HOW TO BUY A USED LUXURY CAR IN 2025?

I'm going to just start the podcast in like a really chill way. I'm not going to smoke a blunt like Elon Musk, but my name is Z and I'm the producer here at Motor Envy.

Hey guys, my name is Mike. I'm the founder and CEO of Motor Envy and in my career I bought tens and thousands of pre owned luxury cars. And today we're going to talk a little bit about how we go about doing that and how we go about buying the right cars and protect our interest and make sure we end up with a satisfactory transaction.

So the first thing I wanted to get into today is, you know, now that we're in almost in 2025, what are the most reliable luxury cars that are out there as brands wise?

Yeah, you know, and we have an interesting vantage point on that because whenever we acquire cars, as I mentioned before, we actually put it into service. And some of these cars that we've, you know, put into service at least to consumers for a year, two years, three years or even four years. So we have as a company collected a ton of data on what cars are reliable, what cars do we consistently spend more money maintaining and I will say for us our internal data that our most reliable manufacturer, at least when it comes to sports cars is Porsche. You know, in terms of the amount of maintenance that goes into a Porsche for the miles driven, it has for us been the consistent one.

Aside from that, I would, I've got to say what are, you know, probably the brand that gave us the most challenge as far as least reliable luxury car.

You know, I'll start out by saying these cars are great cars, they're great experiences for consumers. But you know, the downside is that they're going to cost a little bit more to run and to maintain and they will have unpredictable sort of stops at the dealer. I will say on the luxury side, you know, it's probably consistently Range Rover especially. The bigger the Range Rover, the more likely it's going to require more maintenance. A maintenance is pretty expensive on the sports car side. Generally speaking, I would say it's probably McLaren's. You know, I think they have gotten so much better over the last sort of five or six years. Their reliability has gotten way better. But, but, but as a whole, you know, I think we are definitely going to be a little bit more concerned with a pre owned McLaren purchase than we would let's say a pre owned Porsche or Ferrari or, or even Lamborghini.

Yeah, I've heard, you know the reason a lot, well, a lot of problems coming from Range Rover. We just recently had a test drive that was by one of our sales. One of the, one of the literal power steering went out on the car. You just never expected along the way.

No, we never have to deal with stuff like that when it comes to let's say a Porsche any, you know, things along, things like that. But yeah, that power steering issue on that Range Rover has only got like 20,000 miles.

So at the end of the day, I still love the Range Rover styling. It's the luxury. It's, you know, gives it a good menacing look and then you know, there's people who out there who want like G wagon, stuff like that. But this is like the alternative also luxury opt option for a luxury SUV if you are searching for one and out there at this moment.

Yeah, no, absolutely. They're great cars. They're super comfortable. You know, they drive well, they got great tech. You know, they definitely have certain status to a Range Rover always. Right. It's what the Queen and King rides in in Great Britain. So you know, the great cars, they just, you know, you got to expect to spend a little bit more money on, on maintenance. I would also add that based on our experience, you know, for what it's worth, we've also done a lot of EVs. We've done a lot of Teslas. You know, I would say that they're not as reliable as people think they are. I think generally speaking, you know, yes, they have less moving parts. Yes. You know, there's generally the consumables are not as bad but man, when a Tesla goes bad, it's like an iPhone won't turn on and you're just freaking stuck and there's nothing you can do, nobody can help you. You can't tow it to the nearest shop of any kind because the only people that can diagnose it is Tesla. And so every single time something goes wrong with it, it's usually leaves you stranded. And so while that doesn't happen. Super. It happens enough with our experience that, you know, I would not put Tesla or you know, other EVs at this juncture to be the most reliable car. Yeah.

Plus as I do all the production on the site, you know, I, I don't like how they look anyways.

Well, you know, that's not my personal opinion. You know, like a lot of people like those EVs but you know, right now for luxury consumers it is. They still prefer gasoline and they still prefer, you know, being able to feel the car and all those things.

