Articles by Stephen Corby

Why are so many willing to pay so much for so few obvious benefits? Most of us don't shell out six-figure sums for a car, but plenty of people do, and you have to wonder why.Is it simply because they can, because a car is a highly visible status symbol that can make you feel, and look, wealthier every day? It's exceedingly difficult to drag your giant house down to the golf-club car park after all.Sadly this theory probably holds some water, or some overpriced champagne, but the fact is that expensive cars - not all, but some - really do feel special to drive. Whether they're worth the money Australians have to pay for them is another debate entirely, but something like a Porsche 911 has a kind of engineering purity, a sense of build quality and teutonic tactility, that elevates driving, even in traffic, to a different level of joy.But you can get nearly all of that joy for less, in a $112,090 Cayman, too.Similarly, a BMW M4 feels and sounds special, with muscular steering and spine-whacking acceleration, as you would hope it should for $156,900, but much of that sheer driving pleasure DNA can also be felt in a 435i Coupe, for $108,500, or even a 420i at a comparatively bargain priced $69,500.The extra performance of the M4 is something you'll only rarely appreciate, unless you own a race track, so spending the extra is hard to justify this side of showing off.The good news however, is that much of this seemingly ephemeral and expensive driving joy can be had for far less money, once you convince yourself to be blind to badges.Behold our list of champagne cars for craft-beer money So, you think you can't afford a super car?Sure you might need to sell an organ or two, but the incredible Alfa Romeo 4C - with the looks of a Ferrari, the racing snarl of a Maserati and the all-carbon-fibre construction of a Lamborghini - brings the supercar dream down to an almost attainable level, with its launch price tipped to be around the $80,000 mark.It feels like we've been waiting forever for this car to arrive in Australia, although Alfa says it's definitely almost nearly here, but that's because world demand has been berserk. And building an F1-like carbon-car takes time.How Alfa has managed to make this super-light (just 895kg), super-handling and seriously quick car - 0 to 100km/h arrives in a Porsche-worrying 4.5 seconds - to market at a price less than six figures is some kind of Italian economic miracle. Perhaps they've fiddled the books.Best of all, it looks so good you wouldn't be surprised if it cost a million dollars.Truly super value. A not-so-poor-man's PorscheThe last Volkswagen Golf GTI, the Mk VI, was such a great driver's car that more than one magazine posited the theory that it was the 911 you could actually afford - it is German after all, and VW actually owns Porsche these days so there's a certain sense in it.The new, Mk VII GTI is an even more incredible car, but VW has gone a step further with the Golf R - the fastest Golf in history, and with all-wheel drive and a $51,990 price tag it's one of the greatest performance bargains on the road today.It might not please the people at Porsche to suggest this, but a well-driven Golf R on a twisty bit of road would give a Porsche Cayman owner a horrible, wallet-hurting fright, and a few 911 owners for that matter.It combines prodigious grip with serious rip from its 206kW/380Nm 2.0-litre turbocharged engine. A $112,090 Porsche Cayman has only 202kW and 290Nm and will hit 100km/h in 5.6 seconds, while the Golf R gets there in five flat, which is a huge difference. Even a $228,150 Porsche 911 Carrera 4 only does it in 4.9.This is all the German car any enthusiast needs. Boxer-ing cleverThere are only two car companies in the world willing to tackle the complexities of a boxer engine (in which the cylinders lie flat and punch side to side, instead of up and down) - Porsche and Subaru.Engineers from the riotously rich German company admit they're deeply impressed that the relatively small Japanese concern can manage the engineering task, but the rewards are clearly worthwhile and nowhere more evident than in the legendary Subaru WRX.This incredible car has held the bang-for-your-buck world title belt since its launch in 1995, thanks to its all-wheel-drive setup, sharp chassis and 2.0-litre turbocharged boxer engine which now makes 195kW and 343Nm and will hit 100km/h in 5.4 seconds.Sure, over some of those years it looked like it had been badly beaten up by a designer with a death wish, sporting the equivalent of two black eyes for a while, but the latest version is possibly the best-looking ever.Better yet, the new WRX is just $38,990, making it a full $1000 cheaper than when the original Rex appeared in 1994.Yes, there are quicker cars on the road, but not many, and very few that are more involving. Cheap and ridiculously cheerfulIt's probably physically impossible to drive a Toyota 86/Subaru BRZ without a smile on your face, and not just because you can't believe the price tag.What you need to know straight up is that the Toyobaru - a joint project between Subaru's engineering brilliance (they brought the 2.0-litre boxer engine, but no turbocharger, sadly) and Toyota's global dominance - is not fast. Its 147kW naturally aspirated engine will get you to 100km/h in 7.6 seconds, so you won't see which way a Golf R went. But then it does only cost $29,990.What you get for that price is far more than numbers on a page can express. Its steering has been favourably compared to Porsche's, its rear-wheel-drive and light weight make it a hoot to throw around and there's a kind of purity and simplicity to it that revisits the kind of fun that cars used to be.It's a cheap way to show off the same smile that the guy in the 911 is wearing.

