good used cars in the £1k to £2k bracke t

Perhaps a Focus, a Xsara (might get a HDi if you want a diesel) if I were looking at the cheaper end of that bracket.

Whatever looks like the best buy at the time. & get insurance quotes.

What he said. Once cars have got to that sort of age, the difference in reliability between 2 cars of the same make and model is likely to be much more than between 2 different makes.

That said, if I cared more about reliability than performance or handling, I would look at the korean cars. You are likely to get a much newer one of them than a european car, and I have only heard good things about there reliability. And if I was spending that much, I would not want an old anything unless it was interesting (read fast). You can get a quite new car (6 or 7 years old) for well under a grand these days, so there is no point in going old.

Going rate for an 8 year old Focus looks like £1-2k. I recently picked up a

5 year old 406 HDI estate for £2.5k. If you avoid the German makes, the depreciation is pretty vicious and the cars end up damned cheap for what they are.

With fast stuff, you can easily be looking at a 15-20 year old Golf GTI at that sort of money. Fast stuff tends to hold it's value.

That seems quite expensive. I am driving around in a 7 year old 2l mundano that I picked up at the auction for 600 quid. It has 150k on the clock but does the job. I belive people like focii a bit more, but presumably they are pretty similar in how well they are put together.

They are considered classic cars arn't they? But anything that is thought of as more that a way to get from a to b is going to be a whole lot more money.

The speed of depreciation on cars always surprises me. My Focus 2.0 ESP is 7 years old in June, hasn't gone wrong in the 4 years I've had it, does everything just as well as a new car but is worth only a tiny fraction of the price. High depreciation makes more sense with cars that rust badly but the Focus doesn't do that. If the government really wanted to do something about the environment they'd make it more financially attractive to keep running older cars rather than squandering resources building new ones.

How about no road tax on cars over 10 years old?

Instead most countries are trying to reduce the average age of the vehicle parc on the grounds that newer cars are less polluting and more fuel efficient than older ones. I beg to differ. The average mpg of the cars I've owned has hardly altered in 30 years and we've had compulsory catalytic converters for over 15 years anyway. What's actually happened is that cars have got steadily heavier due to all the safety related features they are required to have so any gains in engine fuel efficiency have been more than offset by the increase in weight you have to burn fuel to lug around.

Back in the day an average hatchback weighed about 850 to 900kg. My Focus weighs nearly half as much again. That doesn't make much difference at high speed when aero drag is the main resistance but round town it's all extra weight that has to be accelerated and braked constantly.

In 1983 I bought a Mk 1 Astra GTE. It was the dog's bollocks in its day although it would look a bit basic by today's standards. No ABS, leccy windows, air bags etc. Over 47000 miles it averaged 31.0 mpg. The Focus has just hit 47000 miles and has averaged 30.3 mpg.

If we want to save oil then modern cars aren't making a scrap of difference. The only thing that will is if we all drive very small, light, low powered cars rather than fat bloated ones packed full of safety features. To save medical costs the best way would be to leave out the weight bloating safety features and train drivers to drive better. That means work though rather than just enacting legislation so it'll never happen.

I suppose you could term the MK2 a classic, the MK3 is relatively disliked, but still commands good prices. If you think of something like the PPC £999 challenge, most of the quicker cars are jap turbos, but there's no saying what state they're in at that money.

I was thinking 15 - 20 years ago would be a Mk1, Mk2 was early 80's? But yeah, anything that appeals to young men is going to be expensive and likely to have been abused.

MK3 arrived in 1992/3 - 15 years old. MK1s came in around 76 and went in around 82 IIRC, so they're getting on for 30 years old now. If you can find a good one it'll cost way above £2k.

Well said that man! Totally agree. Z

That would put the cat amongst the pigeons as far as the car manufacturers were concerned. I think any measures taken to promote the idea of making products that last longer, and that encourage consumers to have things repaired rather than simply replaced if they do go wrong, is far greener than advising we use things like fluorescent bulbs, or switch off low volt adaptors, phone chargers etc, when not actually in use. Mike.

Personally, I'd go with the Primera.

