Goodwood Revival is a true celebration of used cars

Second-hand products are having a good year. Most Brits aren’t used to living in brand-new homes or driving factory-fresh vehicles, and that’s cool. As are the old movies, retro furniture, vintage clobber and other ageing but good stuff they increasingly seek to buy. This has to be a good thing. Scrappage bad, circular consumption good, I say.

The business of buying, servicing and selling second-hand vehicles in Britain ain’t perfect. It still attracts too many complaints, and improvements must continue. But considering the complexity, scale, number of people involved, and the billions swilling around the used-car game, it works reasonably well. 

And credit where it’s due: the trade is dealing with the potentially disastrous fact that demand for generally more expensive electric cars has been disappointingly low. Yet at the same time there’s a deluge of previously leased electric cars on the second-hand market where, understandably, buyers are cautious.

So traders have made major pricing adjustments and reduced their profit expectations. And in doing so they’ve created history – by ensuring that many pure-electric cars are now cheaper than the equivalent combustion models. This has done more to make pure-EVs an economic reality for typical buyers than anything else I can think of. Car makers with high list prices, please note: you, like the dealers, have to settle for lower profit margins with EVs.

But it’s not just little ol’ tight-fisted me who’s noticing the growing appeal and importance of used goods, which are usually (but not all always) bargains.  

One of the best-known and most respected experts in the car/motorsport/events world is The Earl of Richmond. This weekend he’s staging Goodwood Revival 2024. And apart from millions of pounds worth of cars from the 1950s and ’60s being raced on his legendary Goodwood Circuit, a huge collection of pre-1966 beach buggies are in action, along with elegant aircraft of similar vintage. Thank the gods that the scrappage industry didn’t claim the lives of these and similar machines of great cultural and historical importance.

Other Revival features include Revive & Thrive sessions, plus workshops and demonstrations that hero heritage skills, sharing ways to reduce, reuse, repair, restore and recycle for that circular consumption that I’m such a fan of. The classy gathering describes itself as “proudly, the world’s biggest and most glamorous second-hand event”. And all this leads me to conclude that if used cars and other ageing products are good enough for The Earl of Richmond, they’re good enough for me. And how about you? 

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