“Ideally I’d run it into the ground,” says Bill Hasan of the Mercedes S-class. “Per pound I’d benefit much more if I kept it until it fell apart”. But Hasan, like most limo bosses who run executive cars, doesn’t have that financial luxury. The last thing he wants is for the clients for his exclusive London-based chauffeur business, Le-Tour Limited is to start noticing the twice-updated version beside them at the lights.

So Hasan is forced to sell and risk getting the financial wind knocked out of his business from depreciation of skyscraper proportions. But, as you’d expect from a man who can boast a Maybach and a Rolls Royce Phantom on his fleet, he has a few tricks up his sleeve. Apart from Hasan and his near million-pound fleet (well, bought new it was), we also cast the net wider to track down experts best placed to advise the limo boss peering into the chasm of a new executive car purchase. Then, hopefully, when the boss calls for a Bentley, the company finance won’t be rocked quite so violently.

More likely though, it will be a BMW 7-series. The big Beemer is by far the biggest selling luxury saloon, shifting just over 2000 models largely thanks to the 730d — a canny purchase you might think? Just a year after it gets delivered, price experts CAP say you’ll get less than £30,000 for the £48,500 BMW, a drop of just over 40 percent. After three years and 60,000 miles later, expect the dealer to offer up a mere £16,500. Recently, auctioneers at BCA brought the hammer down on a three-year, 47k mile 730d SE at just £23,400. That disastrous fall is the big reason why the SE version will cost 71ppm to run, and that’s relatively ‘sensible’ money in the world of prestige motoring.

Worked out by a company called TopCalc, which works closely with fleets to get accurate running-cost predictions, the pence per mile figure is arrived at by adding service costs, depreciation and fuel bills and assuming 60,000 miles over years, and it can be the most useful finance figure for any limo company.

CAP predicts that the new Mercedes S500, will lose a massive 49 percent of its value in the first year, which is actually more than the model it replaced (mainly due to its higher sticker price) but worst of all is the Bentley Arnage, which loses a incredible £100,000 in the first 12 months of its life, equating to a drop of 49 percent from the plushest RL’s start price of £191,000. Two pounds every mile, reckons TopCalc.

“There’s a new owner hit, as you get with most cars. Trouble is it’s so much greater with expensive cars,” says Mark Norman, managing editor of CAP’s price predictor, Monitor. “The S500 for example, virtually as soon as you drive it out of the showroom you wave goodbye to the best part of £20,000. It doesn’t matter what you do.”

It’s a feeling the boss of London-based Le Tour Chauffeur Drive knows well. “Our Rolls-Royce Phantom is just over a year old, but it’s lost 35 percent already,” says Bill Hasan. “For the price of what that’ll lose, you can buy a whole business and perhaps a nice little house too.”

Watch the spec Worse still, the price of those extras your clients insist on — the air conditioned seats, the rear DVD player are likely to be wiped off completely. “Most of what you pay extra for, you’ll take an absolute hit on,” says CAP’s Norman. “It’s nice having a fridge in the armrest, but how many are people will be willing to pay extra for that later on?”

So spec is the first step in shoring up your residual dam. The one option that often can’t be ignored by chauffeurs is the longer wheelbase version, which can add around £4000 to the price. However, while you don’t get any extra back come resale, they do maintain a price gap against the standard car, says CAP (see box) In other words, some of the extra cash you spent will find your way back into your pocket.

But not all prestige values melt faster than an ice swan in July, just most of them. The Bentley Continental Flying Spur for example might cost £118,000 new, but a year later it’s still worth £77,000, says CAP. The extra glamour factor that comes from being related to the ultra-desirable Continental GT has slowed up deprecation to the point it’s one of the few limos that doesn’t drop more than 40 percent in its first year.

Four-wheel-drives are another class of car to consider, but only with the diesels. For example the Range Rover Vogue with the 4.4-litre V8 follows a path very similar to the saloons — huge first year drop then steady decline. However the 3.0 TD6 costs around four grand less to buy, but four years later according to CAP’s calculations it’ll actually be worth more than the petrol.