I mean, like you said it before, evs make, I guess, you know, they're efficient but you know, when it comes to a luxury consumer, they want something fun. They're still going to choose gas over these, you know, evs that are still, I mean EV technology will probably get better over the years. It's just probably not right now.

Yeah, well, I don't know if the technology will help it become more fun somehow. Don't see that. It will certainly make it more reliable. Maybe it drives itself.

I know you won't have one in your driveway anytime soon, you know, you.

Know, it's funny because I can, you know, in my job I have the luxury. I'm fortunate to be able to pretty much drive any car I want and I always walk by the evs and I respect them. You know, I think it's great when we have customers that like them and we're here to help them with that. But for me personally, you know, you'll pretty much never see me grab the keys to electric car.

Yeah, sometime I have to move them. But hey, that's a conversation for another time. But let's get into, you know, method of getting the car right, you know, as far as, you know how to get get these luxury vehicles.

Yeah, I mean, you know, when it comes to pre owned luxury, there's really two ways to go about it for the mainstream consumer. You can either obviously buy the car, which is pretty traditional. I don't think I need to tell anybody. You know what that means? You can either pay cash or you can get a loan. The only other alternative for pre owned luxury is subscription. And it's, you know, it's obviously what motor envy does. We basically enable our customers to get a car from us, make payments on the car a lot of times most of the time even get a car that they want, that they picked as if they're going to buy the car, except they don't have to buy it. We buy it for them, we maintain it for them, we put into service and then we're done. When they're done with it, we get rid of it. So those are the two best ways or really only ways to get a pre owned luxury car. There are some sort of leasing programs, what they call open ended leasing programs out there that are available from like the Putnams, the Premiers, the luxury lease partners of the world where they, where you can use an open ended lease to get an exotic car. You know what an open ended lease basically means is you have to buy the car at the end of the lease as opposed to just giving it back to the dealer. But these for the most part are not for everybody. They only work for exotic cars most times, cars over 100,000 and most of the time a car is over 250,000. So for AMGs, Mercedes 9 11s and things like that, a subscription service or just buying the car outright is probably your best bet.

Two methods that you gave me on how to acquire a vehicle, could you break them down for me?

Yeah, basically the two ways are either buy the car or subscribe to a car. I think the biggest difference is buying a car, you have to do all the work. And I'm going to be able to tell you step by step in terms of what all the stuff that you have to do if you subscribe to a car. Basically this, the company providing a subscription service, I.e. motor India, would do all the work for you. So it's, it's a much more transparent, fast, easy process. But, but I could go into how to buy a pre owned luxury car. You know, first thing is, first thing obviously you have to do is determine what need you have as a car, right? Do you want something that hauls around the family in style or do you want to go fast? Do you want to it to attract attention or do you just want to feel good when you're inside the car no one else noticed? You know, those are, those are the things that, that you have to decide. You have to also decide, you know, once you kind of like figure out what kind of car you're gonna get, you're gonna, you also have to decide are you trying to sort of buy the car and you know, are you trying to buy the best car that you can possibly find given the brand and the, the trim and the make, model, what have you, or are you gonna try to, you know, spend the least amount of money, right? And, and try to buy the car at its most optimal time. In general, what we see here is the most optimal part of a car is a car that is still under factory warranty, right? So, you know, generally factory warranties are four years, but not necessarily brand new. Because the steepest part of a depreciation curve for car and car owners, which basically just means that the most expensive part of the car, the most expensive time to buy a car is when the car is new. The most optimal time to buy a car, therefore, is when the car is still under warranty but not brand new. So that's usually when the car is 24 months to 36 months old. You know, a lot of luxury cars depreciate half their value in a matter of three years. Just think about that, right? If you buy it historically, if you buy a $200,000 Range Rover, in three years, it'll be worth about a hundred. Same thing with Bentleys, same thing with a lot of Jaguars. So, you know, I would say that you definitely don't want to buy a. If you care about money, right? You care about how much you're spending, you definitely don't want to buy, you know, a Range Rover. You know, when it's one month old, brand new, one month old, or five months old, you kind of want to wait. You know, when it's two years old and you still have the peace of mind of a manufacturer warranty at that point, but you're paying heck of a lot less, you know, probably sometimes, you know, you're only paying 60 to 70% of the original MSRP of the car, as opposed to paying the 100%. We tend to also recommend people to find the lowest mileage car that you can find that is two years old, two to three years old, because generally speaking, you know, most cars are priced similarly. Whether it has 30,000 miles or 3,000 miles. You're probably not going to save a lot of money by buying a 30,000 mile car as opposed to a 3,000 mile car. And a 30,000 mile car in terms of maintenance needs, the probability of something happening to it, breaking whatever, is way higher than a car with 3,000 miles. Also, it's very important to look at the data on the car, right? You want cars that are accidentally free. Ideally, carfax provides all that information to you. You want cars that are, you know, perfectly squeaky clean, which basically means no accidents, no damage reported, no limit law buyback, definitely no rebuilt title cars. And there's nothing wrong with those things. It's just that, you know, as an average consumer, unless you're ready to get into some of these nitty gritty technicalities of what it constitutes a rebuilt title car lemon law buyback, you probably shouldn't be messing with with it. You should probably just be buying the cleanest car you can find. One owners, maybe two low miles, 24 to 36 months old. And you know, generally speaking, you will be able to minimize your cost of ownership when you do those things.

