I'd much prefer to get hold of an older pre-2001 truck [of whatever brand] because of the simpler mechanics and lower road tax. But I'm starting to think this is increasingly unlikely. The ones people are offering for sale tend to be pretty rotted and the people with the good ones are holding onto them.
In theory a newer motor might need less sorting [although I'm still of the instinct that electronic jiggery-pokery has no place in a diesel engine]. But, once you get past 2001, you're into road tax based on emissions, which puts most of these into the £500 - 600 / year bracket. The £million question is; would you save that extra £200+ you'd be paying in road tax every year on reduced maintenance costs and better fuel economy?
Of all the brands I've mentioned, the Shoguns and Troopers seem to be the only ones that are still being offered for the kind of money I'd expect for trucks of this vintage. Plenty around the £2000 - £4000 range coming up on my eBay search, whereas the majority of the Collies, LCs, Amazons, Surfs, Pathfinders, Patrols, etc have definitely moved up into the £5500 and over bracket. It's not that I would begrudge paying £6000 or £7000 for a 20 year old truck, if I thought I'd have it for life. I'm just very wary of paying that amount of money out for something I might only get a couple of years out of, before it becomes effectively worthless, due to more massive "look how green we are" hikes on fuel, tax and insurance, which would leave me unable to afford to run it and destroy the resale value.
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PS. My handy tip for the day, in case any of you didn't know:
In the eBay search box, you can search for multiple options at the same time by putting them in brackets and separating them with commas. So I have the following saved as a 'saved search', to return all the interesting 4x4 trucks in one go:
(4runner,landcruiser,patrol,hilux,surf,shogun,trooper,pathfinder,land cruiser)
If you want to get really clever, you can use multiple pairs of brackets to cover different permutations. I have another saved search:
(4x4,4wd,awd) (van,truck,camper)
which matches any word from the 1st set of brackets with any one from the second. So covers 9 different variations on the 4x4 truck theme: '4x4 van', '4x4 truck', '4x4 camper', '4wd van', '4wd truck', '4wd camper', 'awd van', 'awd truck', 'awd camper'.
Thus endeth todays geek lesson!