Is this overpriced for a trade car?

One of these for a 9000 and a couple of hours work and an aircon regas=20 if you are doing it yourself.

--=20 Carl Robson Audio stream:

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Bugger :(

As I understand it, if you have extra hands available and small hands, and a bit of luck, you can lift the hoses and bits out of the and pray you don't break anything while squeezing stuff out of the way, but on your own it is disconnnect time.

On the non AC one, it is still fiddly because you might need to remove the bonnet or climb on top of the engine to get into the aquarium the plastic covered section behind the false bulkhead.

WTF is "The aquarium" ? :)

First VW I've had that's done this, and most of the others were higher mileage, used a lot more and were older pro rata.

Hopefully it's just 'one of those things' and not an indication of any cost cutting VW had exercised by the time they'd introduced the B5.5.

Aye... well the car still seems happy enough, so it can stay like it til the garage have had their greasy mitts on it.

Ah yes... well that's probably what I'd do. If finances allow, I'd still keep the A8 for now though until the new beast is bought and run enough to prove it's worthy.

That, and I'd be happy to leave something like an A8 parked up day after day in a station car park, but I'm not so sure I'd want to do the same with a classic Porsche, or even the MX5 given the soft top.

Aye... was probably hoping you were so keen to get into it you wouldn't bother getting it checked.

Okey dokey - let me know which one it is, i.e: is it the PSU or the processor, and I'll sort out a replacement in the nearish future. :-)

-- JackH

Unlike, say, a 406 estate where you can have a couple of problems sapping several MPG? :-)

The plastic capped area between the false bulkhead and the real bulkhead where a lot the AC stuff, the wiper gear and wipers, and the blower motor are hidden. Called the aquarium because the drains block with gunk and leaves which tends to cause it to hold water.

I find that things tend to get pop more often with cars and bikes that aren't used as often as they should be, so maybe it's just that. But then again, that would be more of a problem on the mechanical side.

Hopefully not following the lead of Mercedes when it comes to quality control.

I'd be careful - if you're lucky it's *not* the same sensor that also tells the ECU how warm the coolant is. If it is though you're driving around in warm-up mode all the time and that's not a good thing.

Oh, certainly. Especially if it's a car that may need a little work...

Trouble with A8s and station car parks is that the aluminium body dents easily so they're not exactly station car material.

That, and he probably broke the cardinal rule buying something like this privately - always get it HPI checked. I know he didn't...

Cool. I'll have to open it up again for that but the current educated guess points at the CPU fan. I'll confirm that later on.

Aye... was probably hoping you were so keen to get into it you wouldn't bother getting it checked.

What did it say...?

We were about to bid on a Saxo for my mates fiance's little brother the other day on eBay that was finishing just near us. Just as I was logging in, the 'text check' advert came on TV, so my mate decided for £3 it was worth a shot. So we sent off the reg, the first text came back all ok, then he got another following on from it... Cat C write off in December 2006, back on the road March 2007.

So we emailed the seller to let him know, because he hadn't mentioned it in his write up - so we're sure he didn't know... His reply was "Oh, I can't alter the auction now as it's too late, but I've just had *insert a few small jobs here* done to surely it's still worth it....". We then of course felt it was our moral duty to inform the winning bidder, just incase the seller forgot :-) They never replied however...

Beat me too it ;-) I think saying a Ka gets crap MPG, because if you thrash it really hard, it's not as economical as a SO Golf driven sedately.

Those couple of problems which I twigged at fixed within a week or two of owning it...

The Ka was in tip top shape mechanically, the engine side of things was perfect and the brakes weren't binding...

...is a bit unfair.

Oops :-)

I had asked the guy for the chassis number as I'd forgotten to write it down and according to HPI the one he gave me wasn't the one they were hoping for.

Now if someone was very interested in my car and gets back to me with something like that, I'll confirm if I've been a muppet writing down the chassis number ASAP, *especially* if said person suggests that he'd still be happy to take the car if said HPI issue gets resolved.

Oops.

You know that that's a good way of getting kicked off of ebay if you "badmouth" another seller's auction and they find out? At least it used to be.

OTOH I can't really understand why people don't spend the 3 quid for a basic HPI check even on a cheap car. Even if the car is only a few hundred it's still a few hundred down the bog if it turns out to be banana shaped or nicked.

Yup. I think the Mercs of the mid 90s are the most obvious example of a brand ruining a previously pretty good reputation for quality, overnight.

I've seen some really rotten later ones as well - to be fair they're all 25 years old plus now.

They've got something the Mk3 has never really managed to acquire, as in cult car status. (Yes, I said cu*l*t)

A bit early for judgement to be passed on the Mk3s yet, but I can't see them ever attaining the same sort of status, even though they're a perfectly good car which again was better than most of its European contemporaries, at least if you didn't buy the cheapest, most poverty spec model you could only just afford, that is.

Aye. :-)

What happened to that Jetta GTi you had in the end?

I quite liked that.

-- JackH

You're talking about one of the reasons I bougt a petrol/LPG van instead of a derv one. I wanted something I could rack up the miles on with the thing way out of warranty and not have worries about expensive things going wrong. Obvious mechanical bits like gearbox and diff had 6 months or so under the remaining Merc warranty to make some noise and get replaced for nowt (cheers Mercedes for the brand new rear axle :-)), and the rest is pretty simple and straightforward, safe in the knowledge that it's a good old fashioned simple petrol engine that just needs the odd set of spark plugs throwing at it, and the oil changing now and again. Things used to be the opposite with petrols and diesels, with the former wanting points setting, plugs, leads and coils possibly needing sorting out, tappets adjusting, etc etc, and diesels just wanting oil changes and fuel/air filters, but now most petrols get by on oil and all the filters and plugs (thanks to whatever replaces HT leads these days), and diesels have all sorts of issues with DPFs, clogged injectors, high pressure pumps, etc etc.....

I must admit, I was a bit optimistic on the mpg I'd expected from it when running on gas, but even so, it does broadly half the mpg compared to a diesel version, and LPG's gone from being around half the price of diesel, to a good 10p/litre or so less than half, so it'll do....

I'm dead pleased with mine, after a 230-odd mile trip from Wales today. The ability to use proper amounts of revs (unlike diesels) is nice for overtaking on big steep hills, but the combination of turbo plus not-complete-gutlessness like diesels at 1k-1.5k rpm, means you can drive it like a V8 (but without the *proper* torque) around town - a mode which I could effortlessly switch back to once off the M4 this end and heading home.

Fell victim to a previous attempt of reducing the size of my fleet. Went to a VAG enthusiast, IIRC.

So did I, just not enough to keep it.

I demand a game of musical chairs!

Yea we were just been spiteful because he'd told us it was a minter and a real bargain... And naturally we used a 'spare' account as well...

Ahem

I did something some might consider better, some might consider worse when faced with a similar situation once upon a time.

I went along on a trip with two mates to look at an S13 that had been advertised as in good nick.

To cut a long story short, the car was a shed and the bloke selling it was a complete tard who doth protest too much when it came to light on the forum where it had been advertised that the car was a badly described heap.

His other half however was a bit of a stunner... and whilst we didn't buy the car, we didn't walk away completely empty handed either. ;-)

-- JackH