Fed up with my car!

[Retired]

Hi,

Sorry to here of your car trouble Rob. 150K miles is getting on a bit and given this mileage no doubt lots of other components are showing signs of wear?

I can understand your dilemma; you don't want to change the car just now because of finances but is your car now going to cost more to keep?

I used to enjoy tinkering with second-hand cars which were well past their sell by date and eventually bought a VW Beetle; Bron and I ran this Beetle for just over a year during which time I seemed to spend more time working on it than driving it. As usual I had been buying lots of spares during ownership and one day I sat down with pen and paper and added up the total cost of these spares having kept note of prices or retaining receipts. The cost of owning this old Beetle and its thirst for fuel balanced very nicely with monthly payments on a brand new Citroen 2CV so we bought a Citroen 2CV and now Bron and I could forget our motoring costs because we knew exactly what they would be each year whilst the Citroen was under warranty. What a difference this made to our lives though; no sudden bills for spares; dirt cheap to fuel up and above all our weekends were now free and we could get out to enjoy ourselves in the car. Since then we've only ever had brand new cars changing them when the first MOT was due and the warranty was about to expire.

I regard cars as a necessary evil these days and we never spend a lot on buying our new cars always going for a model to suit us after all there are only two of us using our car; our current Aygo is three years old this August and it's our second Aygo but now it's proving rather too small especially for transporting building materials and machinery around so our next car hopefully will be a size larger it being a Skoda Fabia Monte Carlo; we'll visit our local Skoda dealer next month because we might have to wait for delivery which can take up to three months?

This possibly doesn't help you Rob but it works for us. I used to dread MOT time even though I used to look after our cars. If you do a lot of annual mileage Rob then a diesel makes sense but these days petrol engines are much more efficient and whereas a few years ago diesel cost less than petrol now diesel costs more than petrol bringing the two MPG figures nearer regarding running costs?

It really comes down to paying your money and taking your choice. A couple of weeks ago a chum bought a large second hand Skoda estate on a 55 plate with around 99K on the clock. Once paid for and home it was found to have an erratic tick over; this Thursday he is trading it in for a van losing money on it and there are no guarantees the van will be any better because he is buying privately? He wanted the estate as he is starting a gardening business hence the van decision.

Once an older car starts to go wrong then it's a case of constantly spending on the weakest link with sudden bills some of which these days bring tears to ones eyes. New cars are usually more fuel efficient and these days come with manufacturers warranty up to seven years; Skoda are quite mean with a three year warranty because even our Aygo has a five year warranty and these warranty's can save a fortune should anything untoward happen because even new cars can break down.

Time I got something done but good luck Rob; I hope the fault on your car is very easy and cheap to put right.

Kind regards, Col.