Got asked by the Missus' Mother to look out for a car for younger daughter and was given a budget of £2500 with some really strict rules: Nothing over 1.4 (or had to be cheap tax basically), cheap insurance and good economy & reliability. This ruled out 1.9 TDi's so I settled on looking for Polos, Ibizas and possibly a Fabia if I could find one at the right money.
Today I went to look at 2 Polos, a Fabia and an Ibiza. The first Polo was being sold by a really dodgy-looking dealer and had had a replacement door on it (very badly by the looks of things - it didn't line up and the colour did
not match) along with 4 mismatched tyres, 68k miles and the mats (dirty) thrown in the boot. And he wanted £2995. We left that one where it was. We gave up on the Fabia as we couldn't park anywhere near the garage and they had no space to park on their land. Plus it was dirty. The second Polo had literally just come in the day before and had a very low tyre and more parking dings and stone chips than I've ever seen. Nice looking car overall, and her cousin's a bodyshop paint man so that part wouldn't have been too much of an issue. There was something wrong with the gearchange though (I assume the linkage or bushes needed sorting because it didn't spring to the middle of the gate and was reluctant to go into 2nd) and the guy would not budge more than £95 on the price and wasn't interested in Part-ex on Lucy's Ka.
Then we went to a local dealer to look at an X-plate Ibiza 1.4 S Cool. It had FSH, he'd do the belt and put a full year's ticket on it, plus it already had some tax. It was a local car, had all the history and was on just over 50k miles. Lucy took it for a drive and absolutely fell in love with it (which is amazing for her as she's such a choosy so-and-so, especially as it doesn't have a CD player...) It was up for £2750, he took the Ka in part-ex for £500 with a bit of haggling. It's probably about 10% over the odds price-wise but the Ka was absolutely shafted (130k miles and loads of dings and dents plus it's got to the stage where things are starting to go wrong...) and the main issue was to get rid of the Ka without having to go through the bother of putting it up for sale.
It's kind of a VW (well it is underneath anyway!) and I think it's good for a 23-yr old fashion victim. Thoughts anyone??
PS It's great spending other people's money...
