Info On Which Car To Buy, Please.

@shiney - you could take the finance deal to get the extra £1,500 off then just pay off the finance straight away - maybe?

Or as it's 0%, invest it in Bitcoins and you'll have doubled your money by the time you have to pay it back

 

@JWK I've already got that sussed and there's no penalty.

Also, I've just come back from the Ford dealers and they're offering an extra £4,000 discount if I take the finance, which I can pay off the next week. Still checking if there's any penalty. Also, there's an extra £500 off if you have a test drive

@HarryS I've already had four quotes from carwow. I like the way they do it.

Taking a break from getting more quotes for a couple of hours.

 

I can usually argue the price down on a new car to make it pretty close to a secondhand one.

I've aged ten years since I've started looking for one.

I had a look at a Ford Focus 1.0 Titanium X today. So far, I've got them to reduce the price by £6,500 - and that's without shopping around on the net. I've got a request in at carwow for an online price. She needs the boot space without the seats being down.

 

The first thing I would suggest is to look at smaller engines - a lot has changed in the past eight years, and you can now get more performance from 1.0 or 1.2 than you used to get from a 1.5 or 1.6; the VW group 1.2 TSI engine is a bit of a cracker, as is the 1.4. I have driven a friends Audi A1 with the 1.4 TSI and it is remarkably quick.

Maybe look at Kia Rio, Kia Cee'd, Hyundai i20, Hyundai i30, Nissan Pulsar, Ford Focus, Toyota Yaris, Toyota Auris, Skoda Fabia, and one of the best on the road for customer satisfaction - Skoda Octavia.

 

@Trunky - better than Ford. Five year warranty for a start (Kia have 7 year warranty!), versus three years from Ford or Nissan etc. Plus Hyundai and Kia dealers generally treat you better than Ford and Vauxhall etc.

My first encounter with Hyundai was years ago (1993) when a friend of mine was given a Hyundai Lantra as a company car. I laughed when he turned up with it at first, but it was loaded with kit. A few months later, his company asked him to recover another company car from Scotland back to Watford, and they put me on the insurance for the Lantra to follow him and bring him home. It was a long drive, but it wasn't arduous, and I was genuinely impressed with the car. I was even more impressed when it came time for him to get his new company car three years later and the Lantra was handed back with 180k and more on the clock, still on the same engine, clutch and gearbox and still running like a wee train. All that car ever had was servicing, tyres, the odd bulb and wiper blades - and by God he drove it like it was stolen every day of the week.

My lovely mum had two Skoda Fabias in succession, and only had to get the second one after some idiot wrote her first one off. Not a minutes bother from either of them, and she loved them to bits - they are often described as VW's that are put together by people that actually care. VW are often embarrassed by the fact that Skodas are generally better built than their own cars.

I had a friend who had two Kia Rios and a Cee'd - she still has one Rio and the Cee'd, and she has been delighted with both, and again not a moments bother with either of them - in fact, the Rio is such a nice wee car that I would buy one of those before I would buy a Fiesta. The B-Max is a nice motor, let down only by the Ford dealer network and the fact that it is a slightly older design than some of the competition. If you have a good Ford dealer, then you are laughing.

The Pulsar is a nice car, but yes the depreciation is a bit steep - the main reason for that is that Nissan underestimated how popular the new Qashqai was going to be, and people who would have bought a Pulsar ended up buying a Qashqai as the Qashqai was even more comfortable, and just as cheap to run - - I love mine (50-60 mpg around town, no road tax, and rock solid reliability - what is not to like?); Early Pulsars were affected by electronic gremlins identical to those suffered by the Qashqai - this was resolved by Nissan replacing the batteries. The only other issue I am aware of was a problem with the 1.2 petrol - again, this affected all Nissan models with the engine - where they would burn excessive amounts of oil and eventually fail. Nissan ended up replacing a load of engines, but I am pretty sure this too has been sorted.

 

Although it relates to SUV's and Australia, watch this video to get a feel for Hyundai and Kia.....

 

When I was at the Ford dealer yesterday they said that you get more power out of today's 1 litre engine (turbo) than its predecessor 1.6.

 

Update:-
I've ordered the Focus Titanium X. It has all the bells and whistles on it. Front and rear sensors, rear view camera, radar type thingy to warn of getting too close to car in front, heated windscreen, satnav, heated front seats, automatic park assist - parallel and perpendicular, and lots of other useful features.

By the time I finished doing deals I got the car cheaper than they were offering me a secondhand car. Nearly 7k off the new price (helped them hit their target).

Only downside, have to wait 10-14 weeks as it's a new factory build order. Not much of a downside as she's waited 17 years