Vber behind the scenes stuff, it's like, it's like, how does this mic actually work? I mean, like, I know you messed with it the other day. It's like, I can make like a, like a dog sound.

Hold on I can't hear it.

Yeah, I know, but the people can't hear it later. How does motor envy as a company, we go out and, you know, buy, you know, some of these pre owned luxury cars.

Yeah, I mean, this is like a very important part of our business to buy cars properly, to buy, to source the right product for our clients and to make sure we, you know, reduce our cost of ownership, which reduces, you know, which brings value for the customer and also, you know, reduce our maintenance expenses. So the buying part is absolutely what we focus on generally. So first of all, it starts with we built a lot of technologies in house to help us source these cars, to find the, you know, the, the cars that we're looking for. And then we have a team of professional car buyers who really travel the country buying the best cars. That being said, there are still some things that I can share with, you know, our audience so that they can maybe take some of these tips and when they go buy a car, you know, they, they follow these steps. First of all, we tried to find the color, the, the cars that, with the most unique colors options. We try to find very attractive cars. And in the luxury car game, the various options, the color combinations matter a ton. Right. Not only does it give us more pleasure out of driving these cars that are amazing, it also increases our resale value, which will limit our total cost out of pocket down the road.

Yeah, we have that one Arrow kit, one that we have in stock right now that's like the, you know, you know, Porsche is way more than me. But just that trim specifically, is it like a really rare, like people are looking for type?

Yeah, I mean it's, you know, it looks like a GT3, but it's not. And it's the cost of a base Carrera. So there's a lot of value there. You know, when it comes to Porsches, sport Chronos important. Sport exhaust is important. But you know, colors are important too, right? Like, you know, a silver car will always be a little challenging for a luxury car, but you know, louder colors, like in Porsche World, you know, Miami blue, shark blue, yellow does well. You know, right now we have an orange Corvette ca. You know, it's like we try to find interesting colors, but any event, it starts with the right product selection. And then of course, you know, if you're going to buy it from a dealer versus buying it from an individual, I think if you buy it from an individual, it pays a lot of dividends to get to know that person. You know, is this a person that Seems to be responsible. Are they. You know, are they. What are they doing with the car? You know, are they sort of modding it or tuning it? Are they taking it to the racetrack, or are they sort of just consuming it? You know, once. Once every couple of weeks. You know, sometimes they have five or six cars, and this is just something that's a passion of theirs, and they drive it every once in a while. I mean, obviously, we're looking for cars that have the least amount of wear and tear. We're looking for people that are obsessive about their cars. We want to buy cars from people that love their cars, like their family, you know, because they probably did all the maintenance. They probably done all the right things to. To prolong the life of the car. So that's very important to get a history of that. And then finally, I think we need to cut there. Let me think. What else is.

