Used luxury cars for sale

It happens every time I hang out with my car enthusiast friends: We're sitting there, chatting about cars, and eventually the discussion turns to the fact that you can buy a wide range of iconic used performance cars for approximately the same price as laundry detergent.

"I could have an E34 BMW M5 for eleven grand!" one of them will say. "ELEVEN GRAND!!!" And then we'll sit there musing over the fact that a new car that costs eleven grand would be so crappy that you'd have to pay extra if you wanted, for example, reflective mirrors.

This is one of the reasons why I love Tavarish's recent articles so much. It's an excellent thought exercise: you can get a cool old Ferrari, or a used Porsche 911 Turbo, or a Chevrolet Corvette Z06, all for less money than that Lexus hatchback that looks like a MazdaSpeed3 and accelerates like a moving walkway. It's tremendously enjoyable to think about, and his articles usually prompt me to spend the rest of the afternoon on AutoTrader, thinking to myself: "Just five more minutes. Then I'll get back to work."

But just to be clear: normal people should never, under any circumstances, actually purchase one of these vehicles.

I say this because I have many acquaintances who own Honda Civics, and Ford Fusions, and Nissan Altimas, and in talking to these people I've come to discover what they look for in a car: Value. Reliability. Ease of operation. A nice pat on the back from Consumer Reports. A comfortable, dependable place where they can spend a few hours each week, mindlessly using Facebook as they sit in traffic.And most used luxury cars offer none of these things.

For proof, I'd like to introduce you to my 2006 Range Rover, which is a used luxury vehicle that I purchased for approximately the same price as a Toyota Camry. On paper, this seems like a great deal: for less than $27, 000, I got 4-wheel drive, and leather upholstery, and heated front seats, and heated rear seats, and a navigation system, and tri-zone automatic climate control, and a backup camera, and parking sensors, and a series of high-tech off-road gadgets that come in tremendously handy for driving over the parking curbs at Starbucks.

So my Range Rover looks pretty good on paper. But before you get all excited and dash out to buy some expensive used luxury car instead of a nice, reliable commuter vehicle, I want to especially stress one term here: on paper. Because for most of the Camry's value-focused, reliability-obsessed buyers, a used luxury car like my Range Rover would be a terrible idea in practice.

To explain what I mean, allow me to recount what happened two weeks ago when I visited Land Rover of Cherry Hill, an excellent automobile dealership in New Jersey that specializes in apologizing to angry rich people.