Brake comparison.

I've owned an 309 NA Diesel... very good on fuel... very good at relieving insomnia as well, and they're not *that* much bigger / heavier than the 205.

Yes, thinner foil.

Yebbut every first car is ace. That's just a fact of life.

Either, it was shagged and not mint, or you expected more of it than a ~15 year old, crap spec, N/A Diesel £500 car is likely to give...

We got our 205 1.7D for free. It had done 290k miles and we put another 20k on top of that. OK, I did a bit of work on it and it was slow as hell, but it just kept going and to my knowledge is still going now. I loved that car.

And having smashed up a 205 TD at some speed straight into a BFO oak tree I can confirm they're not as fragile as you may think ;)

Carl Gibbs wrote of Purrgot 205s:

My 205 met its demise by being driven into a ditch and flipped over end onto its roof at about 50mph.

The single occupant was mostly OK. The car wasn't as fragile as they might have thought.

Heh. They're one of those cars that have a rep for great handling. I wasn't very impressed at all. OTOH they may well have been streets ahead of an early 90s Fiesta or Nova...

I think your expectation is the key. What were you comparing it to?

205 came out in about 1983. The suspension was pretty supple, well damped, not to rolly and handled quite entertainingly by small, cheap FWD shitbox standards of the day. They also turned out to be fairly resistant to rust.

'Hot' versions have revised suspension and rear discs.

I think it was still pretty good by the early 1990s.