Car woes

I love that!

Can I "borrow" it?

My dad drove a 306 ('Sedan' as it was the variant with a boot rather than hatch) for 235,000 miles from (nearly) new.

He loved it, and every car he's had since gets compared to it and invariably loses.

I think the heater matrix went on his too!

I think I had the Citroen version (ZX 1.9D) as my first car. Great machine until the head gasket blew.

The only problems I've had with the Land Rover have been due to worn out parts. At 122k and fourteen years old I think it has an excuse to demand some new components!

It's the same with everything I think.

It must just be human nature to shout loudest about something that's wrong I guess.

Take the Punto for example, as it is thread relevant, my auntie (the most demanding consumer I know) is on her fourth now (and she had a Tipo or two before them, and possibly an Uno if memory serves). She loves them, wouldn't have anything else. That said, she hasn't mentioned this on a forum, as I guess you only raise the matter when you would like something to change!

My Corrado is 15 years old and has done 156,000 miles, it doesn't get driven much now (I SORNed it over winter), but I started it the other day for the first time in about three months and it started first time, no hassle. Sure it has had work done, but mainly just consumables over its entire life (I've got documented evidence of every bit of work ever done to it).

The only Fiat I've ever had much contact with has been a 1993 Ducato van chassis (under a Hymer A class motorhome belonging to my parents). It sounds like WW3 when you give it the beans as the exhaust is a huge steel pipe sticking out from under the driver's door and it's deceptively fast for a 3.1 ton vehicle. Put it this way, they don't often have to pull over and allow faster traffic to pass, as providing you get a fairly flowing road it'll keep up with most cars!

The only problems with the Fiat parts have been down to an incorrect drive belt (notched, when a smooth one should have been fitted) and a loose connection on the start solenoid which has since been cured by the highly technical approach of pulling the spade terminal off and squeezing it with pliers.

DOH!

Never get angry and post... My anger blinded me. It should read, "since buying my 2001 Punto", I actually bought it Fev 2008.

So not so great... Mike-P.


Don't talk about how good your cars have been, I want horror stories, I wanna feel better

Fair comment.

Although there could be someone somewhere lauding the 7 year-old Punto they sold for being utterly reliable for the entire period the owned it.

In reality though, the previous owner probably gave it very little TLC.

Through years of bitter experience I have come to the conclusion that the only truly reliable cars are built in Japan or Germany, a bit like cameras really.

The closest I have to a car horror story is the Astra SRi I had as a company car 4 or 5 years ago.

Had it from new to 12 months old (when I left the job) in which time it covered 50,000 miles. In that time, I had it refuse to start once (and I mean recovery vehicle to the garage refuse to start - they said it was an ignition problem) and breakdown twice (once an "ECU malfunction", the other time was due to a defective fuel gauge which made me think there was 1/4 of a tank when I was running on vapours).

That said, the exact same engine is in my Fiat Bravo (FIAT supply Vauxhall with certain diesel engines), and it has been great so far.

And in it's defence the Astra looked brilliant, letterbox red, big wheels, and a tasteful body kit. Great for attracting shallow women...

If you follow that Mantra you won't go far wrong. Unless you bought my old MX-5, or one of the recent "No brakes" Toyotas. There are exceptions to every rule though.

The problems usually come when people don't look after the car properly. I see this all the time with Land Rovers. It may be a big, tough truck but that doesn't mean you can skimp on servicing. You need to grease propshafts, make sure the axles have oil in the right places, keep an eye on wheel bearings and above all else listen for any unusual noises. Yes there were badly-assembled examples but most of them have been broken up for parts now.

I have never needed to call for a recovery wagon, and only had it fail to start as a result of a life-expired battery or a poor quality "reconditioned" alternator causing a major power drain. It was even struggling into life with four dead glowplugs in below freezing temperatures!

Fully agree with what you've posted here.

What I would say also is that if anything does go wrong you're far better off in an older vehicle. The only times I've ever been really let down (by the Astra described above), there was bugger all I could do as until its been plugged into a diagnostic tool it won't play ball. The manufacturers don't want you doing anything with modern vehicles (because of course, servicing is where the money is made).

You can buy a basic diagnostics unit from ebay for about £20, that'll enable you to do things like reading fault codes and resetting them.

I suspect that the reason the AA et al are able to give some impressive percentage of vehicles "repaired at the roadside" is because that percentage of faults with new cars are due to electronic hissy fits, where you only need to plug in and tell it to stop being stupid!

OK,

Same Pug 306 just to show how a great car can also be bad:

The electric sunroof never worked, it would open, but getting it closed again required a trip to the garage. This was apparently due to a small piece of plastic which had broken off, but would cost £200 to repair. I went for the "well I just wont use it then" option.

On one occasion after a particularly heavy rain storm, I went out to my car to find the passenger footwell had 3 inches of water in it. It took 20 minutes of bailing with a small bucket and quite a few odd looks from passers by to get the water out. Turned out the air blower intake was clogged with leaves and had filled up with water in the rain.

My Dad and I did 90% of the maintanance on that car ourselves, servicing was a doddle but for everything else we had a running joke that the first line in the Haynes manual for any task would always be "jack up and remove front passenger side road wheel". This was because Peugeot always seem to hide components underneath or behind something totally unrelated and difficult to remove. When she blew her heater matrix (apparently a common fault on the 306) the first line was "remove stearing wheel". The manual then went on to describe the removal of the entire dashboard, at which point we phoned a garage. We then phoned 3 more garages before we found one who would take the job, and then paid £300 to have the HM changed.


Her gearbox was ideosyncratic at best. From the time I got the car until ~150,000 the gear linkages were shot to hell, causing the gear stick to flop about more when in gear than most cars do in neutral. I used to say that changing gear in my 306 was an act of faith. You had to Believe that pushing the lever forward and to the right would result in 3rd, and if you didn't believe hard enough then God alone knew what gear you'd get. Eventually we had the gear linkages changed, which tightened up the gear change to such an extent that from then until the end of her life she would occasionally jam in 1st, usually on a roundabout when I wanted to be accelerating and 20mph at 4000rpm wasn't really enough.


I had a bit of a love-hate relationship with my 306. She wasn't a lot of fun, nor very comfy, problems when they came were usually a pain to fix or expensive or both. But the way that 1900 Diesel would spring into life on the first turn in any weather was worth a lot!