August 2001
By the way...
What is the name of that Fiat that I saw last week ? It looks like a people carrier which has been hit in the face with a meat cleaver. Why would anybody buy such an ugly car.
Also a small Ford which looked vaguely like a Tigra.
M. Read more
The time has come to get shot of my Rover 620 and I'm looking at getting a secondhand 75.
Is there anything I should look out for ? I've kept a close eye on the 75 and they seem well put together. I'm interested in a 2.0 Club Manual and have a budget of about £13K. They seem a bit of bargain considering this will get me a two-year old with reasonable mileage. Are they likely to depreciate heavily and it's worth me hanging on another few months for a three year old for much less ?
Are high mileages young cars preferable to lower mileage older cars ? I'm not touching anything without an immaculate service history.
Finally, what can I expect to get for my 94 Rover 620 Si Auto ? Glass's says around £2500. But the mileage is on the low side for my car having covered 58K with full service history and the important cam-belt change at five years old.
This place seems to be a goldmine of knowledge so I'm wondering if you guys can help me out, many thanks in advance. Read more
Cheers guys, I feel more confident in a 75 if it passes the scrunity of this board. Love it or hate it, it seems a stylish motor for the money. Fortunately as a big fan of P5 and P6's I like it.
The 620 is in pretty good shape and I did check for the dreaded tinworm in the rear wings and they seem OK. I thought 2500 was a bit of a tall order as it's likely to be taxi fodder bearing in mind its age. It's not been a bad car, got a good reliability index from Which last week.
I'm quite lucky as Trade Sales / Great Trade Centre are only a few miles away so I'll be off there for a quick look round on Saturday.
Thanks again.
I read the previous thread about Top Gear and their fixation with speed etc. and I thought it about time we put comfort on the agenda. Most modern cars are adequately fast, so we will all get where we want to go in reasonable time - but are they all comfortable enough?
I'll start the ball rolling, with the objective of teasing out: a) the most comfortable car, and b) the most uncomfortable car. My nomination for the most uncomfortable is the Renault Scenic. My wife and I recently spent a holiday in Scotland with another couple and used our two cars alternately for day trips. Mine is a Xantia - my pal's is a Scenic.
The Scenic's bearable in the front, but the back is atricious. How did Renault design the seats and suspension? The back seats must have been designed for dwarves and the suspension for JCB drivers who are on holiday. Anybody lured to one of these vehicles by their excellent space packaging needs to sit and ride in the back before parting with their money.
Anybody care to disagree and/or nominate the most comfortable car? Read more
Beg Pardon, Andrew?
5'7" Normal? Vertically challenged, more like. I'm surprised you could see over the Omega's dashboard.
Vin
(in two senses....)
From "On The Road":-
"A new police unit in Northamptonshire aims to catch motorists who give speed cameras the V-sign. Drivers face a maximum £5,000 fine or six months in jail for public order offences. The £100,000 unit will have four officers on motorbikes."
Well, we knew the spoil-all-motoring brigade to be pompous, humourless, hostile, tyrannical single-issue fanatics with over-inflated egos but at least it is amusing to have them demonstrate it themselves.
I recall that in Prussia you could be heavily fined for "treating an officer for contumely". After two world wars for "freedom" we seem to now plumb similar depths.
What, by the way, precisely are these public order offences? Is just the V-sign in question, or would, say, the American single finger, or putting a tongue out, count. I ask because I find expressing my total loathing and contempt very good for my blood pressure, which I am supposed to watch in the interests of my safety!
I trust some local hero is taking up the question of waste of taxpayers money, and of four policemen doing something obviously of no practical use, who would be better employed on the beat. Read more
Or a double nostril pick
:=>)
Jonathan
Virgin now have a dedicated bike site, worth a look I think.
www.Virgin.com/bikes. Read more
See also Smartgroups (www.smartgroups.com)
I was interested to read the letter from the Mondeo owner concerning heater problems. My wife's Seat Cordoba 1.6 (1994) has shown similar symptoms with the smell of acrid burning (although not that strong) and the fan switch is also unreliable. Sometimes all blower speeds work but at other times only some do. Has anyone else experienced this problem and solved it? David Marchant. djmat15@aol.com Read more
I had a Fiat with this problem. The three speed fan would usually only work on full speed. The fan resistor was shaped like a coil spring about 4 inches long and
half an inch in diameter (attached to the rear engine bulkhead). This "spring"
was connected to a printed circuit which sent the current through the whole
resistor for the slowest fan speed setting, half of it for intermediate and bypassed it altogether for the fastest setting. The printed circuit had corroded,
so current wasn't getting through when the resistor was in the circuit. I soldered some wire between the connections to bypass the printed wires to cure the problem.
After having my wing mirror kicked off by a vandal. I asked my local Honda dealer to supply a new one. They said they could get one but I would have to pay an extra £50 ( in top of the £170) to respray it black. They claimed this part was no longer available in black, i find this hard to believe as the car is only five years old. Read more
For something the size of a door mirror I bet it could be successfully sprayed with an aerosol. I did a lower half door panel and it looked quite OK.
I rented one of these while I was in the UK. An outstanding car. I drove about 1200 miles in it.
I was a little disconcerted by how much it pulled to the right when accelerating hard - I've no idea whether that was the one I had, although it was brand new or that they're all like that. But I got used to it and it didn't pull under braking or normal driving.
The only niggle was the you wouldn't want to be too wide in the back since the sides of the seats pinch a little.
Other than that, fast, handles well, quiet, well equipped. All in all, pretty impressive.
I did wonder what "ST" stands for though.
M. Read more
either that or a hypodermic in the seat squab......seen it happen around here trying to catch an unsuspecting plod when recovering stolen cars. Ended up nearly catching out one of my guys. F****G outragious !
Caravans should never be lifted by their jacking points as they are only designed to steady the van and are rarely strong enough to lift the wheels from the ground.
miss-use can cause damage to the chassis or the floor. Read more
Agreed. Unless there is a dedicated jacking point, the best way is normally a jack directly under the axle as close to the wheel as possible.
My son has damaged one of the alloy wheels on his 1999 Astra Sport (1.8), not his fault, of course.
Does anyone have a suggestion of where he can get a replacement other than the, presumably, expensive option of the Vauxhall dealer?
The car is a little too new for a breakers yard option I assume. Read more
There is also the option of having the wheel repaired if the damage is not to bad. It costs around 50 quid or so to have the damage repaired and the wheel resprayed or coated. Have a look in your yellow pages.
Ash.
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> I guess it's winter in Rio because there were a LOT of
> Brazilian girls on the beach in Bali.
Certainly is. Temperature down to 27 degrees, beaches deserted, women in Bali