Paging the Economy Bargeisti

I'd turn my nose up it that it's a diesel combined with the fact that it's really not all that economical. Ok, being a manual, it won't be quite as bad on fuel as that Omega I had, but they really are s**te on fuel. I honestly can't imagine the equivalent petrol one (523i I guess) being any more than 5mpg worse.

It's not the manual bit that worries me, but the fact that E39s are a lot more complex electronics-wise than E34s. If it had been an E34 I'd already be waving the white & blue flag :).

Your Omega was a very leggy ex cab, IIRC... not something with a, hopefully, genuine 109k under it.

If the E39 520i I had was anything to go by, they'll be horrendous if you actually expect to nail it now and again.

Granted, it had a mere 265k on the clock, but it was ex-private hire, not ex-cab, and you could tell by the condition of all the seats, particularly the front ones, that it hadn't been got in and out of all that much i.e. had spent most of its time doing motorway airport runs.

And I wasn't solely basing it on my one anyway, I've heard from a few different sources that those engines, whilst a decent enough engine, are pretty s**te on fuel. Averaged 24-28mpg in general driving, and 36mpg on a

Define "horrendous", exactly....

Well then - hardly likely to be as good as something with well under half the miles then, is it?

That's still an exceptionally high mileage for anything to cover, motorway work or otherwise.

That, and it's not unknown for cabs etc, to have seats replaced with lower mileage ones as they become worn.

I've not used one myself, so can't say 'yes, but it *will* do this'... but a good one should definitely do more than 40mpg on a motorway run like you describe if the official figures aren't a complete work of fiction.

To be fair, some of that involved getting the back end hanging out on roundabouts etc. ;-)

Was surprisingly quick when wound up for something with an engine relatively small compared to the rest of the car.

I know of a fair few cars, petrol and diesel, that have been run to high mileages (a fair bit higher than that), and I've never heard of massive mpg drops in something well maintained as the mileage gets significantly higher. If anything it's worse at lower mileages (but in fairness, we're talking not run in, so 109k doesn't exactly qualify).

Well, yes and no - it would have been around 8 years old at the time, so not huge amounts over 30k/year.

True, but whilst they were in bloody good nick, in terms of wear on the bolsters where you get in and out, by looking at them you could be fairly certain they were the original seats.

Possibly - my one was an auto as well, and it's a fairly well known fact that autos have a much more marked effect on the fuel economy of turbodiesels than petrols.

Heh, well that Omega was struggling to top that around town - didn't get involved in back end fun around roundabouts, but I substituted that with a lot of traffic, so similar net result.

It's been mentioned in this very group loads of times to be fair, and there is no other way I can think of that I would have repeatedly heard that an E39 525TDS is crap on fuel heh.

Are they prone to electrical issues then?

I've just looked up the stats for one of these on Parkers guide - it would appear my Passat is *heavier*???

More prone than E34s, supposedly. The trouble is that with a lot of more modern cars the problem area has moved on to the electronics, which seems to overtax the abilities of most garages and leads to expensive component replacements...

Modern cars aren't getting an lighter either :).

They are value wise.

I've just done an online valuation on mine and it's dropped more than even I was expecting.

Arse.

Doesn't help if you're trying to sell. Looks like the Audi's going this time, though.

That's really not good.

I'm not bloody surprised... :-O

Nope.

Still, if I decided to get something else at some stage, it's all relative I suppose.

Well, yes. OTOH it's got a lot more watchers than last time and I've had several "would you take X" emails already. With X being noticeably higher than the current price.

Hmmm... well might be better to let it go to one of these if they turn up to look at it with pound notes in their greasy little mitts, rather than hope a winning bidder comes through.

With the economy the way it is, I reckon there will a lot more people defaulting on auctions for things like that once they've got past the initial 'I can't believe how little I won something like that for' euphoria, and they consider how much its going to cost to run it.