Didn't Kia market the last Magentis at taxi drivers, seems perfect on paper, i've seen it and its sister Hyundai Sonata for sale ex taxi with starship mileages.

The most respected (mainly long distance) private hire firm here uses Mercedes E class 220 Diesels, my indy services them from new and i know the cars' owner well, they usually get sold on over 400k miles on with very little work other than servicing needed to reach that, however the maintenance is better than normal and they are driven professionally.

For general purpose hacks round here Eurotaxi is popular as is Octavia, but Toyota Prius are increasing in number too elsewhere, seemingly able to stand colossal mileages with few problems and for local taxi work better than Diesels on fuel.

Edited by gordonbennet on 27/12/2013 at 18:46

THe biggest taxi company around here used the Octavia exclusively but now they're replacing them all with Hyundai i40s

Round here (Macclesfield) there are quite a few Vectra C diesels being used, ironically. Also a lot of Octavias and new model Superbs.

A private hire driver I know recently sold his 08 registration Octavia diesel estate with 230,000 miles. He bought it with 40,000 miles up. I'm not certain if it was a 1.9PD or the later 2 litre diesel, but it did have a DSG box.

He says it was reliable -- he had no problems with the engine, injection system or DPF, but it needed a new dual-mass flywheel every 80,000 miles (about £7 - 800 fitted I think, although that might have been the total cost of a service including cambelt etc too -- you'd have to check). He put two on it (at around 85K and 170K) and he reckons it was probably due another one when he sold it.

He's now running a Seat Exeo estate (the one based on the Audi A4) with manual box. He likes the big VAG parts bin.

Edited by craig-pd130 on 27/12/2013 at 20:13