Corsa water pump failure (general rant)

LOL. They're not bad at all as long as your memory is worse! I started off in this thread only remembering the hopeless water pumps that had been jogged in my memory. Then, as the clouds in the memory dissipated, the list grew and grew..

I used to think that I had had a couple of good Vauxhalls in my time with them. Now I drive such a rubbish make (according to the general public!) that I can judge all my previous cars by that yardstick and if any cars were worse, then I must realistically conclude that, they were a sick joke at my expense and nowhere close to being a decent motor. Works for me..anyway!

50 cars! Is that even possible? In the last 15 years I've had 5, of which only one survived to be traded in (and one still lives). I guess if you've had 50 cars you never need to worry about reliability, keep it for a week and then throw it away :D

Regards,

Tim

53, I think. That includes my wife's cars, and numerous restoration projects. We've had up to 15 at a time.

Reliability is important in the cars I'm driving, though I almost always have a backup available. My daily commute is a 50-mile round trip, which I mainly do in a car which is about to reach it's 40th birthday. The only time it's failed to get me home was when the coil nose cracked in a torrential downpour - a 10 minute fix if I'd had a spare coil at the roadside.

They could be designed to last much longer, but at a price. If you were a car manufacturer, and you tried selling a car that would last

20 years without any parts failing, but had to price it 1 1/2 times more than an equivalent car, you would soon go out of business. Manufaturers have to design cars for the first buyer, who cares about the price, but not about the longevity.

the only way would be to tax badly made stuff, reduce the tax on long-lasting or eco friendly cars. stopping the snob value year marking of number plates might encourage people to buy less often. what could be usefully made might be a long lasting eco friendly runabout, that is very cheap to insure/tax, it only needs to have 80mph performance. All this current trend to make shopping cars as fast as a formula car of just a few years ago is really a waste of time, the effort that has gone into extra speed could have been channelled into extra economy.

Banning adverts that go on about how fast everything is might be a good idea too.

Saturday night round here is very like something from an arcade game with the hooligans throwing around very fast cars all up and down the local shopping roads, it sounds like a race track at about 1am, again, I think that this is only a result of games and films which glamorise street racing.

Mrcheerful

Big problem in lots of places. Our town was advertised nationally in some "cruise" mag as a race circuit, and has had problems with boy racers circuiting the ring road for the last 6-7 years because of it. The residents of a street near a shopping centre car park actually went out with baseball bats to a group of youths "donutting" every night. The county constabulary now has an injunction against any form of car cruise, which they define as "five or more cars driving in convoy and in a manner which causes a noise nuisance or danger to other road users".

Round our estate recently we've been plagued by gangs of youths on motorbikes, either dirt bikes which they ride without helmets, or mopeds which they ride round tooting what passes for a horn on the bloody things. Someone will get killed soon.

Only 53? I passed my test in 1972 and reckon I'm way up into several hundred cars now.

Name them all then... I can, and give registrations for most. Several have been kept for 4-5 years. You have 7 years driving time on me too ;-)

I had a mk2 cavalier for years and it made it around Europe including to Rome and back. Ok, so the brakes faded in the mountains and the colling fan switch stopped working. ..oh and the CV joints kept failing. ...but other than that it was a good car :-)

I have a couple of newish BMWs and a 17 year old Carlton and actually sometimes driving the Carlton is better.

Cuts down on manufacturing costs. Save a couple of quid over a production run of millions and you've got that as extra profit. Repair costs when a car is out of warranty simply don't matter.

However, is there no time rather than mileage set for cambelt etc replacement on a low usage car? Which includes waterpump replacement?

My pump ('91 celica) runs off the cam belt too, pain in the ass. Whats even more a pain in the ass is that if you want to replace all the seals that go with the pump you have to take off the cam belt, the water pump, the pump housing and related hoses which means taking off the air con, the alternator, the exhaust manofold, turbo and downpipe and the oil cooler. Good fun :)