10 used cars for less than £15k we’ve found this week

It’s a simple enough premise. While cars have been named after a great many things – places and races, breezes and other bits and pieces – an automobile named after an animal is almost always superior. Unless the prospect of driving a Viper, Cougar or Hornet somehow doesn’t appeal to you in ways you can’t fully understand or explain, in which case there’s probably an article about the Renault Espace or something that’ll be more up your street. 

For the rest of us, it’s time to take a whirlwind, whistle-stop tour of 10 superlative nameplates for less than 15 grand. And often with eight cylinders, come to think of it.

And sometimes not, in the case of the Ford Puma. 

Americans have superchargers with bigger displacement than the Puma’s entire engine – even the biggest, most powerful and Yamaha-fettled engine only managed 1.7 litres. What’s worse, it was front-wheel drive and based on the Fiesta. You can almost feel the revulsion from the other side of the pond. But, of course, the Puma was actually brilliant; it was a complete riot to drive in a way that made a mockery of its mundane origins and milk-bottle displacement. In our book, the best bet is something with the aforementioned 1.7-litre, 16v four-cylinder. And being patient enough to wait for a deal on a Ford Racing Puma... 

Like this one that just sold, for instance

Yes, Doc from Cars was a real thing. And no, Larry the Cable guy (credited as the voice of Mater) isn’t – he’s a character invented by comedian Daniel Whitney. 

Anywho, the Hornet you’ll get for £15,000 likely won’t be the two-door, but then it’s unlikely to sound eerily like Paul Newman, either. 

What you will get, however, is a four-door saloon that gives almost nothing away to its two-door version in terms of looks or performance. And yes, those looks are particularly menacing. Oh, and they're also hiding an advanced unitary body underneath, when Hudson’s competitors were still using ladder frames. Plus the Hornet absolutely dominated NASCAR back in the day... which explains certain choices the Pixar team made, come to think of it. 

Just as long as no one mentions Cars 2, we should be OK

But of course it’s not just the Americans who can do a Hornet. It’s just that they might be the only ones who can do it well. 

And if you’re thinking, ‘Hey, that looks like a classic Mini with a weird boot on the back and styling from 1947 on the front”, we’d be inclined to agree with you. We’d also be inclined to give you a pass mark in terms of accuracy. 

It is, as it plainly appears, Britain’s best-ever export (go on, name something better) with some badge engineering, a bigger boot, a grille from yesteryear and an uncomfortable proximity to the phrase ‘completely ruined aesthetically’. 

We spent way too long in Photoshop trying to make it look less ungainly, and still failed

The Ford Falcon may have begun as an American creation, but it’d be fair to say it was the Australians that really made it. 

After all, it was in the Antipodes where a regular ‘compact’ car (in Americanese, of course – it’s not small) became a bona fide performance saloon, touring car legend and 50-year veteran of the local car market. 

From LPG-powered taxis to sports saloons mentioned in the same sentence as supercars (look up the Falcon GT-HO and the Supercar Scare sometime, if you’d like an insight into how Australians can do moral panics as well as the rest of us), Ford Australia was the company that made Falcons, and sold other cars as well. 

And just to make sure we drive the point home, we’ll pick a Falcon with a home-grown engine: the Barra turbo inline six. There’s 360bhp or so out of the box, 1,000bhp on the table with bolt-ons and double that if you’re really into the idea. It’s basically an Australian 2JZ...

Just don’t make the mistake of calling it a ‘Fawwllcon’

We’ve something of a triple whammy here – not only is Mercury’s luxe take on the muscle car called a Cougar, it’s pretty much a long-wheelbase version of the Mustang... which is based on the Ford Falcon platform. 

Where we fall down a bit is on price. 

Unless you wander across a screaming deal – and we mean screaming – you’ll be looking at a project car on this budget. But that’s no particular hardship, is it? There’s already a cornucopia of pristine show cars, so you can do what you feel. Restore, modify or just get it running and go from there. 