TopCalc’s prediction is that, for example, the Jaguar XJ Sovereign with the V6 diesel engine will cost 15p per mile less than the V8 petrol. That’s taking into account cheaper servicing, cheaper fuel bills and a smaller residual drop.

But Bill Hasan, like many chauffeur bosses, won’t go diesel for his top-end limos and he’s not about to swap them for 4x4s, so he’s forced to deal with huge drop in value. His solution is to keep them as long as possible – not run into the ground, but long enough to take advantage of a slowdown. “The major deprecation comes in the first three years, and they will hold their prices after that,” he says. “You still get the same quality. A five-year-old S-class is not so different to the three-and-half-year-old car.

Hasan also makes sure he extends the warranty with Mercedes dealers. It costs him £1000 a year, but says it’s worth every penny. “We’ve just had £5000 of warranty work done on the five-year-old S-class that we paid nothing for. And if you have some of the warranty left when you come to sell, the person who is buying the car has more peace of mind.”

Having owned his cars from new, Hasan either sells to other chauffeur firms, or angles for good part-exchange prices with Mercedes dealers. “There’s so many choices where to buy, it’s worth it to haggle and say so and so gave me this deal. Their pockets are very deep,” he says. It is advice echoed by Mark Norman at CAP: “Bargain hard as possible. All of them will do something.”
Getting a decent price when you sell can be hard, but auction houses like BCA are geared up for prestige cars.

“The key to remarketing high-value product is exposure to the right buyers and this takes a little more time,” says BCA general manager Graham Smith. Their solution is dedicated Top Car sales that keep out the usual fleet riff-raff in favour of high-end sports cars and limos. It was in this rarefied atmosphere that they established a UK auction record for a current model, selling a Rolls-Royce Phantom in Nottingham for £189,000.

Instead of buying you could lease it, but — as you probably feared — there’s a premium. For a start, the leasing companies can get nervous at the top end, and for finance houses, nerves always mean higher prices. “With cars like the Maybach, it’s such a risk for us,” says John Porter at Lex. “We’d take a more prudent view on used values and the rentals would be high for the customer.”

Of course, if you’re not buying new, this almost catastrophic drop in price plays right into your hands. Wait a year and there’s £20k saved, providing you pick the right car. BCA’s dedicated Top Car auctions are a good place to hunt down the deals close to the prices we’ve been talking about.

The CAP prices quoted throughout are trade-in figures, ie what a dealer would give you, not what they’d sell for. For example your Bentley dealer might offer just £98,000 for your year-old Arnage RL, but he’s going to put it on the forecourt for a whole lot more. The cheapest 05 model we saw was going for £127,500 (although still a long way down from £190,000). When buying new, there are a few tricks limo bosses can learn to contain the residual damage when selling up, but it’s a bit like holding a bucket to a dam burst. Instead, you’ve got to work out how to best go with the flow.

Working for billionaires

With 16 years in the chauffeur business, Bill Hasan of Le-Tour Chauffeur Drive has learnt a thing or two about running a limousine fleet. His first piece of advice is to go Mercedes — of the eight cars on his fleet, all but one is either a Mercedes or Mercedes-built.

The Rolls Royce Phantom is his one concession to other makes. “They say Mercedes is a poor man’s car, It might be expensive to buy but you can run it for nothing.” He admits this isn’t entirely true, what with that depreciation, but the combination of low-mileage and on-the-button servicing allows him to wring maximum use and around five years out of his S-Class cars.

That’s because they’re hired most for “directed work”, ie they stand about a lot. His E-Class cars on the other hand can spend their life running to Heathrow and back and rack up around 150,000 in three years.

It’s a different story when it comes to the Rolls-Royce and Maybach though, “They’re very exclusive cars,” Hasan shrugs. “Some clients are after the latest car, like Russians and the Arab royals and they don’t mind paying for them”. Despite the potential fuel savings, he draws the line at Mercedes S-Class diesels. “What’s next a Rolls diesel, a Bentley diesel?