No matter who you are or where you live, the first question anyone who is about to dip their toe into the electrified water of EV ownership asks is always the same; how long does it take charge an electric car? (Followed by, can I have a Tesla please?)The answer is a complicated one, I’m afraid, as it depends on the car and the charging infrastructure, but the short answer is this; not as long you might think, and that figure is dropping all the time. Nor, as most people tend to think, is it likely that you’ll need to charge it every day, but that’s another story.The easiest way to explain it all is to examine those two elements - what kind of car do you own and what kind of charging station will you be using - separately, so you have all the facts at your fingertips. What type of car do you own?As it stands, there are really only a handful of pure-electric cars on sale in Australia at the moment, with products from Tesla, Nissan, BMW, Renault, Jaguar and Hyundai. Though that number will grow, of course, with models due from Audi, Mercedes-Benz, Kia and more - and political pressure building to increase the number of EVs on our roads.Each of those brands quotes different charging times (largely dependent on the size of each car's battery packs).Nissan says charging its Leaf from zero to full can take up to 24 hours using the standard power at your house, but if you invest in a special 7kW home charger the recharge time drops to around 7.5hrs. If you use a rapid charger, you can top up the battery from 20 per cent to 80 per cent in around an hour. But we’ll come back to charger types in a moment. Then there’s Tesla; the brand that made EVs cool measures its charge time on a distance-per-hour scale. So for the Model 3, you’ll get around 48km in range for every hour of charging that your car is plugged in at home. A Tesla Wall Box or an on-the-road Supercharger will significantly reduce that time, of course.Enter Jaguar, with its i-Pace SUV. The British brand (the first of the traditional premium marques to get an EV to marker) claims an 11km per hour recharge rating using home power. The bad news? That roughly equals 43 hours for a full charge, which seems staggeringly impractical. Installing a special home charger (which most owners will) increases that rate to 35km of range per hour.Finally, we’ll look at Hyundai’s just-launched Kona Electric. The brand says from empty to 80 per cent of charge takes nine hours and 35 minutes, using a home wall unit, or 75 minutes using a fast-charging station. Plugged into the mains at home? That’ll be 28 hours for a full charge of the battery pack.How long do the batteries in an electric car last? The sad truth is that they begin to degrade, albeit slowly, from the first time you recharge, but most manufacturers offer an eight-year battery warranty if something should go wrong. What kind of electric car charger do you use?Ah, this is the part that really matters, as the type of charger you use to power you EV can cut time off the road to a fraction of that you’d spend if you only do your top up by drawing mains power.While it’s true that most people think they’ll be charging their vehicle at home, simply plugging it into the mains when they get home from work, that’s actually the slowest way to pump juice into your batteries. The most common alternative is to invest in “wall box” infrastructure at home, be it from the manufacture themselves of via an aftermarket provider like Jet Charge, which increases the rapid flow of power to the car, usually to around 7.5kW.The most well-known solution is Tesla’s Wall Box, which can up the power output to 19.2kW - enough to deliver 71km per hour of charging for the Model 3, 55km for the Model S and 48km for the Model X.But just as with an internal-combustion-engined vehicle, you can still recharge while on the road, and when you do, you don’t want to spend the better part of an entire day glued to a power point. Enter, then, fast charging stations, which are specifically set up to get you on the road as quickly as possible using a 50kW or a 100kW flow of power.Again, the best-known of these are the Tesla Superchargers, which have started being phased in on freeways and in cities on the east coast of Australia, and which recharge you battery pack to 80-per-cent full in around 30 minutes. They were once (unbelievably) free to use, but that was only ever going to last so long. There are other options, of course. Most notably the NRMA, which has begun the roll out of a free-for-members network of 40 fast-charging stations around Australia. Or Chargefox, which is in the process of installing “ultra-fast” charging stations in Australia, promising between 150kW and 350kW of power, which can deliver some 400km of range in 15 minutes. Porsche is also planning to rollout its own chargers around the world, which are, cleverly, called Turbo Chargers.

