12 brilliant used car bargains for the price of a UK lease deal

It’s easy to see the appeal of leasing a brand-new car. Whether it’s a Corsa or Qashqai, Juke or Jaecoo, laying down a modest deposit then circa £200 a month on something shiny and warrantied is clearly a low-risk way to potter about your business.

The catch is you must hand it back at the end. Over three years you’ll have spent eight grand and possess nothing to show for it. Time to deploy some TopGear.com maths, then. A princely £8,000 could instead buy you an entire Alfa Romeo Brera, and a red-hued, phone-dial wheeled, Prodrive-fettled special edition at that. Cor.

Or how about a bona fide sports car? The Cayenne is often touted as the real saviour of Porsche, but the first ever Boxster certainly played its part, casually igniting Stuttgart’s sales by channelling lots of 911 spirit into a neater, nimbler and crucially cheaper roadster.

Early ‘986’ gen versions aren’t the giveaway they used to be, but you can still squeeze a more powerful 3.2-litre Boxster S into our weeny budget if you look hard enough. And you should.

Rather your drop-top miles were covered with a rumbling V8 as the soundtrack? Step right this way. The ‘R230’ SL was a minor revelation in the early Noughties, replacing the ageing and angular (but iconic) R129 with something altogether curvier. And possessing a still pioneering folding hard-top roof rather than a fabric hood.

The supercharged AMG versions grabbed all the glory, but this calmer, 302bhp 5.0-litre SL 500 ought to be just as enriching for the soul on a sunny day.

The Mazda RX-8 launched alongside the Nissan 350Z to bring some frenzied JDM fun to the UK market in the early Noughties. The two quickly transpired to be different beasts, though, the Nissan torquey and muscular, the Mazda, um, neither.

Instead its focus was on agility and tactility, and boy are these things good to drive if you keep their weeny rotary powerplant on the boil. Just beware their perilous reputation for engine rebuilds.

An underrated modern classic if ever we saw one. The world went doolally for the four-wheel drive, manually shifted Toyota GR Yaris at launch, with plenty of rally pedigree (and handling hilarity) funnelled into a teeny, square-footprint supermini.

Audi got there first, though, the S1 following a spookily similar recipe nearly a decade earlier to create one of its most engaging 21^st century cars. It looks an utter bargain at this price.

For purists who prefer their hot hatchbacks to be front-wheel drive, here’s one of the best. Ever. Renault Sport’s stripped-out Megane R26.R rightly gets all the praise – it’s one of the sharpest handling cars of all time, at any price – but drop the clunky suffix and you can enjoy very similar performance with the back seats and glass rear windows still in place. This one’s in uber-desirable Liquid Yellow, too.

Those who’ve been anywhere near The Internet recently will be all too aware there’s a new BMW i3. One that looks absolutely nothing like the first, being as it’s now a fully electric 3 Series saloon (and eventually Touring) rather than a funky, carbon-cored city car with a design nerd’s interior.

As car folk, we adore the original, but the UK’s more cautious buying public have ensured used values have dropped almost as low as modern EVs can. Eight grand therefore snares you quite a nice example.

Plenty of big, luxe barges occupy the cheaper end of the classifieds. At this sort of money, a V12-powered BMW 760i is surely a devilish temptation. 

But the comparative angel on your shoulder is this Lexus LS460, offering a similar abundance of tech and a deep well of V8 power but with half the mileage and a better reliability record. ULEZ compliant, too!

You’ve already swerved a cornucopia of £200/month crossovers to end up at this list. So why not duck the SUV trend entirely and ride a little higher from the ground in a posh estate car? Here at TG we adore all Audi Allroads – and their Skoda Scout or Mercedes All-Terrain kin – and the sumptuous practicality of a bi-turbodiesel A6 should feel a whole world away from an entry-level Sportage. If you don’t mind a chunky mileage, anyhow.

You can lay down a very cheap lease deal on a modern Fiat 500 and live your best iced latte life. This particular writer wouldn’t even feel much shame doing so. But if we’re thinking outside the box, then heading into the world of tiny wee classic Cinquecentos feels much more on brand. Several occupy the classic car sales channels within budget, each in a truly cheery colour.  It won’t be fast, it represents the opposite of ‘tech’, and for both those reasons it should be truly cherished.

The Internet is also chockful of opinion about what Jaguar should be doing with its future, one may have noticed. Furious commenters with their brogues firmly rooted in the past might appreciate a big, V8 bruiser like this S-Type R.

It couldn’t hold a tealight to the BMW M5 in its day but its then-pastiche styling has improved (gradually) with time and you can guarantee it’ll be a riot to drive. And riotously expensive when it’s time to tax and service it…

TopGear.com doesn’t like to go in too hard on ‘investment advice’. Partially because we don’t want to resemble a crypto bro accosting you in All Bar One, but mostly because we’d hate to lead you expensively astray. Fast Fords, however, seem to retain (and then soar in) value even when they aren’t outright classics.

While the Escort XR3i doesn’t rank among the Cosworths and RSs of this world, this left-hand-drive example could represent great value within our eight grand budget. But you didn’t hear it from us.