Buying a used car (vectra maybe?)

Matt1977

Strider590 wrote: »

I/we had a 1996 Seat Ibiza 1.4cl, my mum bought it in 1996, I bought it from her in 2000 and owned it until 2005. It only ever had a new exhaust and 4 new tyre's.
Nothing else ever went wrong in it's 9-10 years of life.

I'd not be so confident of the newer models though, I think VAG cars have generally gone downhill in the last 10 years.

Between 2002 and 2010 I had a 1999 SEAT Ibiza 1.4 S and it was an excellent car (Sadly wrote it off at the end of 2009 but it didn't get collected until 2010).

I now own a 2003 Nissan Almera SXE - its a great car. The 2.2 dCi engine is very powerful but the trade off is fuel economy. Any Nissan would be a good bet. Or any other Japanese make, especially Honda.

jase1

Inactive wrote: »

But they rarely go wrong..;)

I've not seen much evidence of this overengineering in any case. The whole Japanese philosophy when it comes to engineering is to make something just well made enough to do the job at hand reliably, and no more. Unnecessary overengineering doesn't fit in well with that.

It's all about attention to detail. An underengineered design is obviously inferior -- it breaks. But German-style overengineering isn't the answer either -- throwing tolerance at a problem doesn't improve the basic design. I see this all the time as a network engineer -- vastly overspecced systems that nonetheless don't do their job properly because of oversights, caused by someone just throwing money at a problem.

liam8282

Yes I have been reading up on auctions. The cars I am interested in are in the Fleet and Main Agent section, which looks like the safest bet.

I have never been tempted, but friends and relatives have bought some decent cars from auctions before.

I won't be rushing into anything, just want to get an idea of what is available and at what price.

Strider590

Kilty wrote: »

Care to substantiate this?

One of the most common faults with these switches is caused by the "anti-pinch", this causes the window to drop by around 2 inches because it "thinks" there's an obstruction.

As the window rises/falls, an electric pulse count is generated for every few millimetres, these are counted by the CPU and compared to it's programmed count.

When this setting gets corrupted the switch doesn't know where the window is, so it detects the high current draw from the stalled electric motor and says to itself "oh hell, i've got 50 more pulses to go but the window has stopped!!! There must be a problem!!! stop this action and drop the window!!!".

It's wise to check for water damage inside 2005+ Honda Civics

jase1

That's not overengineered though is it -- it's an important safety feature (albeit one that doesn't seem to always work correctly from your description). I remember the hoo-hah about electric windows throttling small children 15+ years ago and all manufacturers promised to implement anti-pinch systems.

Well, it must be said that I can't remember too many manufacturers who have implemented it. Ford, Nissan and Vaux certainly haven't in any cars I've seen.

hartcjhart

jase1 wrote: »

That's not overengineered though is it -- it's an important safety feature (albeit one that doesn't seem to always work correctly from your description). I remember the hoo-hah about electric windows throttling small children 15+ years ago and all manufacturers promised to implement anti-pinch systems.

Well, it must be said that I can't remember too many manufacturers who have implemented it. Ford, Nissan and Vaux certainly haven't in any cars I've seen.

my vectra has anti pinch

Strider590

jase1 wrote: »

That's not overengineered though is it -- it's an important safety feature (albeit one that doesn't seem to always work correctly from your description). I remember the hoo-hah about electric windows throttling small children 15+ years ago and all manufacturers promised to implement anti-pinch systems.

Well, it must be said that I can't remember too many manufacturers who have implemented it. Ford, Nissan and Vaux certainly haven't in any cars I've seen.

It's implemented on all cars, but not with the use of a CPU... It's done by measuring the current to the electric window motor, if this is beyond normal capacity (current spike) it cuts power to the window.
When you block an electric window motor the supply current will spike from a normal 2amps to around 20amps.
The same system is what's used to auto up/down on almost every car, once that spike is detected it know's it should stop.

I think the designers of the Honda switch were trying to prevent that current spike and use a position sensing system, which would then communicate with the cars ECU via can bus. In short it's more complicated than it needed to be, but perhaps it's a field test for what is to come in future years.

jase1

Put it this way, if it is implemented on all cars then it simply doesn't work on some of them (perhaps that is why Honda decided to reinvent the wheel). It's one of the things I play with when I get a new car, and the majority do not have a working system.

Ford have an "ingenious" way around the problem on the lower-end Focusses -- they simply don't have an automatic switch when winding the window up, only down. Fail to see the point in that really.

In any case that doesn't really tally with your comment about each switch having an independent CPU -- just a separate process on the ECU surely?

Kilty_2

jase1 wrote: »

they simply don't have an automatic switch when winding the window up, only down.

Still has 100% more automatic modes than my Picanto

Kilty_2

Strider590 wrote: »

One of the most common faults with these switches is caused by the "anti-pinch", this causes the window to drop by around 2 inches because it "thinks" there's an obstruction.

As the window rises/falls, an electric pulse count is generated for every few millimetres, these are counted by the CPU and compared to it's programmed count.

When this setting gets corrupted the switch doesn't know where the window is, so it detects the high current draw from the stalled electric motor and says to itself "oh hell, i've got 50 more pulses to go but the window has stopped!!! There must be a problem!!! stop this action and drop the window!!!".

It's wise to check for water damage inside 2005+ Honda Civics

I meant some technical documents showing the use of these extra CPUs, not another half arsed explanation of a system most cars have.