There’s long been a bit of a stench around diesel, but with the Volkswagen scandal and big cities in Europe now considering banning them, it seems to be a fuel source that’s more on the nose than ever

The NSW state government could charge owners of electric vehicles (EVs) to use its roads, on a per-kilometre basis, to make up for the huge loss in fuel excise it predicts will occur when people start shifting to EV ownership in a big way.

The only bad thing about the government's instant asset tax write off policy on new company cars - which offered a $150,000 tax break to help people buy a new vehicle - was that it was asking people to spend money to save money when, quite possibly, they

Now look, obviously telling anyone that a particular second-hand car will have bulletproof reliable is a bit like telling them that skiing is a totally safe hobby, or advising them to invest in blue-chip stocks.Sometimes, things just don’t work out and if your friend ends up with a broken leg, an empty bank account or a total lemon of a car on their driveway - it can be embarrassing, or a friendship killer.So, we must proceed with caution, and caveats. We’re also trying to live in the real world here. I have good reason to believe, for example, that Porsches are hugely reliable. I once asked a Porsche engineer whether it was true that every single part of the company’s cars was over engineered by 200 per cent, and he looked truly offended and said “No! No, it’s more like 400 per cent.”This might explain, at least partly, why Porsches are so expensive, and why they remain pricey, even as second-hand cars. So, by all means, if you can afford a used 911, it’s probably a good investment, it’s just not one we can all make (more realistically, if you want a second-hand sports car, it’s hard to go past a Mazda MX-5, of any vintage, because they are fantastic to drive, reliable and relatively affordable).At the other end of the spectrum, we don’t want this list to be entirely dull. There’s an argument, particularly from people who only buy Toyotas and believe in them religiously, for suggesting that all of the 10 cars on this list should be Corollas, Camrys, Yarises, Priuses and so forth.Yes, Toyota is fairly famed for its unbreakable reliability, and Top Gear certainly did its best to help that reputation with its failed attempts to destroy a HiLux.But here’s an interesting wrinkle for you. When Australians were asked by Canstar, to rate their own cars for reliability, just last year, the results were telling, and fascinating.Coming in first, by a clear margin, as the most reliable brand, was Mitsubishi. Sure enough, Toyota came in second, followed by Kia, Mazda, Suzuki, Mercedes-Benz, Subaru, Hyundai, Honda and Volkswagen.The less-loved five, hanging behind the top 10, were Nissan, Holden, Audi and Ford. So you won’t see any of their cars on this list, although we’d still like to recommend used versions of the VF Commodore to those of you who don’t mind taking a slight reliability risk, just because they were such fantastic cars, and clearly the last big sedans that will ever have been built specifically for our conditions.And just one other personal caveat. Whenever people ask me what sort of second-hand car they should buy I give the same answer - “whichever Subaru you can afford, and in whatever shape suits your lifestyle”. I still stand by this, because in my experience the brand has rock-solid reliability, combined with excellent driving dynamics, all-wheel drive and tough, hardy interiors. It’s just a shame they mostly lack visual appeal.Here, then, in no particular order are our careful recommendations.

Back before the wondrous invention of speed cameras - or “road-safety cameras”, sorry - a speeding fine would generally be in your hands within minutes of a police officer pulling you over for the offence, but today they are often sent out by mail, which is, to put it mildly, an inexact science.

The problem with cars is that all the ones you really, really want - the ones you'd have posters of on your wall if you were still young enough for that to be acceptable - are too expensive.

You might have heard that some points expire after just 12 months, but that’s not the case, once you’ve got them, you’re stuck with them for a full three years.

