What you need to know is what the average wage was then. IIRC cars were much more expensive in those days.
Sorry, should have made myself clearer - I was wondering how they compared in price with each other.
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Good point Nick. I have just looked at it another way. My Dad's house was probably worth +/- £10k at that time so he was paying the equivalent of 15% of the value of his house for a car. Do that sum now and it looks steamy.
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A new Mini was around £500.
In 1969 we bought a flat for £3200.
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Missed your chance - just chucked a load of DRIVE (AA) Magazines - there were tests on all kinds of old ironmongery in that.
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4 door 1200cc Cortina was £620 inc RFL (£12.50) & delivery in Jan 1966
Morris 1000 (1100 engine) was £530 in 1966
Rover 2000 in 1966 was £1450
A Bungalow (near my home) with 3 bedrooms was £3500 brand new from the builder and the rooms were much bigger than today.
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That's an interesting one FB, the bungalow v Cortina price relationship. I make it that the Cortina represented 17.7% of the value of the bungalow. So if you take a modern 3 bed at say..... £200k ? times 17.7% is £35400. Quite an expensive Mondeo eh ?
Maybe car prices aren't so bad these days !
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I paid £525 for my 14-year-old R type Bentley in 1968, the same price as a new Mini at the time. Three years later I bought the only new car I have ever bought, a Citroen Dyane, £610 on the road and a bit more frugal than the Bentley. But just a tiny bit less road presence and so on.
That Bentley had a valve wireless that took about a minute to warm up but had the best and warmest sound (albeit mono) of any car radio I have ever heard.
Oh yeah, house in Highbury £5000 in about 65 or 66, £14000 when sold in 1973, made me feel extremely guilty as I was more of a rabid lefty in those days, but not guilty enough to give the money away... wish I'd kept it a few more years actually but tenants are more of a PITA than anyone would believe without having met a few of the carphounds (of course I've always been an exemplary one myself give or take a few pauses for the rent).
Edited by Lud on 15/04/2008 at 22:46
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Ah radio valves ! What a proper word most unlike what our American friends call them "Tubes"
Valve actually says what they do - typically British to adopt a word from one discipline (water engineering) and adapt it to another (electrickery.)
Edited by Pugugly on 15/04/2008 at 22:49
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A new E Type was around £2000 when introduced. I remember it well - not really !
A new Ferrari was "only" around £4,000.
I bought an immaculate 1946 Rover 16 with 67k miles for £80 and a 1929 Riley 9 (scruffy) for £30.
My first Mini estate was £110 and clapped out.
Austin A30/35s were £30 to £80 s/h.
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Fiat 500 (pre-retro) was 412GBP in 1965 - filling the 4 gallon tank was under a pound
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Before we get all dewy eyed about this, compared with average earnings then and now and the infinitely more complex systems on cars, in reality they are probably as cheap if not cheaper than they've ever been.
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Bought a new VW Beetle in 1964 which cost £624.00.
However second hand cars kept their value better than today.
My first car a 1953 Morris Minor series 11 803cc bought in 1960 was £415.00.
Good as the Moggy was the Beetle bought in a new dimension in reliabilty and build. quality.
Average wages at in 1960 would have been about £13.00 in the Midlands.
I had just finished a six year apprenticeship in Plumbing and Heating (yes it was six) with starting pay at age 15 of 28 shillings. £1.40 per 44 hour week
How they do it today in such a short period puzzles me although I suppose a lot of the craft skills have disappeared.
In 1965 good new three bedroom detached houses were selling for £4500.
Stone terraced houses about £400.
Today the same stone terrace houses in my home town are on the market at £180K plus.
The new ones as above not much more than that.
wemyss
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My Dad worked at the Firestone tyre factory near Brentford during the 60s. His weekly take home was about £18. He bought a used Vauxhall Victor for £1800.
My take home a week is around £500. I've just spent £9500 on a used Focus II.
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So you should have bought a 50k car then applying the same maths ! Cars are muc, much cheaper in real terms.
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The average wage for men was £23.47 in 1966. In 2006 it was £571.
I can't be arrised to do the maths, but you have to work a fair few weeks less to have the price of a car now than you would have then.
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We got married in 1965 and paid £2,300 for our Victorian (1880s) three-bedroomed semi-detached property.
Today such properties in our road are selling for at least £200k and up to 25 per cent more for the four-bedroomed versions...:-)
By the way, the Minx I mentioned earlier was part-exchanged in early 1971 for a Vauxhall Magnum 1800, which had a windscreen price of £1,295.
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It's sobering to think that a new Range-Rover was £1998 in 1970.
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But cheering to realise that an old one might be no more than £1970 in 1998...
:o}
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I think its valid to compare cars to wages in the 60's vs now, but I dont think it tells us much to compare how much a car would cost today vs house prices using the same ratios as houses today are in a price bubble (yes I know thats a moot point)
I'd use (say) yr2000 annual wage and yr2000 house price to get a feel for the figures and to eliminate a peak variance in house prices.
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According to this educational guide:
tinyurl.com/4wd7dr (it's PDF)
some interesting facts include that, in 1965, 95 per cent of all cars sold in the UK were made in Britain and that only one in 20 children's parents were not married....:-)
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There's an interesting calculator for "what was your money worth in XXXX" at the measuring worth website, and some other tools for looking at prices/wages etc over the years at an Exeter University page as below:
tinyurl.com/ytb4dm
and
tinyurl.com/yuq4sz
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Checking the present-day purchasing power of £1000 in 1966 (using a calculator at www.measuringworth.com) I get £13,412.89 - which suggests that, as we know, property was cheap but cars not outlandishly more expensive...? That Ford Zephyr at £1200 would equate to maybe a modern repmobile at £16000. Of course, the commodity itself might have improved just a bit.
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In 1965, at the end on my studies in U.K., I bought an export Singer Vogue estate, 1600cc model, with sundry optional extras like a radio { Fiendishly modern transistor type with 5 selectable channels and with both MW and LW bands }, overdrive on 3rd and 4th, heavy-duty suspension { we still had a lot of gravel roads in those days }, fog and driving lights, seat belts { Yes, they were optional extras in those days } and factory-applied underseal { which was well done and lasted the 17 years before I sold the vehicle.} Price 759 pounds, which was just over half my annual income at the time. Used it in U.K. for N.Z. import tax purposes, and then handed it back to Rootes for shipping. That cost me an extra 70 - odd FOL NZ, including all the protective overspray. For comparison, it represented about one-seventh of the cost of a standard N.Z. wooden house on a standard quarter-acre section at that time.
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