The supercar nightmare

Clip the wing mirror of a Maserati Quattroporte in the supermarket car park, for example, and you’ll be signing a cheque for £561.93 plus labour. For a Mercedes- McLaren SLR you’d be looking at a bill for twice that (if you include fitting) — more than £900 for the part alone. By contrast, if you’d kept the Focus you could probably pay the £55.45 bill for a new wing mirror, plus the labour charge, jet off for two weeks in the sun and still return with change from £1,000.

The cost of replacing a broken headlamp unit on an SLR is even more eye-wateringly expensive — £2,869.28 for a single unit.

A punctured rear tyre on a Rolls-Royce Phantom costs £724 to replace, before labour. For a complete exhaust (including catalytic converters) you’ll be looking at a bill of £2,004.56 for an Aston Martin DB9 to £7,916.91 for a Ferrari 612 Scaglietti — that compares with £443.93 for a Focus.

Then there is the matter of simply putting fuel in the tank. With fuel economy of more than 40mpg (over 60mpg for the diesel), a Focus driver may put £50 of petrol in the tank every 500 miles. The 12-cylinder 5.7 litre engine of a Scaglietti (13.6mpg) or the 6.7 litre V8 powering a Bentley Arnage T (14.5mpg) will guzzle more than three times as much.

Not surprising, really. A top speed of 199mph (in the case of the Ferrari) and a 0-62mph time of a little over 4sec are going to eat a lot of petrol.

Fuel costs aside, what is it that makes supercars quite so expensive to maintain? After all, isn’t one windscreen or electrical component much like another? Surely a wing mirror is a wing mirror? Even Ferraris don’t come gold-plated.

True, advanced technology and complex materials used in high-performance cars can push up the cost of replacement parts, but a large proportion of the added expense is the result of simple economies of scale.

When Ford orders Focus windscreens from its suppliers, it does so by the million. By contrast Mercedes has yet to fit a single replacement exhaust system to one of its SLRs — which is why when it finally does the unlucky owner will be looking at a bill for £3,000 to make it worth manufacturing.

The same goes for the Maybach. None of these super-limos has ever needed a new £1,955.96 headlamp or a £1,144.79 windscreen, despite the cars having been on sale for more than three years.

There’s one exception: tyres will certainly need replacing and on a heavy high-performance car they’re likely to last as little as a quarter as long as those fitted to a typical family runabout. You could completely re-tyre an average Focus for less than £350, but you won’t find supercar tyres at your local Kwik-Fit. They are bespoke items designed for that specific model and that model alone, which is why a tyre for a Phantom costs approximately 10 times more than one for a Focus.

So should we feel sorry for supercar owners? Certainly not. Expenses that would bankrupt mere mortals are unlikely even to graze the bank balance of the buyers of these type of cars.

Unless, of course, the buyer is you, stretching to afford that desirable motor which in truth is beyond your means.

Even those with serious money tend to use their favourite cars as playthings, not as runabouts. If you know the owner of a Bentley Arnage or an Italian exotic such as a Ferrari or Maserati, it’s a pound to a penny the car will sit in the garage with an everyday working car such as a Mercedes S-class limousine (okay, it’s an everyday car to the superwealthy) and at least two other motors for day to day use. Few people ever got rich without knowing the value of money, and just as you’ll wince at the 50 quid cost of replacing the wing mirror on your Focus, so too will the Murciélago driver presented with a bill for £880.42 (before labour) for the same misfortune.

Of course the ideal situation to find yourself in is that of the motoring journalist. I love driving these cars but I do it with the assurance that ultimately it’s not me who’s going to have to foot the bill for repairs. Whether I would actually want to own one is an entirely different matter. It’s not a decision I’m likely to have to make any time soon.

Page two: how one woman’s 007 dream went sour...()Continued from page one

HOW MY 007 DREAM WENT SOUR

Ever since Sean Connery drove the DB5 in Goldfinger in 1964 I have longed for an Aston Martin, writes Stephanie Zinser. All that unbridled power bubbling underneath the sleek veneer makes me drool. So when my DB9 Volante arrived in December I was dying to show it off.

Except I couldn’t. The passenger door wouldn’t open properly because the window did not drop to clear the frame. So off it went to the garage for a new door module.

Just a minor blip, I thought. Not what you’d expect on a £125,000 (with extras) car, but not worth losing my newfound 007 cool over.

But this was only the beginning. The second fault to emerge was with the sat nav system. It was unusable. Aside from the retro 2-D graphics that look less advanced than you’d see now as standard on much cheaper cars, it was permanently 30 miles off target. It had me driving through fields, across rivers and even into dodgy urban areas where this car just isn’t meant to be.

Then the hood started squeaking noisily from both rear sides. The garage fixed that but left me with a rattle at the front. I’ve been waiting since May for the bit of trim to remedy that.

The Bluetooth phone connection is so terrible friends say I sound as if I’m speaking from inside a tin can on the ocean floor — assuming they can hear me at all.

The other day the “handbrake on” warning bell went off and absolutely refused to stop ringing no matter what I did. And at the fuel station my petrol cap fell into five pieces, leaving me to reconstruct it like a giant Kinder Egg.

To top it all the passenger door then refused to lock, which meant I couldn’t risk taking the car anywhere.

I was stunned by the laissez-faire way the warranty repairs were handled. I expected the dealership to be embarrassed/horrified/apologetic — but the workshop appeared full of DB9s and I was casually told I’d have to wait.

Although not strictly a fault, another constant headache is the ride height. The nose is so long and low I’m limited as to where I can actually drive — including my own road with its huge speed bumps, my local Waitrose in Surrey and an entrance to my daughter’s school.

I was told DB9s frequently came into the garage with “chunks hanging off” — so didn’t Aston realise this car would be driven on normal British roads with irregular cambers and uneven surfaces? We need a website: www.whereCANidrivemyDB9.duh.uk.

For a supercar the DB9 is surprisingly short on luxuries. The leather and walnut interior is scrumptious, the crystal ignition button cute as hell. But where are the fripperies I have on my nine-year-old Jaguar XK8 or my Mercedes E-class? There are no automatic headlights and no driver’s seat memory.

A good convertible should produce hot air from the footwell to warm you when you drive with the top down on cold days. My XK8 is brilliant, but the Aston is very chilly to drive in winter and the windows don’t rise up automatically after you put the hood down. You have to do this manually, a nuisance and surely a careless oversight. When I asked my dealer why these things weren’t even available as optional extras I was told “because it’s a sports car not a luxury vehicle”. But who said these things had to be mutually exclusive, especially when you’re paying £125,000 or more? In eight months my DB9 has been to the garage four times and awaits another visit (to fix the sat nav, rattling hood, Bluetooth and handbrake warning bell).

Yes, the engine is as sweet as cherry pie and the body styling delicious, but this isn’t my Bond dream car — it’s a weapon of mass disappointment.