Best car for £3k?

londonTiger

15k miles is fair enough. I would not buy a polo or corsa or any compact car

1) compact cars with small engines do worse than a mid range mondeo/passat on the motorway

2) compact cars are a bit too small and uncomfortable for the amount of time you'll spend inside it. my mk4 golf just about does it for me but i only drive 5k miles. I am on the verge of thinking that I need a slightly bigger car. there is no space to rest my right arm comfortable in it, there's a hard plastic door moulding that I rest on and it's not great.

seats arent great on compact cars either. my golf seats are unberable for long drives over 4 hours.

PenguinJim

londonTiger wrote: »

2) compact cars are a bit too small and uncomfortable for the amount of time you'll spend inside it. my mk4 golf just about does it for me but i only drive 5k miles. I am on the verge of thinking that I need a slightly bigger car. there is no space to rest my right arm comfortable in it, there's a hard plastic door moulding that I rest on and it's not great.

seats arent great on compact cars either. my golf seats are unberable for long drives over 4 hours.

I just did two hours in an old K12 Micra at the weekend and I'd say that's my limit! The first 90 minutes were fine, but approaching the 2-hour mark I considered asking my Satnav to divert me to the nearest proctologist. Although I used a new Getz to do a few thousand km one week a couple of years ago, and that was no problem at all. Cars from 2010+ are more comfortable than cars from ~2002, perhaps!

You must be ENORMOUS if you can't fit in a small car, though!! There was more headroom in that Micra than I've had in some sedans, and I'm 6'4. And the Getz was positively roomy - I chose it again a few weeks later.

That's a good point, actually. OP, are you particularly... err... wide?

Strider590

Fot that money and that mileage your best value bet would be the typical rep-mobile, forget the German makes as they get expensive to run, but something like Ford Mondeo, VX Vectra/Insignia, would be ideal. You'll get a lot of car for the money and it will probably have been serviced properly.
The smaller the car you go for, the older it will be, it'll be basic spec and if its done low mileage probably never been serviced (as most people are idiots).

I spent 3k on a 4 year old Vectra, the same age Corsa was (at that time) around 6k.
The Vectra (1.8) does 35mpg, the Corsa (1.2) does 38mpg.
Whats better? 3k in your pocket or 3k in the dealers pocket for an extra 3mpg?

Because of the fleet market, larger cars also come with much better base specs. They're also better built, because the fleet market is very important to manufacturers, unreliable cars will lose them contracts.... But small cars are designed to keep a steady cash flow coming back into the dealership network, in the form of repairs and servicing.

straas

lexington013 wrote: »

Volvo s60 petrol. Cheap to run, comfortable, 2ltr petrol. Manual gearbox.

Looks like you get a fair bit of car for £3k, what's the reliability of this engine like?




I am finding smaller cars have a bit of a premium, likely as people assume better economy, but most lads in the office get similar mileage in their 1.6-2l engines as I get in a 1.2, and they get a much smoother ride aswell.


I do a fair bit of my driving on motorways, and whilst I'm no speed freak, spending 3-4 hours at 65mph isn't great fun (mpg drops drastically after this, and drive gets much less comfortable)

heartbreak_star

forgotmyname wrote: »

But smaller cars can cost more to buy than a larger car. On a decent run a larger engine can give better mpg than a smaller one.

Yep, we have an Almera 1.5 and a Getz 1.1, and on long drives we always take the Almera!

londonTiger wrote: »

15k miles is fair enough. I would not buy a polo or corsa or any compact car

1) compact cars with small engines do worse than a mid range mondeo/passat on the motorway

2) compact cars are a bit too small and uncomfortable for the amount of time you'll spend inside it. my mk4 golf just about does it for me but i only drive 5k miles. I am on the verge of thinking that I need a slightly bigger car. there is no space to rest my right arm comfortable in it, there's a hard plastic door moulding that I rest on and it's not great.

seats arent great on compact cars either. my golf seats are unberable for long drives over 4 hours.

How tall are you??

HBS x

LandyAndy

londonTiger wrote: »

2) compact cars are a bit too small and uncomfortable for the amount of time you'll spend inside it. my mk4 golf just about does it for me but i only drive 5k miles. I am on the verge of thinking that I need a slightly bigger car. there is no space to rest my right arm comfortable in it, there's a hard plastic door moulding that I rest on and it's not great.

seats arent great on compact cars either. my golf seats are unberable for long drives over 4 hours.

I had a Mk4 golf as a company car (GTi 150 diesel). I did about 15k miles a year in it including plenty of 200+ mile drives. I found it really comfortable. I like a firm seat. One of my colleagues borrowed it for a few days and thought it far too hard a ride. His usual transport was an Espace though.

lazer

londonTiger wrote: »

15k miles is fair enough. I would not buy a polo or corsa or any compact car

1) compact cars with small engines do worse than a mid range mondeo/passat on the motorway

2) compact cars are a bit too small and uncomfortable for the amount of time you'll spend inside it. my mk4 golf just about does it for me but i only drive 5k miles. I am on the verge of thinking that I need a slightly bigger car. there is no space to rest my right arm comfortable in it, there's a hard plastic door moulding that I rest on and it's not great.

seats arent great on compact cars either. my golf seats are unberable for long drives over 4 hours.

I would do over 15k miles in my polo, and have driven 4-5 hours journeys without any problems, and regularly drive over 2 hours and I love it.


OP - I would take a small car and a large car for a test drive and see which you like best.


My husband drives a VW Bora - and I prefer my polo to his Bora!

jimjames

lazer wrote: »

VW Polo, Seat Ibiza or Skoda fabia, diesel - a polo gives around 60mpg and the tax is only £30 on the 1.4TDI

Or cheaper Golf 1.9 TDI. Might be marginally higher tax but lower price and less depreciation.

colino

Buy a 1.8 petrol Vectra, or even better, an even less loved Signum and enjoy the space and economy while you wonder what to do with the spare £2000.

londonTiger

LandyAndy wrote: »

I had a Mk4 golf as a company car (GTi 150 diesel). I did about 15k miles a year in it including plenty of 200+ mile drives. I found it really comfortable. I like a firm seat. One of my colleagues borrowed it for a few days and thought it far too hard a ride. His usual transport was an Espace though.

The mk4 golf is a bad example tbh because the drivers space is the same as the bora which is a compact saloon.

The teething problem with the golf I have is the hard plastic right elbow rest (it's got a tiny bit of foam that has flattened now). Also the seats do not have adequate lower back support - it's soft and your lower back sinks into the backrest. It needs to be firm on the lowerback and extrude a little bit more than the upper portion.

The spine is not straight, the spine is curved and the backrest needs to encourage that position. When the backrest is the same "firm-ness" and straight it causes the spine to take an unnaturally straight position.



Most ergonomic office chairs have curved backrest. I have a humanscale freedom and it's so well designed that I can sit on it for the whole day and not have any back pain. When I drive on the mk4 golf for more than 2 hours my back takes a beating - I can tolerate it because I drive 5k miles a year and probably do journeys longer than 10 miles about twice a week. So my back has time to recover. But if I was doing it day in day out 30 miles a day in city traffic my back would not be able to tolerate it.