With mega high mileage (125,000+miles), 3-4 year old ex-fleet cars worth very little at auction. What would people pick as the most likely to run for a further 3 years & 50,000 miles without major expense? Read more

I am looking at the possibility of buying a high Mileage (90k) BMW 318i New Shape (E46) for about £13k cash. Is this a sensible thing to do? Everything I read says the new 3 Series is rock solid, but I will be doing about 10k miles a year, whereas this car, according to the FSH, did 25k miles in one period of 4 months. Snap it up or spend my money on something less prestigeous but still safe (2 young children).

This high mileage newish vs. low mileage older comes up every time I look at buying a new car.

Knowledgeable advise gratefully accepted. Read more

I had my first taste of a Daewoo the other day, a '95 Nexia stranded at a guys house with coolant "pouring out of the bottom as fast as he put it in the top" as it was reported. Turned out he had noticed the car overheating and limped home the last few miles with the engine "feeling funny".

Of course my first try was to re-fill via the header tank, I have never seen such an effective straight through passage of water in a cooling system.

On checking the leak source I found the radiator drain plug was missing. Because of tight access in the area I removed the rad to find the plug had blown out with failure of the retainer. It was something like one of these plastic 20mm plugs in a plastic end tank with a plastic 1/4 turn thread to seal. All the parts had fallen off on the road somewhere and the hole left had no signs of a thread or any other way the plug could fix in.

Anyway I checked with Daewoo and a large national radiator supplier, plug not available. Ordered the whole rad from the trade supplier, after six weeks of waiting they gave up...there have been none in stock over the whole of the UK during this period they told me.

The only answer was to go to the Halfords Daewoo counter and order a new complete Daewoo rad. They don't do trade or any other discount so the actual price was...............£216-20!

Astounding cost to repair a problem caused by something as small (and lightweight) as a plastic wine stopper.

The new rad had a stronger design of plug but the Daewoo spares guys claimed they had never heard of this failing before.

David Read more

One of the previous threads covered the removal of film from glass and the risks of using Brasso to clean it. Is there any way of polishing out scratches from glass? I have scratches on a side window that look like they might have come from an attempted break in using a coathanger or something similar. Does anyone know of a product or service that could remove or reduce these? Read more

My wife & I each run Saxo deisels on our driving school. We normally change cars every two years when they've done about 80,000 miles. Because of the milage we take a fair hit in depreciation, but it will be worse this time with the drop in new car prices effecting the second hand market.

Negative equity re the finance means the cars will have to run to about 120,000 (very hard) miles before they can be replaced. Is it worth using oil an oil additive to preserve engine life? Are they just a bit of clever marketing, or do they really make a difference? I've always thought that if whatever is in them is any good, the oil producers would be putting the stuff in anyway.

By the way, adding Wynn's Deisel Clean to the fuel hasn't made any difference to my car's fuel economy or performance (present 53,000 miles).

Any thoughts?

Tom Read more