Let the buyer beware!

"Sellout," my friend said, half-jokingly.

"Who, me? Why do you say that?" I asked rhetorically. I knew exactly what he meant.

"You've only gone and bought a car, haven't you? What happened to Mr Anti-Car Motoring Hack? So much for being anti-establishment, eh? And a BMW to boot!" I could picture him shaking his head theatrically on the other end of the phone.

There was a short, uncomfortable silence. I knew this chap was only niggling at me. But he'd hit a nerve. A frazzled one.

I've been torn by this fact of recent months. A quick retrospective of two years of old columns showed that I have been virulently anti-motorist for the vast majority of them. Until I became one. So, he's right, I am a sellout. But, I hasten to add, a qualified sellout.

I still think it is immoral to spend more than €100,000 on a car so you can drive it past homeless children on the streets. I still think people who are as attached to their cars as they are to their livers, who get cold sweats at the prospect of not driving absolutely everywhere, should be forced onto a bus.

I still think boy and girl racers of all ages who put the lives of everyone else at risk by their maniacal driving need to be forced to spend a few weeks in a wheelchair to see how funny it is.

And I still think people who insist on having a brand spanking new top-of-the range car every January in order to reinforce their own deluded ideas of social status need to take a long, serious look at themselves.

Thankfully, while I am inordinately fond of my little green Bavarian beauty, I am still none of the above. Who knows, though. I may win the Lottery, buy myself a Humvee and have myself surgically attached to the steering wheel before I start tearing down city streets at 90.

The above, while utterly unrealistic, exposes something basic at the centre of all "have-nots versus haves" debates. For I am one of the former category.

Perhaps my disdain for people swanning around in brand-new cars that cost seven times the average annual industrial wage is rooted not so much in my socialist philosophy, as in my seething envy of their vastly superior financial positions. Perhaps.

My car cost me less than my bicycle. If it depreciates any more, I'll be driving minus equity. I fail to grasp why people spend their dough on a machine that is going to be worth half what they paid in a few years.

How do people accumulate enough capital in the first place when they are stupid enough to then waste it so easily?

Take Michael "Skipper" Flatley. Bought himself a new Rolls Royce Phantom at a tidy €320,000. Some valuers in Britain reckon it'll be worth half that in three years.

That said, the whole depreciation issue is probably a non-issue for most of them. The kind of person who buys a Rolls Royce Phantom isn't the type who buys a second-hand car. And those who are probably don't want to make too much of a song and dance about it, if you get my meaning.