O rly?

Mark

Dunno what age your fezza is but all mk4 and mk5 fezzas are renowned for rust.

I've had to have the sills done at a cost of £150 and now it looks like the rear arch is causing issues. Mechanically sound at 85k.

With any (new/ish) car, spray the underside with waxoyl to protect from rust.

As for the fezza, if you go for another used one, you'll still have the issue of rust unless you go for a mk6 or the new mk7 (which I recently drove - in some ways very different from the mk4, in some ways, still the same!).

Ya rly.
The old mans 4 litre Jag does better mileage on the same trip. Approx. 30mpg. Pootling about town, there's not much between them.

(8+) I missed this first time around.
Those bits of glass should never be overlooked, y'know?

Mark

Toyota Aygo, or if you can get one for the right price, a Toyota Yaris.

Does Autotrader have a load of scams on it at the moment?

Just been looking around at cars and seen a few which are crazy cheap. Like £5000 cheaper than I was expecting.

My 1987 BMW M535i used to return around 40mpg when driven sanely, did a trip to Germany, cruising at 90mph on the motorway, with a blast up to over 150mph, to see what it was still capable of (it lost 3mph off what it should have done new after 15 years!), I still managed 40mpg over 1,500 miles.

On a trip to the Welsh mountains, where I stripped the rear tyres in a weeken, it dropped to about 20mpg though!

I'd go with second hand/nearly new. My current car is a Mondeo estate TDCi (the 130PS version with 2L 6 speed), bought it 3 months old and saved over 10K! (It was fully loaded, with climate control, touch screen onboard computer/radio/navigation system, sports leather, 18" summer and 17" winter alloys, xeonon headlights, sports leather heated seats, parking help, fog lights etc.)

I wouldn't buy new, unless I had money to throw away, but buying nearly new or up to 1 year old and you get that new feeling, but save money.

Over here Mercedes are doing some fantastic deals on the new style A and C class "Young Stars" (up to 1 year old), but they are probably out of your price range...

Edit: Of course, the advantage here is that the registration doesn't show the age of the car, nobody is interested, except the MOT centre. My car is 5 years old my girlfriends is 8 years old and we ended up with consecutive number plates - I moved to this area and had to re-register my car and she bought her car the same day I decided to re-register mine, and I was walking out of the town hall, as she arrived...

Here, the first 1 - 3 letters signify which catchment area you fall into (previously I had LL or M on my cars - Landsberg am Lech or Munich - now I have OS (Osnabrück). Then there is a space for the valid TÜV (back plate, the German MOT) and AZU (front, German emissions test badge) and the issuing land (Niedersachsen in my case), the discs show when the next test is due, then you get 1 or 2 letters and 1 to 4 numbers (max letter + number combo is 5).

The only information you can gather from the plates is which area the owner lives in - if you move, you need to get the car reregistered for the area you live in - and when the next MOT is due.

The only way to tell the age of the car is to know when a certain body shape was in production.

I find it much better than the one-upmanship of the UK system.

Unless I was minted, I'd never go near a brand new car - you lose several thousand as soon as you drive it out of the showroom. A good 1/2 year old car with something approaching average mileage is your best bet (avoid cars that have only done a few thousand a year - short sto-start journeys are great at killing modern engines). My BMW would have cost over £42k new, but after two years and 20k miles it was almost half-price.

My Fiesta is 1999, a T reg with the 1.25 engine. It's been a great car and a superb engine. I've had it maybe 8 years or more.

The problem is that my youngest and wife took it to the shopping mall today and called from the carpark to tell me that smoke was coming from the front offside wheel arch. I knew immediately that the problem was a binding brake because this happened to me 6 0r 7 years ago.... a week after I had taken it into the garage for the same problem !

So... they nursed the car home but I know it needs getting rid of fast.

As for buying brand new.... yes, depreciation is there to be taken into consideration but if you keep the car for any length of time then that really doesn't matter too much.

HAhahaha I had the same old fezza. 1.25-Zetec LX, 5dr. Loved it to bits. Now my sister has it and has scraped it left, right and centre.

It's been a great little car ! I downsized from a 2.00 sierra ghia when I got it and was very downcast at the thought of driving a 1.25 fiesta.

Incidentally, my wife drives a 57 plate 1.4 zetec and my old one if far more responsive and nippy.

Yep

A lot are Cat D reclaimed from accidents, technically a write off but repaired to new, as always caveat empor or however it's spelled

Bought an 9 month old Fiesta Zetec 1.4 yesterday.

I let someone else take the depreciation hit and am very happy with the price I paid. Incidentally, there are only 2 colours (red and white) that come as standard when buying new. All the rest are "metallic" which bumps the price by a whopping £425.

I'll be kind of sad to see the back of my little old 1.25 It's been around for many a year and through more thick and thin than most manage in a lifetime, never mind 7/8 years.

What a rip off. That means the dealer is effectively charging £13.5K.
Try http://www.drivethedeal.com, that's where we bought our car from, we saved 1800 quid.