Last week we replaced my wife's old and clattery Ford Focus diesal estate with an 3 year old Auris Estate Hybrid from our local Toyota garage. The salesman we dealt with looked like he had just left school. Not really dishonest but he was obviously following a script re selling additonal insurance policies for tyres, GAP etc etc. Test drive was about 20 minutes long, with the sales man in attendance. To give him credit he was familiair with Toyota hybrids.

When it came to haggling over price he retreated to his sales manager as he was obviosly not authorised to come down on price.

The most amusing part was he insisted that we finance even though we were cash buyers because apparently it gives us greater protection if the car gets stolen! He only stopped trying to sell finance when I asked him if he would give me a share of his commission.

By way of contrast the best experience I've had is buying a £3K Honda Accord from a used car lot. I started off by going throught the paperwork first, decided the paperwork looked ok and then asked for a test drive. One of the two sales guys just handed me the keys and said give it a go.

Decided to buy the car. I had driven up in my old knackered Honda Civic, Cat C writeoff. They asked if I would like to drive away in the Accord. Despite my best efforts to put them off, they took the Civic in as a Part Ex value £150 (120K miles, o/d service, cambelt change etc). And knocked a bit off the price of the Accord after I asked for a contribution to the RFL. And gave me a lift to the post office and back to sort out the RFL for the Accord.

People like us usually know much better about cars than typical car salesmen. Their aim nowadays is to sell finance products rather than cars because cars kind of sell of its own.

Salesmen cater for generic buyers who buy cars as washimachines or fridges (do you know at what RPM your washing machine drum rotates or how many litres capacity your freezer has?)

Some people cry that we are losing human interfaces but on this occassion I'd prefer to buy a car from robots :-)

I used to sell Mitsubishi’s and they had a terrific level of repeat business. They simply never went wrong and you could be almost guaranteed another sale from a delighted owner in 2-5yrs time. It’s a shame the firm today are a pale shadow of what they once were but after decades of losses and cost cutting the current range are dated at best and downright rubbish in the case of the Mirage. . They expect them to work without any maintenance other than an annual Mot.

When I bought my first car (2yo Nissan Micra 1.0 S 96N), I also had on the list the very nice Mitsi Colt (early - mid 90s model, both the 1.3 and the VERY nice, but expensive 1.6 GLXi [too expensive to insure for a new driver]) and a Civic 1.3. I wasn't a Toyota fan (way too boring for me, even back then - at least the Micra was 'funky' and cost peanuts to run [I got 52 mpg ave. out of it - not to be sniffed at!], the other two were decent drivers cars I thought).

I don't regret going for the Micra (it gave me nearly 8 years of mostly excellent [if a little on the slow side] service before becoming too costly to run), but I'd have loved to have run the Colt as it was great to drive (I test drove a 1.6, no 1.3's in stock) and was a very nice looking car too. Just too expensive for me at the time and not many dealers (with a service dept - my local one only sold cars) about locally though, which put me off a bit (the Nissan garage was handily on my way to work and far more abundent [and far higher regarded for engineering quality than they are today amongst the Renault Alliance]).

I defintely follow your rule nowadays to buy the lowest spec I need with the least complex car possible for the level of reliability and other criteria I have, which is why (at present at least) I won't be changing from Mazda unless something absolutely amazing comes along from other makes that is essentially found to be (I never buy a car until its been out in the market for a couple of years to see if its reliable or not, and only change tech [e.g. TSi engines, DSGs etc] once the tech has been proven generally/for that make over a good number of years) as reliable (or better) as my Mazda 3 mk1.

It'll be very interesting to see what happens to petrol-engined cars when the next level of Euro emissions laws (and I presume, whether the UK is fully out by then or not, we'll still likely have to abide by them or have to at least buy all cars that do so) kick in, as many people have said very similar emissions tech will be needed in them as the unreliable stuff currently in diesels. I wonder how the sales personnel will spin that to customers?

No wonder car sales are down this past year - people are increasingly not believing in all the BS and sticking with their known quantity existing cars.