The new sportscars you can afford

There is, of course, a catch. It’s £370 a month with Nissan’s personal contract purchase scheme (PCP), but it’s a deal which could open up Z ownership to a range of budget conscious fans.

After three years or 36,000 miles Nissan thinks its sportscar will be worth 46 per cent of its original value, and is claiming this has allowed it to offer a £370 month PCP as part of its ‘Preferences’ scheme.

What is a PCP?

A Personal Contract Purchase (PCP) involves the payment of a sizeable deposit and then a number of low monthly payments. At the end of the finance agreement, there are a number of options depending on whether the customer wants to continue or end the agreement:

• Pay a large balloon payment and keep the car
• Hand the car back and pay nothing
• Put the car down as the deposit on your next vehicle

The big deposit and final ‘balloon’ payment keeps the monthly repayments low, avoiding the far larger monthly fees that would be found with traditional hire purchase schemes.

More great deals

How about a Mazda MX-5 1.8i SE on a PCP? Currently Mazda is offering this at £16,440. Put down a £3,014.75 deposit, and pay £279 over 24 months/12,000 miles a year, with the option of a final £7,569 final payment at the deal’s end.

Fancy an Audi TT? The entry level 2.0 TFSi costs £26,245? Audi finance offers a zero per cent PCP, but if you stump up 10 per cent of the price they’ll charge you £422 a month over three years or 12,000 mile annually.

If this seems a little tame and your pockets are a fair bit deeper, how about a £103,256 V10-engined Audi R8 supercar? Yes there’s even a PCP on this. Raise 10 per cent of its price and it’s yours for £1,902 a month.

Fancy a Ferrari but can’t quite manage to pay in cash? Until now UK Prancing Horse fans couldn’t buy one of its cars with a PCP, although their continental cousins could. Now that’s changing and Ferrari is launching a PCP-style buying package here. They’ll even fix up a deal on a used Ferrari F430 coupe.

Assuming it’s worth £205,000 – and you have a £41,000 deposit or trade in allowance – over a three year period you’ll pay £3,165 a month, with a final ‘balloon’ payment of £82,180. But the deal attracts 8.7 per cent APR which makes the car £32,141.24 more expensive than if you’d bought it in one hit.

A Ferrari spokesman was very keen to tell Auto Trader that its customers would like the scheme because it was tax efficient, not because they lacked the readies to buy its cars.

Lamborghini on the other hand, expects you to have the cash. “It’s a very simple answer,” said a spokeswoman. “Lamborghini doesn’t offer a PCP.”

By Martin Gurdon