by Emily Muelford, a British car enthusiast and friend of CarNewsCafe
New cars are great. Apart from benefiting from the fact that the car is completely new and has no previous owners, not to mention that it has that familiar new car smell, the main selling point of brand new cars is that they are going to be extremely reliable and cost very little in the way of repair or maintenance in the first few years of its life.
But don’t let these benefits detract you from the fact that, as with any car, brand new cars still need to be maintained! These are basically mechanical devices, after all, and they will only perform at their best for a certain period of time before they start becoming problematic!
When you lease a brand new car, whether it is for personal or business use, did you know that you can also include a maintenance programme as part of the deal? Some people might be reading this and thinking to themselves that this is just a waste of money, but the truth is, these useful add-ons can actually save you a lot of money in the long term – especially if you have to pay a fairly high amount of money for leasing an executive or luxurious car!
Here are some of the benefits of including a maintenance programme with your car lease.
It will save you money
The most important selling point about add-on maintenance programmes is that they save you money. For example, on the Tilsun Group website, you could lease a Ford Focus car for £132.99 + VAT each month, yet for an extra £7 + VAT a month you could incorporate a maintenance programme as part of the deal.
This basically works out to be an extra £84 + VAT a year, and here’s why you would get super value-for-money:
* You save on servicing – Ford have a two-year servicing plan that costs £291.67 + VAT for two services, or to put it another way, each service would cost you £145.84 + VAT;
* You save on MOTs – if you lease your car for more than three years, you would have to pay for annual MOT tests which can cost up to £54.85;
* You save on repairs – if your car needed to have certain items replaced such as the exhaust system or tyres, this would be covered under the maintenance programme.
Additionally, most, if not all, maintenance programmes come with UK and European breakdown cover including home start cover, so if you had a problem with your leased car either at home or on the road, this will add extra peace of mind to the deal.
It will ensure your car is properly maintained
We are busy people, and it’s not uncommon for us to forget to maintain our cars sometimes. Luckily when you have a maintenance programme in place you can easily arrange for your car to be collected by a service centre at a date and time convenient to you and returned back to you when it has been serviced, helping you to stick to the terms of your lease agreement and keeping with the manufacturer’s warranty requirements for servicing.