Tell me about it, and then after be alerted to the problem instead of denying all liability they should have done the decent thing and paid for the repair. Which I heard can be around £750-£1300 so quite a lot and well it was there f'up. I personally like the mk3 golf had a few either I got very luck with my 2 but nothing went wrong, just usual servicing and they was heavily used hi miles on the clock.
Hmmm they are not exact f1 cars so god knows.
..
*All* cars have their faults.KAs rot... terminally. Much as I loved the one we had, it was rotting in places you'd rather it didn't in terms of being able to sort it. Having said that, despite it being high mileage we had no other real issues with it, yet if you go on some review sites you will find many reviews slating these as poorly built and reeling off a whole host of faults and issues.
Mondeo Mk3s have DMFs that disintegrate and as a result of it being such a common problem, you can't get a warranty on replacement starter motors from a lot of places who sell those now, because the DMF strips its ring gear and takes out the starter motor as well.
Were I that interested in owning either or a Focus (or most other cars for that matter), I'm sure I could dig around on the net and find a whole host of horror stories about all of them.
That doesn't mean each and every single Focus / Golf or whatever, will have every single failure you've ever read about.
-- JackH
This'll be the cupholder which from memory could do the many years of drink / sugar residue removing and then lubricating, yes?
Bloody Germans... fancy fitting a car with a cupholder that doesn't self clean! ;-)
-- JackH
snipped-for-privacy@c14g2000yqm.googlegroups.com...
Aye... and don't go by the colour coding of the TDI badge on the boot either - the definitive way of knowing what brake an engine in one of these has, is by getting the engine code by way of VAG-COM from the ECU, or getting it either from a sticker on the front slam panel, or there should be a sticker under the carpet on the boot floor which will tell you what it is, and you can then look that code up on that there internet.
HTH
-- JackH
The 130s are known to do it as well.
Aye.
Yes... one pipe pops off normally in cold weather if you don't have enough washer fluid mixed in with the water, and you have to push it back on having first operated the pump to make sure fluid as described is fed right through to the washer end - takes five minutes.
Seen that on one.
Not a mission to change tbh, and can be avoided for the sake of periodically oiling the part of the rack concerned.
Microswitch fails in the drivers door locking module, normally - don't leave your keys in one with this problem, as the microswitch concerned tells the car the door has opened... and if you've unlocked the car by way of remote locking and it doesn't detect you've entered it by way of this, it locks the car back up. ;-)
I've not seen this myself... but again, plenty of other cars suffer with this at higher miles?
Not dear and a two minute job to change - you don't even need a spanner, as it's held in with a clip you can remove without tools.
Not seen this on any to date...
Not seen this on any to date... and to be fair, *most* cars will suffer with something along these lines in older age?
Never done that yet - most of the problems you've outlined above won't show up on this, and if there is anything that amiss with the car that would show via this, it's pretty obvious when you drive it that something is wrong.
With you or the car? :-P
To summarise, part of the problem with the Mk4 and in fact all VWs, is that people seem to expect them to be utterly flawless, no matter how many miles they've done or how they've been treated, and they're not - no car is.
Fords etc on the other hand... your initial expectations are much lower in the first place; my KA had rust in places you really would have preferred it not to have, but I accepted 'it's a Ford, they do tend to rust'.
Had I had a Golf or whatever with rot in the same places, I'm sure I'd have been far more indignant about it. ;-)
-- JackH
Indeed, but it wasn't enough to stop my Dad from buying a brand new last-of-the-old-model Ka, and buying another one (year old with 5k on the clock - almost the same age, but an 08 instead of 57 by probably a matter of a few weeks) when it got written off by some dozy bint coming off a roundabout way out of control and colliding head-on with him. As with most cars, buying an end of the line one might mean that it's almost instantly out of date, looks-wise, as soon as you buy it, but you generally benefit from virtually all of the teething problems in that particular model having been ironed out, and normally get a bloody well specced one brand new at a bargain price.
Indeed. Kas rot - yup, it's well known. Big deal. So did lots of older Fords, but the ones that had been well cared for, particularly ones that had been garaged most of their lives, survived a *lot* better than most, and often had very little rot to speak of, when identical models had long since been scrapped. Dad's is kept in a garage, and whilst he's not obsessive about looking after it, it always gets serviced on the dot, and gets leaves that gather in the bit in front of the windscreen (scuttle?) cleaned out regularly, so it should "see him out" as it were. His Mondeo (P reg Mk1
1.8) lasted him 10 years (bought at 2 years old), never gave him a problem, and had someone not rear-ended that, would have probably happily lasted another 10 years.-- JackH
Yup.
For all their sins, the Mk1 / Mk2 Mondeos are pretty resistant to rot... which is a perfect example of how one company can excel with one product and fail with another.
Aside from the actual design, almost certainly a reflection on build standards differing between factories within the same company, and this is one of the things I believe has blighted the Mk4 Golf, as, IIRC, a lot of the offending ones were produced at a plant in South Africa...
-- JackH
m...
