... Or “I _hate_ shopping for cars: part two” (part one being here ) …

… in fact, it’s a number much higher than two – every time I’ve needed a ‘new’ (used) vehicle – at least a dozen times then, it’s been the same old manure.


What prompted the whole hateful business of having to shop for another car was the fact that my Renault Clio failed its MoT – an annual test of road worthiness. And by quite a margin too – basically it was going to need new brakes (as in just about every single component related to braking), new front suspension (again, as in everything related to controlling the up & downiness of the front wheels), and excessive rust in the sills.

The total bill would have been just shy of the £1k mark, and bearing in mind the car only cost £250 in the first place, it just wasn’t worth it. Especially not with my luck – I’d probably spend all that money, then park it in a tree a few weeks later, and get about £300 as an insurance payout.


Once again, I wasn’t going to have an awful lot of money to play with – even raiding what paltry savings I’d managed to put aside over the last few months, and the cash from selling my CX500 (sob!) came to £965 - putting me firmly in the old car category again.

Now, that shouldn’t necessarily have been a problem – theoretically, there must be some good cheap cars out there – ones where the owner hasn’t totally run it into the ground and avoided all maintenance, but yet, somehow, if there were cars out there like that, I wasn’t seeing them.

Let me share some of the highlights with you:

* Owners going away for the weekend … if they’ve got money to throw away (by paying for an advert & then not being around to get any benefit from it), I wish they’d give it to me

* Owners spending a long time on the phone telling me just how many bits had been replaced on their elderly relative’s low mileage car … I’ve seen how old people drive – just how do they manage to need a new clutch, brakes, suspension, engine, etc in 30,000 miles?

* Two rough Skoda Felicias … it’s probably just as well neither of these worked out, as given where they’re made, I would have had to post a thread entitled ‘Czech out my new wheels!” … anyway, one had no rear wheel arches, and what was probably quite a low impact dent on one of the front wings that could have been successfully fixed with a rubber suction dent puller – if the previous owner hadn’t bodged it by twatting it several dozen times from the inside with a toffee hammer. The second had a rattle from the top end of the engine that got increasingly loud as it warmed up … a note to sales people here: look, it doesn’t matter how many times you insist there’s nothing wrong with it – it you have to shout to be heard over the pneumatic road drill noises coming from the engine, I’m just not going to believe you.

* A VW Golf (Rabbit) that should have gone to the crusher _years_ ago

* A Ford Escort that was ostensibly a nice, low mileage car with a full service history … which turned out to be rough, clocked (IMO – the seat & pedal wear & the stone chips on the leading edge of the bonnet {hood} said it had done at least 100k miles, a figure the odometer didn’t agree with), with no service history, being sold by a dodgy roadside trader. The ‘dodgy’ epithet is just supposition on my part … but if someone is legitimately selling cars, why aren’t they doing it from a lot with their name on the sign? It’s also a legal requirement to mention if you’re a trader in any advertising.


I could go on (and on) … but I’m sure this isn’t news to you if you’ve ever had to buy a used car. I’m sure most people have – if my research is to be believed (if you can call 30 seconds thought whilst having a dump ‘research' ), the average car lasts 10 years and has 5 owners in that time, so 80% of car purchases are of the ‘used’, ‘preowned’, or ‘previously enjoyed’ (fer fuxxache ) variety.

I just wonder why it has to be so difficult … the used car business is probably a multi-billion £/$ trade, and after all, a car is a pretty standard commodity nowadays. I’ve been trying to think of a cogent paradigm to illustrate my point: a product of similar ubiquity if you will … oh all right then, _a good example_ … after at least several seconds thought (dismissing a dentistry/blacksmith analogy), I came up with Ketchup. Seriously.

Buying ketchup is easy – you go to any supermarket, any corner shop, convenience store, most petrol (gas) stations, cash & carry, etc, pick it up off the shelf, pay a price that will at most vary a few pence/cents (or get it on the five finger discount ), and it’s yours. Even if you’re particular about the brand (Heinz rules! ), it’s no problem.

Now, if the ketchup trade were anything like the used car market, it would be totally different. You’d have to worry about whether the price you were paying was fair or double what it ought to be, whether what you thought you’d gone to buy turned out to be salad cream, brown sauce, or even BBQ sauce rather than ketchup when you got there, whether it was some cheapo brand in a Heinz bottle, whether it was past it’s use by date … pants, this is a carp example … but you know what I’m saying.


