And the next car question....which people carrier?

[bertie]

I think MPV's are easy to drive. I'd rather drive an MPV or a van or a minibus than a more standard car. .

not if you're doing 30K a year......... while I love to drive mrs berts zaf for short distances and around toon - for my normal journeys I'll stick with the comfort of my car thanks

[travisthedog]

You'll struggle to get a C4 Picasso for under £4k same with a grand scenic and certainly not one that's worth owning . We have a scenic and its been utter shit. Great concept and a good Diesel engine but the electrics must have been wired up by the Italians, every time it goes to the garage it's a minimum if £300

For £4k or less you'll be looking at a ropey Cmax, an older Picasso (xsara) normal scenic or an older zafira

And if I needed 7 seats and to pick between any of those I'd buy an old Volvo 960

[chillidoggy]

+1 on the Renault electrics front.

[ICBM]

It's pure pot luck. My Scenic was £5K five years ago, is still a good car, and is probably worth no more than half that now. I don't think you'd have any difficulty at all getting a good one for £4K, but it would pay to not buy one privately with no guarantee for that. Yes, the two faults have both been electric-related, but that's only two in five years and nothing else has gone wrong with it at all.

All modern cars are quite reliable, some are definitely a bit worse than others, but you can just as easily get a duff example of a "good" brand, especially when they're a few years old.

[travisthedog]

Sage advice - before I became "fleet manager" at work we all drove what we were told to drive so all had diesel mondeo estates. I hated mine with a passion but over our fleet of 12 identical cars 3 years and over a million miles - not one of them was ever garaged for anything other than servicing and accident repairs. On the strength of that I was asked by a mate to source him a good family car. 55 plate mondeo tdci zetec - identical to mine. He had nothing but trouble with it and sold it at a huge loss after a year
Amazingly though he doesn't blame me

Thank god!

[bertie]

got to say - I had a 56 plate 2.2tdi mondeo before the volvo, and after about 50k the "pre injector" or "after injector" or something like that went, it was fixed but had nothing but problems with it after that.