They just refuse to die and have the advantage of not needing cambelt changes. (although the interval on the Focus is pretty long these days - it's something I'd almost certainly want doing immediately after purchase unless there was a recent invoice for it)

MichaelS gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:

Sure, I've had to do a few things to it - but total expenditure is still less than £2k, and it's running very nicely indeed.

snipped-for-privacy@italiancar.co.uk (SteveH) gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:

More's the pity.

Whenever governments get involved in things like the environment A) they c*ck it up and B) they run into big business interests which generally don't want things changed. Numerous examples spring to mind.

1) My house has 80 year old single glazed metal framed Crittal windows. They have the insulation properties of tissue paper and leak like sieves anyway, but if I want to replace them with double glazed windows I have to pay for building approval. Now any double glazed windows, however crappy would be a huge improvement but I can only fit 'approved' double glazed units for which I have to pay the local council for the privilege. If they want people to improve their insulation why give grants out on the one hand for some things but make people pay for approval to do it on the other? No f**ing sense there at all. The way to do it would be to regulate the window vendors as to what they could sell rather than make every single house have its new units checked by the council. 2) When condensing central heating boilers became mandatory the early versions only lasted a few years because the heat exchangers failed. Even those which don't rust through have so much electronic crap in them they break down on a regular basis. My old Potterton might not be as efficient as new boilers but it's lasted nearly 30 years and has bugger all in it to go wrong. A new thermocouple every 6 years is about all I have to do. I reckon the average household has to spend far more on short lived replacement boilers than the savings on gas used. 3) Cows generate more greenhouse gas than all the cars in the world combined. They also turn grain into meat at an efficiency of only about 8lbs per lb. If we really wanted to eliminate both global warming and world hunger we'd quadruple the tax on meat and remove it on grain sold for human consumption. 4) Designing a car that can average 100 mpg isn't just easy it's trivially easy. The two main areas that impact fuel consumption are aero drag and weight. Reduce the average cars frontal area from 21 sq ft to 14 and the Cd from 0.35 to 0.28, reduce the weight from 1300 kg to 500 kg, fit a 40 bhp direct injection diesel engine and you end up with a low, narrow single seater (maybe a passenger behind the driver) with some luggage capacity that can do 110 mph and better than 100 mpg at 70 mph. At 40 mph it could achieve 200 mpg. For most single occupant journeys it would reduce fuel consumption by at least 70%. Big oil would have a fit though.

Without the govt getting involved in the environment, a lot of things would be for the worse. OTOH a lot of things might be for the better - often brownfield sites where development is encouraged by planning rules have far more nature conservation value than farmland where development would be nigh on unthinkable in many cases.

Double glazing is a bugbear of mine. If you want to replace them at all, you'll have to replace them with double glazing. Double glazing has a payback time of around 100 years last time I checked, and you're lucky if the windows last 20 years. OTOH a lot of 100 year old houses still have original wooden windows...

The average house also consumes far more energy for heating than the two cars sat on the drive. Therefore it produces more CO2. But we don't have everyone insulating their old houses to hell and back. We just tax people for driving around.

I think that's one of the strongest arguments against global warming - if Govts really believed it was real, they'd discourage the things that produce

*big* amounts of CO2. Instead they use it as an excuse to tax cars...

Whatever the richer western countries do to reduce environmental pollution is going to be more than offset by the polution produced by the emerging economies of countries like China, India, Brazil, and even Russia. The poor of those countries are not going to be satisfied with anything less than a comparable living stds to the one we enjoy now, and with a market runnng into billions of potential consumers, any green efforts we make will be like a drop in the ocean.

Personally though, I think the climate can take care of itself. There seems little proof that any global warming is not due to natural fluctuations. Historically global temperatures have gone through periodic colder or warmer cycles ever since records began. The present rise in temperature is nothing unusual, something that hasn't occured in the past, and those in the past were not caused by CO2 emissions, industry, or any human activity at all. Mike.

We could call it something like FENSA

Pug 306 1.9 DTurbo, Citroen Xsara 1.9 DTurbo. Bosch fuel pumps...