It turns out that it’s still possible to buy a functioning car with an MOT certificate for less than £500.
I may have bought it from a friend’s parents’ neighbour, but this ULEZ-compliant Jaguar X-Type cost me just £400, complete with six months on the MOT (with only tired suspension parts as advisories) and just 53,000 miles.
From the outside, you can tell it has lived in London’s busy suburbs its whole life, but inside it looks almost new, despite the dated grey leather matching the walnut veneer like an original Mercedes-Benz A-Class and a moose test.
The 2.1-litre petrol V6 is silky smooth (although shockingly averse to making progress), while the suspension is as pliant as almost anything else these days but equally demonstrates how far body control has come in the past 20 years.
The only thing I’m not looking forward to is the running costs.
The annual road tax is £415 and the fuel consumption is diabolical. We’re talking 16mpg in town and 24mpg on a run.
The anachronistic five-speed automatic gearbox working with a complete absence of torque is to blame for this: if you set the cruise control at 70mph, the car will need to kick down to fourth at the slightest incline.
Overall, my new Jag is far from perfect, but you can’t argue with £400.
Log two: Jag faces early exit – but not for why you’d expect
After just a few months, it’s already time to move the X-Type on: it turns out that someone who commutes by train does not need two cars.
I’m not getting rid of the X-Type because it’s rubbish.
Well, it is, but in the same way your grandad is rubbish at athletics: time may not have been kind to his sporting credentials, but you still love him.
And that analogy works because your grandad probably drives, or at least drove, an X-Type, and when he bought it 20 years ago it was somewhat more competitive than it is now.
I do love the car, but unlike my grandparents I struggle to find time for it.
Driving it is surprisingly pleasurable – it offers a relaxed undertone that is missing from almost everything these days – but when I do want or need to use one of my cars, it’s my Alpina D3 that I turn to every time.