Thread: Low Km's worth extra $$$

Originally Posted by Grumbles

From what I see on Carsales many asking prices are aspirational rather than realistic and these same cars just sit there unsold. In fact from what I can gather many never even get an inquiry.

I have a car on carsales at the moment (not Landrover). I had it advertised at a reasonable price and was inundated with time wasters, tyre kickers and people who just wanted to see how low I would go. To give you an Idea of what I am dealing with, after telling a potential buyer I had rejected an offer of $4,000, he offered $3,000 sight unseen. It is worth $5,000 and was advertised for $5,000. Since I upped the advertised price to a ridiculous $6,500 the fewer enquiries have been more serious.The latest one offered $4,500 sight unseen.
But I'm rambling.
Carsales prices are where the seller wants to start negotiating at because the buyer does not want to pay advertised price.
In my opinion, low km (sub 100,000km) is worth extra as is service history. How much extra depends on the car and what you intend to do with it. If you are going to use the Landrover off road in anger, you will more than likely break or damage things anyway so I wouldn't think low or high km's would be much of a concern.

It is not as simple as saying that low kms is good or low kms is bad. Apart from the other things that have been mentioned, it depends how those kms were accumulated.

My daughter once bought an immaculate dual cab Hilux. It had about 70,000 kms but had been meticulously serviced on time rather than distance, so it had been serviced up to about 140,000 kms.

Sounds good so far doesn't it? However after a year or so it was found to have so much tar built up in the sump, that it was beginning to be starved of oil. Fortunately she noticed a slight noise, caught it early and no damage was done.

The problem seems to have been that it was an ex-RAAF vehicle, I think from Wagga, and we suspect that it was used mainly to drive down the airstrip to shoo the birds away to allow planes to land safely, then driven back without the motor having warmed up.

On the other hand I became the owner of a 1998 Camry that was 14 years old and had done just 124,000 kms, about 6 years worth of running. It has now done nearly 300,000 kms and apart from the usual consumables like timing belts, it has been trouble free apart from a water pump and a head gasket and a radiator.

if the low kms is the result of a large number of very short trips where the engine doesn't warm up, that can be a problem. I believe that it is more of a problem with diesels and particularly Toyota diesels.

On the other hand if the low kms is the result of infrequent trips long enough to get everything thoroughly warm, then a low km vehicle can be expected to give you more time before things begin to wear out.