signs in their windows. Though this means the first owners of these cars have taken massive hits to their investments, it also means good news for the rest of us.
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For little more than a well-spec’d Lexus or Acura, we could get our hands on some of the finest, most beautiful, and most evocative luxury sports coupes from the country that does luxury sports coupes the best. The question is: Aston or Jag, which one is the better deal?
How Do They Compare On Paper?
Aston martin V8 vantage interiorvia astonmartin.com
The Aston Martin V8 Vantage predates the Jaguar F-Type by almost a decade. It launched in 2005 and remained in production until 2017. Aston doesn’t rush its model upgrades. However, there was a Jaguar connection even back then: the 4.3l V8 engine was based on Jag’s AJ engine architecture, but Aston made a number of changes to the basic design for use in the Vantage.