Buying a car that's subject to finance, however, rings more alarm bells than someone attempting to dance cheek to cheek around the Louvre with the Mona Lisa. It is, of course, just as viable to buy a car subject to finance as it is a house, as long as everything is above board.So the possibility of a private sale turning into a financing tangle shouldn't put you off; more than four million used cars change hands annually in Australia, and the benefits of buying privately are obvious.All you really need to do, as with any major purchase, is do your homework beforehand when it comes to finance, just as you would when looking at a car's maintenance issues, service record and so on.You need to be absolutely sure about a car's financial state, of course, because the onus is on you to do the checking, and if you don't you could be driving into a world of hurt.As we said in our article on selling financed cars, it all comes down to how car loans work. Because car finance uses the car as security, the loan is applied to the car, not its owner. The owner is still obliged to repay the loan, and until they do any unpaid amount on the loan is held against the car, not the borrower.This is where it can get a little murky for prospective second-hand buyers. While dealers and auction houses are obliged to provide proof of a clear title – and face stiff penalties for breaching their obligations – private sellers aren't subject to the same regulations.The big risk of buying a car that has finance attached is that you lose the carThis means that any number of problems can lurk beneath an ostensibly good deal, including hidden interests in the car. If you unwittingly buy a vehicle with money owing against it, you'll get slugged with the debt or lose your car completely when the finance company repossesses it to recoup its losses, as Justine Davies from loan-rating service CANSTAR explains."The big risk of buying a car that has finance attached is that you lose the car," she says."If that car has been used as security against the loan then the financial institution has ownership rights."It really is that serious. Australian law dictates that the buyer is responsible for checking the vehicle has a free title; if it all falls apart, you don't have a leg to stand on, but you'll need two to walk everywhere.You'll either have to pay out the balance of the loan, or the car will be repossessed and sold, leaving you with little more than empty pockets and a lot of time to regret your decisions as you wait for the bus.As long as any finance arrangement is out in the open, there's really no problem with buying a car that's still subject to a loan; it's only when a seller hides the fact that there is still money to be paid that everything goes pear-shaped.If the seller hasn't advised you that they still owe money on the car, it's a fair indication one of two things is going on. The seller is either purposefully defrauding you or, in a hugely unlikely scenario, simply doesn't know about the car's encumbrance. In either case, it's time to walk away.Check the Personal Property Securities RegisterWhile this all sounds daunting, there's a simple and cheap way to avoid coming to grief – check the Personal Property Securities Register, or PPSR.The PPSR is the new name for the old-school REVS (Register of Encumbered Vehicles) check, which was outmoded in 2012 (the government version at least, privately run sites like revs.com.au still exist).The PPSR is a vast, nation-wide register that keeps track of the loans held on Australian cars, motorbikes, boats and anything else of value, even artwork. The older REVS system was a state-by-state concern that only handled vehicles."You can visit http://www.ppsr.gov.au to conduct a check using the car's Vehicle Identification Number," Davies explains.Do your first check at the point that you're considering buying the car"If your potential car is under finance, the certificate that you receive from doing a Personal Property Securities Register search will detail the type of loan and who holds the loan."Running a check through the PPSR costs just $2 and gives you concrete proof of the absence or presence of a loan. It's so cheap, in fact, it's worth doing twice."Ideally, do your first check at the point that you're considering buying the car," says Davies."Do another check on the day of purchase, before you hand over the bank cheque or do the online transfer, just in case the seller has taken out a quick loan in between."If you do your due diligence beforehand and deal with an honest seller, there's no reason why buying a car that's still under finance should be any more difficult than buying one with a clear title. It's important, however, to make sure that when you sign your name to the bill of sale, there's no money left owing against the car."If you are going to buy a financed car – perhaps, for example, the seller can't pay off their car loan until they have the cash from the sale – then conduct the sale transaction in the office of the financial institution that holds the loan over the car," says Davies."That way you can pay for the car, the seller can pay off the loan and you can take unencumbered ownership of the car all at the same time."It's a lot like attending a real estate agent or a bank to sign the documents for buying a house, only the figures on the papers you're signing are slightly less likely to give you heart palpitations.