Plenty of places to put your cups from Starbucks though ... why Starbucks anyway BTW? Here at SaraLee we also look after Douwe Egberts coffee. We've got some coffee experts who do the buying of beans overseas. Apparently, Starbucks is s**te quality, Costa is about the best you'll get from a coffee shop - no, we don't sell to them, it's just the personal opinion of a few of the buyers,.
Mike P
I liked 'em. I've had plenty. Ran them on SVO too for a while. Never had any reliablility issues apart from a snapped cambelt.
I wonder if that's the same at 90+ speeds. I used to get 43mpg cruising at an indicated 95 in the Xantia, same as the 2.1 XM diesel I had.
=A0And the HDI chips well too.
ah, nice. Hadn't thought of that. But presumably more expensive should it break?
Mike P
m...
Just to fly off on a tangent, I parked next to a T-reg (1999?) Merc estate at Hilton Park services on Saturday morning. It was rotten as a pear. Front wings bubbling, rear arches going. Shocking state. I've not seen a ford of that age that bad..
Mike P
The pikey in me hankers after a MK2 Mondeo 2.5V6 with leather and all the toys. God knows why. I did use one as a pool car for a week or so. Must have left a good impression on me being able to do 110+ on some of the roads near here when my old Rover struggled to do 80..
Mike P
Indeed... they have an appetite for head gaskets, and invariably knacker their heads when one of those lets go.
And they're not all that pokey for what they are; the Mk3 Cavalier 2.5 V6 was a lot more potent, if that kind of era six pot tat is your bag.
-- JackH
org...
com...
E class, no doubt... and yes, they're really prone to that.
Nor have I, but KAs rot in place that tend to mean the shell is written off by it; mine was starting to go at the bottom of the drivers side windscreen pillar, for instance.
-- JackH
Plenty of places to put your cups from Starbucks though ... why Starbucks anyway BTW? Here at SaraLee we also look after Douwe Egberts coffee. We've got some coffee experts who do the buying of beans overseas. Apparently, Starbucks is s**te quality, Costa is about the best you'll get from a coffee shop - no, we don't sell to them, it's just the personal opinion of a few of the buyers,.
*****Well I only need the one cupholder, which the 9-3 provides.
As to the coffee, to be honest, I like my coffee mellow and mild, rather than Costa-bitter. I'm more a tea drinker really. :0
On Mon, 03 Aug 2009 08:32:38 -0700, JackH mumbled:
Was it really? I drove a Calibra V6 back in 1999 when it was quite new. I thought it was a gutless POS, and pretty vile to drive compared to the Mundano
Mike P
I liked 'em. I've had plenty. Ran them on SVO too for a while. Never had any reliablility issues apart from a snapped cambelt.
I wonder if that's the same at 90+ speeds. I used to get 43mpg cruising at an indicated 95 in the Xantia, same as the 2.1 XM diesel I had.
And the HDI chips well too.
ah, nice. Hadn't thought of that. But presumably more expensive should it break?
****Not sure. We had a couple of 406 1.9 TDs and a 2.1. 92 bhp or 110 bhp. The 1.9 wasn't bad at all - indeed, perfectly acceptable for the majority of drivers. But get out of the 1.9 and the 2.1, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was far more powerful than the headline figures quoted.
*checks Datasheet*1.9 TD: 109 mph, 13.0s to 62, 14.3s 30 to 70, 69 bhp / tonne and 40.9 mpg.
2.1 TD: 119 mph, 12.3s to 62, 12.4s 30 to 70, 78 bhp / tonne and 39.8 mpg.Our 2.1 returned mid 30s but the driver concerned was known to be hard. One
1.9 showed high 30s, the other low 40s. I used to struggle to see low 40s from either. Both were reasonably refined but the 2.1 was *easily* the one to borrow for the weekend.As for modifying them, there's plenty that can be done with the XUDTs, some of it is spanner-it-yourself stuff. So come to think of it, simply remapping the HDI is arguably the most effective but also expensive compared with a few bashes with a spanner.
On Mon, 03 Aug 2009 19:04:09 +0100, DervMan mumbled:
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Good man! Same here..
Mike P
Apparently so.
I've had a Mk1 Mondeo V6 and found it quite tepid tbh... would do 145 on the clock (on a private runway), but felt pretty mundane (no pun intended), overall, whereas I've been in a Cavalier and that revved more sweetly and shoved you back in your seat harder when nailed.
-- JackH
It isn't... not on the older 2.0 ones anyway, which is what the 306 will be if you get one.
I've had several HDIs... they're very sensitive economy wise if
*anything* is amiss under the bonnet.If possible, get a 110bhp rather than a 90, as weirdly, they're both more torquey and more economical overall when both are running right, although the 110 isn't found in the 306.
IME, the XUD has less bits that fail under the bonnet than the HDI.
The HDI is quieter and more economical when running right.
The XUD (TD at least), can be tuned with a screwdriver, the HDI needs a map - both go notably better once tweaked, and both will cover high mileages if you look after them... although the HDI will present more problems without obvious answers, most of which will cause it to lose power and use more fuel, along the way. :-)
-- JackH
IIRC about 11.5k new list in 1998.
Slooooooooow though.
I drove a good few Montegos with the Perkins Prima lump. Very noisy, but economical, and quickish for the time. Hell of a lot of turbo lag though.
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