I was gonna say, would you say it's like. Is it like a more risky to buy from a private dealer?

We find it to be way riskier to buy from dealers than from individuals. It's ironic because we are a dealer, and so, you know, of course, we have dealers that we trust that we do business with, and they're great people, and we love them, and we've done years of business with each other. We handle. We can transact millions of dollars without, you know, in cars without thinking twice. But generally speaking, we don't like to do business with new dealers. We find that individuals in the luxury car segment. Individuals are generally more. More reputable. You know, a lot of these people that own these luxury cars are doctors, they're lawyers, they're business owners. They don't have time to mess around. They. They have. You know, these are people that accomplish things and in their careers, and they're probably not out to scam you. And if, you know, they're probably. And if they are, they're probably not that great at it. We can probably spot it from a mile away. But a lot of dealers, unfortunately, are professionals at, you know, not doing the right thing. Right. And, you know, sometimes those dealers sort of give all of us a bad name. But for all intents and purposes, I'm way more afraid of doing business with dealers than I am with individuals.

Yeah, Because I think we had that one shop whose name I forgot that was in the same complex as us. Sold a car to a gentleman in Hawaii and just. I think it was like $246,000 and just never sent the vehicle out. And now it's like hurting the business for a lot of, you know, luxury car sector dealers.

Yeah. I mean, it happens all the time. They sell cars, they don't have titles. They're hiding stuff because at the end of the day, they're pros. Right. And sometimes you can take that professionalism and create value out of it by taking care of your customers, or you can take that professionalism and do bad things with it and like, scamming people because it's hard for them to, you know, because they're really good at it, and it's hard for. It's easy for them to cover their tracks, and it's hard for them to get sort of exposed. That's why we tend to not like to buy cars from those people, from professionals. Right. Because, you know, we just have a lot more, More. More chances of sort of getting stomped on something than just the end consumer who just wants to sell. Yeah.

I think what Mike is saying, like, I think it's. It's better since when they're not a dealer, you're building, like, a more intimate connection, I believe.

Well, you can do that. You can build a more intimate connection. I mean, ultimately, it's a business transaction. We like to buy from our consumers because, you know, because they can end up becoming a lifelong customer of ours. We have people, whether they sell us their cars and then they keep calling us back for years to buy their cars, or sometimes they'll buy cars from us, or at some point, sometimes they start saying, okay, why am I buying these cars? Let me just go and subscribe them with motor envy. So we have the opportunity to, you know, to do the other side of the transaction. When we buy from. From private, of course, you know, we have the opportunity to sell dealers cars as well. But. But we. Look, we're in. We're in business. We're a retailer. We're in business to service retail consumers. We're not in a business of service dealers. Dealers are part important part of our business, but that's not why we're in business. Right. So, you know, so we rather do business with retailers when, whenever the opportunity.

Arises, there's a lot of good cars out there and there's definitely a lot of bad cars out there. So how do a consumer like, you know, our audience protect themselves from buying the wrong car?

Yeah, so as I mentioned before, it starts with the interview of the seller. They potentially know a lot more about the car than you at this point. In fact, they should know more about their car than you once that passes the smell test. If you Will then the next thing is for you to kind of lay your own hands on the car. You know, if you're buying from a reputable dealer, a lot of people don't come and look at it, which is fine, but you really gotta find a reputable dealer. If you buy it from a consumer, you know, there's probably more work that you have to do. You have to travel there, you have to go take a look at the car. Unless, you know, unless you're mechanically inclined, you should probably have it inspected by a reputable shop, which is what the industry call a PPI or pre purchase inspection. If you're a mechanically inclined, at least go take it for a test drive, take a look at the car, make sure it's, there's no red flags. You know, there's no, there's no telling signs this car was abused or not taken care of. Like when we look at Porsches for instance, you know, whenever we see things like track tires or roll bar or racing harnesses, that, that, that, that, that, that will make us want to dig a little deeper, right. Just to make sure. It's not that there's anything wrong with those type of cars, it's just that we're going to be more careful. We're seeing signs that, you know, we need to take a closer look. So you know, getting, putting hands on the car, driving the car is super important. Especially if you don't do this for a living and you know, you're, and it's a one off, you want to be as careful as possible as far.

