Now’s the time for a rethink – buy with your head, not your heart

This year has forced us to reconsider how we get about. It might seem obvious advice, but if you’re in the market for a new model, consider what you really need it for, says

The internet is awash with patronising clickbait articles about “how to choose a car that’s right for you”. Offering analytical gems such as “set your budget” and “make sure there’s enough room for the dog”, these articles do very little to guide their readers through the bewildering choice of cars available, nor to address the elephant in the showroom – the fact that we often buy cars with our hearts, not our heads.

That is to say, we buy the car that we want, rather than the one that will best suit our needs. If this were a purely pragmatic decision, we’d all be driving Peugeot e-208s, Skoda Octavias or Subaru Foresters. But we don’t – we’re swayed by brand, by advertising, by intangible ideas of status. Whether we say it aloud or not, we buy cars because of how we think they make us look. And we can’t really help it.

As car critics, this is both hugely exciting and deeply demoralising. Exciting because it means we get to drive a 200mph supercar that does 10mpg and recommend it with a straight face; demoralising because we give five-star reviews to brilliant, affordable, well-engineered cars knowing that everybody is going to buy the worse but more fashionable rivals instead.

So instead of trying to unpick the fundamental drivers of human behaviour, I’ll try to distil our new-car-buying advice into a single principle: buy enough car.

Don’t buy too little, and don’t buy too much. Don’t buy a car that will struggle with what you need it for, and don’t buy a car with capabilities that far exceed your daily routine. If your day begins with a high-speed motorway commute, don’t buy a 35 kwh urban EV such as the Honda e; if your existence revolves around Waitrose and the school gates, then you’re unlikely to need the 90cm wading depth of the new Land Rover Defender.

Everybody – you, us, the marketing departments of car manufacturers – knows that most buyers ignore this incredibly obvious advice, and will continue to crave more powerful, more expensive and larger cars with every passing model year.

But this year has forced us to analyse what we do, and how we’ve been doing it; there’s never been a more important time to rethink the way we get about.