Re: 'Advice sought on the purchase of a good second-hand vehicle'

Primera's are s**te, the old ones were at least slightly 'fun', the new (past 4 years) models are just plain rubbish. So monotonous to drive, nothing slightly there worthy of the high price tag.

I'd stick with Toyota Mazda and Honda personally, as you stated, wont go far wrong there. IMHO Nissan may be of japanese origin, but they're not far off Koreans in their dire styling!

Oh no, I don't want another Pug 406.....

Adam

SteveH wrote:

Whereas some mechanics on this group have previously commented on the fact that they could easily replace a Mark 2 Astra clutch in under an hour, so why didn't Vauxhall design the Vectra to be the same?

The cynical side of me says it's to make more money for dealerships.

At one time cheap and easy serviceability was one of the aspects aimed at company fleet managers when placing orders.

My daughter who (in the early nineties) was in charge of the local vehicle finances of a national telecom company, tells me that reliability and low maintenance costs was the main reason that the vehicle of choice for their engineers was the Vauxhall Astra estate.

Also when I was in the trade, the standard vehicles for many TV rental companies was Ford Escorts, again the main factor being running costs and reliability, obviously something that vehicle manufacturers and fleet managers don't appear to worry about quite so much nowadays.

Fleet maintenance costs are based on fixed menu servicing, so if a manufacturer quotes 100k intervals for cambelts and cheap, 20k interval regular servicing, a fleet manager will have that car top of the list.

Of course, the cambelt may not last 100k miles, but that doesn't bother the fleet manager who'll be replacing cars at 80k miles.....

Ah, this day and age of affluence, the companies I worked for usually reckoned somewhere from 80 and 100,000 miles.

Also I believe that nowadays there is a greater tendency to let the employee choose his or her own vehicle, however if the company my son-in-law works for is anything to go by, then this can sometimes backfire, as a particular model of French vehicle chosen by several of their IT technicians turned out to be expensively problematic!