As like pre purchase inspections. You know, personally I, I have never even done a pre person because I'm a, I'm a more mechanically inclined than most people. But that's like, you know, JDM sector. You know, I told you this, I, I want to get into a Porsche eventually. So like for like pre purchase inspection do I just go to like a, you know, mechanic that I trust or is there a way to go about it, finding the right Porsche person? Do it.

I would make sure you find somebody that has domain expertise in the car that you're looking to inspect. So like, you know, I know a lot of people in the past hire sort of these generic companies. You know, there's one out there called Lemon Squad for instance. Nothing wrong with their service. I think they're very much generalist. But you know, you're gonna get what you pay for. You're gonna get a generalist diagnostic. You know, when it comes to general cars like a Chevrolet Equinox probably okay but if you got a Ferrari 488, you know, you kind of want to make sure you get a, a technician or somebody knowledgeable about Ferrari.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Because it's like, you know, I can look at like my, A six. I could, I can tell you, I can, I can close my eyes and tell you what's wrong with it. You know, it's like Porsche. I'm not exposed to it. So it's finding the right person who knows like the mechanical knowledge for it. It's very hard, I guess.

Well, just, you know, I would just search for somebody with some sort of Porsche experience, Porsche background. You know, I wouldn't, you know, I, I wouldn't put a lot of, you know, emphasis on a ppi that was done by someone who is familiar with Fords, really familiar with fors, and then, you know. But you're getting them to do a PPI on a pre owned Porsche.

Yes, for me and the audience is, you know, find someone who is not a generalist when it comes to buying specific vehicles such as like a pre owned luxury car.

Yeah, I mean, look, you know, if, if you guys want to give us a call, we'll be happy to help you, you know, get an opinion on a car, even if you're not buying a car from us, you know, because we know that in the long term maybe you'll consider us in the future. You know, so we're, you know, our salespeople and this is the way we operate as a company. We're happy to do those things and just give you some free advice if, if that helps you. We can pretty much tell a car is good or not good just by, you know, taking 30 seconds. So once the car checks out and you've inspected it in person, maybe taken it for a test drive, then it's time to pay. And the only thing that I would suggest you do is just get some sort of validation the person has the title and is the rightful owner of the car. Our internal process, we make sure that a title, you know, we see a copy of the title and that the person that name is on the title is going to be present to sell the car. So this is very important step. Do not skip this step. Or you know, do not shortcut this step. It don't bite you.

Do not skip this step.

Do not skip this. It could bite you hard. But you know, just in closing, I mean, obviously buying a car is, you know, there's a lot of different things to look out for to make sure that you're on the right side of the transaction. When you join our service as a subscriber, we basically do all that for you so you can't possibly end up with a wrong car back or you don't have to go anywhere to look at anything. You don't have to do any PPIs and you don't have to worry about title anything, anything of that nature. You just, you know, everything is handled. But, you know, certainly both ways are very, very viable ways of getting your next car, luxury car.

Well, thank you to everyone that made it to this part of the video. We're going to be wrapping up today, so I'm going to pass on the mic.

Thank you guys for listening to our podcast. And I think we're excited because this is going to be something that we're going to continue to do. Hopefully you guys find value in that. We're going to share our intimate collection of car knowledge that we have obtained over the years. I think some of the possible topics for our next one is probably going to be, you know, hey, I'm stuck in the lease. I don't want to be in. How do I get out of it? Or maybe something more appropriate for this time of the market, which is, you know, a lot of people bought cars in the last couple of years since COVID and they're upside down in it. How do I deal with that negative equity situation in the car that I have? So we may have some tips on how to help you guys out with that. So, you know, comment below and what you'd like to see and then hopefully we can try to answer all that in the future episode.

And what do they say, like, subscribe, comment, follow. Thank you so much. Have a good day.