1.25 Base

Badly built, unreliable junk. Looks quite nice, though.

We bought this car from a local car dealer in August 2011, after the sad demise of our (ancient) Micra, "Betty".

It's had problems from the start - the gear knob fell off on the test drive for a start, and it's had build quality issues ever since. Trim panels randomly fall off. The rear lights randomly become a flashing "christmas tree" when braking AND indicating at the same time.. this is a design fault in the multi-plug behind the cluster. I've fixed both mine with silver paper. Seriously.

Last Saturday night it stubbornly refused to start. And yet on Monday it did 75 miles of SERIOUSLY steep hills on the Yorkshire Moors without a hiccup. It's to do with the dodgy coil-pack system on this model. The coil packs are a known weak point on these cars.

Currently, only one of the wipers works. Fortunately it's the driver's side! The Balljoint that kinks to the passenger side is worn, and the arm drops off. This is a design fault - if they'd done it the other way up, gravity would have kept it in place. Another KNOWN weak point.

While we're on about design faults, I really should mention the snazzy headlights - you can't get at the passenger side ones to change bulbs because there's a fusebox behind the cluster. The Haynes manual advises dropping the front bumper and removing the cluster.. I kid you not!

The (manual) window winder keeps falling off no matter what I do to the retaining clip, and the fan has a mind of it's own (unfortunately, it's gone senile).

Apart from all that, on a good day, it's no bother at all to drive it long distances.

You may have noticed that although our previous car had a name (Betty), the Punto doesn't. Well, nothing printable or in the least affectionate.. there's a reason for that.

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