We know which one we’d pick: having the best day at work ever

When an American says ‘full-size’, you know without question that it’ll be fuller than anywhere else on Earth. 

Which brings us to the Chevrolet Impala. Named for a lean, quick antelope out in the savannahs of southern Africa, the Chevy was nearly 5.5 metres long, more than two wide and riding on a cushy three-metre wheelbase. So despite being a coupe, there was ample cabin space for five and room in the boot (sorry, trunk) for two or three more, depending on their affinity for each other. 

Oh, and up front? Well, any number of gargantuan V8s were available from the factory, but there’s enough room to fit anything up to a Rolls-Royce Merlin V12 under there, so you can take your pick. Although, when Chevy still does an incredible trade in crate engines, would you really go anywhere else? 

Nothing exceeds like excess, after all

Here’s a new one for you. It is a car we found this week, and it’s in budget, but it’s also one we’d only recommend to people with more patience than we could ever hope to muster. 

Yes, it couldn’t be a more obvious punching bag if it said ‘Everlast’ down the side – the Stag is infamous for being a cylinder-head-warping, water-pump-blowing, timing-chain-snapping Sword of Damocles.

And it’s all true – the Triumph V8 had so many fatal flaws that you couldn’t call them Achilles heels without giving Achilles more legs than an octopus. But being a rather fetching, Michelotti-designed V8 convertible – with one of the best names ever – of course the Stag was going to have a long list of fans who figured out how to get around them.

Or you could just embrace the heresy and fit a Rover V8, like it should have had from the factory...

No, not the new one. If you’d like to experiment with what an MX-5 would be like if it were uglier and less likely to work, you can always go and buy one of the classic British roadsters the MX-5 was inspired by. 

We’re talking about the Tom Tjaarda and Pininfarina-designed beauty, with a sweet and sonorous twin-cam engine by ex-Ferrari engineer Aurelio Lampredi. It’ll be good for around 100bhp out of the box, but with some judicious old-school tuning of the later 1.8-litre version, that’ll be closer to 130bhp. Might not sound like much these days, but it was enough to win the European Rally Championship in 1972. And when the whole car weighs less than a tonne... 

This is one of the few classics we wouldn’t modify at all. Well, maybe a little

But of course we can’t mention an Italian Spider without mentioning the Italian Spider. 

Alfa’s almost terminally pretty roadster may have done a Dexter and gone on for too long – but, crucially, it managed to get through its later seasons without tarnishing its legacy. Sure, throwing Eighties and Nineties parts on 1960s underpinnings puts us in mind of the old days of ‘updating’ old Porsche SCs to look like 964s (ah, how the tables have turned), but the essential ingredients – open air, free-revving Nord engine (also by Giuseppe Busso, by the way) and MX-5-inspiring rear-drive handling – are still there in spades. 

Of course, we’ve gone for the second-generation cars. We have 15 grand, after all

Are we really, really going to do a list of cars with animal names and not include the most-famous, best-selling example? Well, yes.

The VW Beetle was pretty rubbish, after all.

We’re going to side-step the Mustang as well, partly because of its obviousness and partly because the classic Bronco is very clearly getting its time in the sun. First-gen Broncos are now in-demand classics (a situation with some inherent irony, considering how slow the Bronco sold when it was new), while the short-lived second gen stallions have already cantered out of our suddenly meagre-feeling budget. 

So what’s a Bronco buyer to do? 

Well, we’d scrimp and save the extra grand or so it takes to get into a 1978 or 1979 model – the price is close enough to budget, plus you get a perfect blend of the old-school utilitarianism of the original Bronco and the enormously embiggened (what? It’s a word) SUVs that followed. But thankfully without the dowdy, plastic-heavy interiors that ensued. 

Try a bit of haggling and maybe you’ll swing a deal for £15k...

... or just go for this one from 1990, which is a) actually in budget and b) looks killer