Bang for your buck, performance for your pound, dash for your cash, wallop for your wad… whatever you want to call it, I think we can agree that this is not a high-brow concept.
Indeed, and at its heart, it is a number arrived at extremely easily for more than 40 years now, since the widespread availability of that diminutive giant of the computer age, the pocket calculator. Price divided by power.
And yet there is a certain simple honesty in the number that results. So simple, in fact, that we wondered why, as far as any of us can remember, no one has ever tried to pull out a few examples of cars that, by this charmingly crude method at least, offer a particular kind of value for money.
One horsepower. How much would you be prepared to pay for a single bhp? Perhaps more than you’d think. Down in the bargain basement of cheapo petrol-powered push-along mowers, you might pay as little as £50 for a unit of power equivalent to an ability to lift 75kg a distance of one metre in a second – which is one measurement of a single metric horsepower – but in our automotive world, you’ll have no such chance.
Cars need doors, windows, furniture, gearboxes, differentials, equipment, space and many other items not identified as traditional requirements for lawn mowers, so, in the event, it’s remarkable just how close to this mark some cars actually come.
So what follows are some examples in different categories of cars and their rating in pure bang-for-your-buck terms. The list is not and was never intended to be exhaustive, but more a collection of cars that we like or find interesting or perform notably well or badly on this scale. You may well find others you regard as worthy of note or inclusion and, if so, we look forward to hearing about them from you.
And finally, as for how to interpret what constitutes an impressive bang-for-buck ratio, we found precious few cars in our trawl whose creators charged less than £100 for each of their horsepower. So anything with a double-digit bang-for-buck ratio can be regarded, in these terms at least, as a 24-carat bargain.
Hot hatchbacks
I suspect that, instinctively, we all know that if you want to buy a lot of horsepower for not a lot of money, a hot hatchback is a good place to start shopping, but we did not realise just what value these cars represent until we started working on this story.
Among all groups, there is a greater density here of cars that get close to or duck under the £100/bhp than anywhere else. And it’s not just the cheap hatches, either. In fact, it’s the Ford Focus RSs and Honda Civic Type Rs of this world that offer the most for least, with hot BMW and Mercedes hatches also providing conspicuous value.
5. Suzuki Swift 1.6 Sport 3dr - £105/bhp
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Used cars...?
spectron wrote:
Great post. Plus used cars are the only truly environmentally friendly choice - to claim anything else is hypocritical posturing.
Mustang?!...when that come out?
Old concept ?