mike morley

A few years ago I bought my brother's Focus (9 years old but only 40,000 miles on the clock for just £1750. Too good a bargain to miss)  I'm a motorcyclist so don't look for thrills in a car but, even so, I found it a bit "beige".  It also had a hopelessly inaccurate speedo that I always suspected masked fairly poor fuel consumption. Then my daughter became pregnant and realised she was never going to fit herself, her husband, their baby and all the paraphernalia associated with parenthood in her beloved Kia Picanto, so we swapped cars. 

The Picanto expired just before last Xmas (The mechanic who replaced the cam belt should have re-tightened the crankshaft pulley bolt to 120 newton metres.  Instead, he only did it finger-tight)

Then, just a month later, to round off a perfect Xmas, my daughter wrote the Focus off. (Switching from main to dip, she managed to turn the lights off and collided with a parked car)

She had a 120 mile round trip to work every day so needed a replacement car in a hurry and as she'd long yearned for one I bought her a Kia Sportage.  It was a year older and had 10,000 more miles on the clock than I felt it was worth, but she was thrilled to bits and hers was the only opinion that matters in such circumstances.  What got me about it though was, considering what it cost and the market it's aimed at (what is the current term for what used to be Yuppies?) how unsophisticated it was.  I think the technology in the by-then scrapped Focus was more advanced!

Don't get me wrong.  I don't like a lot of the technology that comes with the latest cars.  I've test-driven my ex's Peugeot 3008 and now loath electric handbrakes.  After the Picanto went bang I hired a BMW X1 to visit my brother for Xmas and not once did its automatic windscreen wipers share my opinion as to what they ought to be doing.  I have several friends whose cars have automatic headlights and needed only very brief demonstrations to understand why they keep them permanently over-ridden.

I recently looked at a Citroen C4 Picasso and felt it ticked a lot of boxes.  I asked my brother (until he retired, an extremely senior traffic policeman) for his opinion and he admitted he had a poor opinion of French cars in general.  It was a couple of days before I recalled that he once owned a Citroen 2CV, long after they had ceased to be current models, and used to sing their praises from the rooftops.

You see why I'm confused?

P.S.

My brother has just bought himself a Porsche.

I went through the "dazed and confused" phase when my old car (fifteen years use, bought at c24 months old) was clearly entering "huge bills to keep it going" territory, so I can identify very closely with what you say.

My solution was to set a budget, and attempt to get the best VFM medium-sized car c12-24 months old that I could for that. By default, I ended-up buying a brand new car, because dealers had pre-registered so many in June 2018, which they hadn't shifted over the summer that they were flogging them off in September 2018 at "secondhand prices". I got three dealerships under-cutting one another in a phone-bidding contest!

Moral? Do look at pre-registered cars just before the registration is due to change - dealers are sometimes near-desparate to shift stock to meet quarterly targets.

Oh, and I don't much like the car! Its a 4x4 shaped one,  although actually 2WD, whereas I had an estate before, and it seems very space-inefficient by comparison. So, I got that wrong. 

Kevin