Executive cars

Your £50 a week will get you into some very smart metal indeed, but you should expect to put down a sizeable deposit if you’re to keep the monthly payments that low. The BMW 320d remains one of the very best small executive saloons with handsome styling, a very good cabin and sophisticated dynamics. The £9358 deposit does look quite steep, even with a £5648 dealer contribution, however, and a limit of 10,000 miles per year isn’t terribly generous for a car that’s designed to hack up and down motorways.

Still, that PCP deal looks suitable for an intergalactic space traveller compared with the offer we found on a Jaguar XF. A scant 6000 miles per year on a car like the XF doesn’t appear much use at all, but this offer (to say nothing of the Jag…) might well suit a retiree.

The monthly payments of £182 are among the lowest you’ll find in this entire guide, although £12,500 up front isn’t quite so affordable. We rate the XF as one of the best executive saloons on sale, second only to the brilliant BMW 5 Series, but this four-cylinder diesel model is let down by its noisy, rattly engine.

You’ll find the same unit in the new Range Rover Velar, where it is, once again, the weak link in the chain. Otherwise, though, the Velar is a very desirable executive SUV with a great cabin and sleek, modern styling. Again, though, this PCP deal is soured somewhat by a 6000-mile annual limit. The most difficult thing to get over, though, is the £17,000 deposit; you would have to be unusually cash rich and income poor for this offer to work for you. Nonetheless, it is possible to get into the SUV of the moment for less than £50 a week.