Of course, buying a _new_ car is totally different … if was rabidly multimedia oriented, I’d enlist the help of Nev to illustrate my point via a staged video clip … but I’m not, so I’ll just give you the script:

Starring Me (as the customer) & Nev_payne (as the salesman)…

Camera pans through car showroom (probably Mercedes if we can get some freebies for the PR staff ) , pauses briefly on furtive salesmen, peeking through the foliage of a large ficus plant in the manner of meerkats … only weaslier ).

Cut to:
Camera follows customer through showroom.

Cut to:
Fixed shot – customer climbs in car, makes pretend ‘brrmm brrmm’ noises, pretends to pull up to traffic lights, looks in rearview mirror, preens in a ‘look how cool I am’ way

Cut to:
Reverse angle, camera looking across customer – customer makes ‘finger gun’ sign out of the window and says “Hey, foxy lady!!!” in an unnecessarily cheesy way. Salesman (appearing at window): “Can I help you, sir?”

Cut to:
Reverse angle
Customer (exiting car, undoing trousers): “Well, I’ll probably be dropping thirty k here today, so you can start by” (customer turns around, baring arse) “… kissing this!”.
Salesman: “Certainly sir!”

Fade to black, smooching noise.


Well .. that’s how it ought to be … but it’s just as bad as buying a used car – not so much a case of SSDD (same sh1t, different day), as a _totally different kind_ of sh!t.



I could (as you know) continue in a negative vein all day … but there is some positive news. Having decided I needed to increase my budget, I looked for the credit I was going to need to achieve it. Thanks to a short term loan from the Bank of my Long Suffering Parents , vehicles up to a cost of around double my previous budget would be a possibility … if only I could find a good one.

A short flirtation with the idea of buying a Saab was killed off by insurance costs far above what I wanted to pay, the prospect of massive parts bills, and the fact that Saab is the motoring equivalent of the Mac … what’s that advertising line again? “It does the same thing, just much more expensively”

Next up were a couple of Citroen Xantias, a phrase which, when translated into English, almost certainly means ‘money pit’, thanks to the French attitude towards electric gizmos - high quantity, low quality.



Frankly, it was sheer desperation that took me southwards to a garage I’d regarded as being too expensive this time around … not that the cars there aren’t worth the prices, but if the prices are higher than your budget, it doesn’t matter how good value they are.
It’s a place where the owner is an old fashioned (though not old) gentleman who refuses to take deposits as a sign of good faith, instead regarding a handshake as sacrosanct.

Fortune was (at last) smiling on me … if not for the thousands of people that lost there jobs here recently. I don’t know if the news made it across the pond, but the MG / Rover group went bust, turfing no end of people out of their livelihoods, and ending two British Motoring traditions.

Prices of the remaining new & of course hundreds of thousands of used cars out there have plummeted over the last couple of months – which is how I managed to buy a car that would have cost £3k two months ago, then £2.5k a month ago … for £1.8k.



Assuming I haven’t bored you to death already, I’ll get to the point – it’s a 1997 Rover 416Si with 52,000 miles on the clock. It looks like something your grandad would drive, but handles pretty well, and the 111BHP K-Series 1600cc engine propels it to 60mph in a whisker under 10 seconds, and onwards to just about 120mph.

A few pics to finish – it’s not particularly exciting, but does have few nice quality touches like walnut panels in the interior, alloy wheels, metallic paint.

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Nice car. Unfortunately the daft buggers put the steering clear over on the wrong side. Surprised you didn't spot that on the test drive ....... you are usually pretty perceptive.

The pedals are in the right places, but the steering wheel? Sheesh, no wonder they went out of business...

Nice wheels and nice find, BTW, JE...

*edited for unoriginality*

Cool looking car. Car shopping blows.

It must be the mirror effect of taking the picture.

Damn Jonny! Nice ride. I rented one of those in Italy for a weekend and it was rock solid on the autostrada. I just want to see a picture of you sitting in it with the window down, finger and thumb gun-like, winking and say "Hey, Foxy Lady!"

Quote: Originally Posted by Jonny English It looks like something your grandad would drive

Actually..the front looks sexy..I dunno about the back..lol or the sides..but id hit it