Surprisingly cheap cars to run?

bigmaz

stator wrote: »

Look for a car that shares all it's components with other popular cars.
eg Audi cars are made by VW and share most of their parts with other VW cars, eg Seat, Skoda.

See, I LOVE Audi's, always wanted one, but never got one, as they seem to be very expensive to run.

WellKnownSid

jase1 wrote: »

Engines don't usually break in my experience (most are pretty much sealed for life, and need nothing more than cambelt changes). It's the electrical parts that end up emptying your wallet if they start to fail because they can be so difficult to diagnose.

There are plenty of exceptions - poorly designed Vauxhall engines that drank so much oil that they put the 'nominal consumption rate' of 1 litre / 1000 miles in the handbook, VAG engines that run the entire oil pump and balancer assembly off a tiny hex drive which has a life of between 60-100,000 miles, Jaguar engine blocks that were lined with a material that was allergic to UK petrol, weaknesses in engines from the likes of Nissan and even Toyota.

Furthermore - what works in one car doesn't always work in another. Different ancillaries - or even placing the same ancillaries in different places in the engine bay (less airflow, hotter) can result in a different set of failure modes.

The good news is that once a new design gets to 5+ years - the majority of these real world issues are known about, and by the time a car is 10 years old, there are probably fixes on eBay for the simpler ones (be that improved components, or repair/exchange solutions).

jase1

WellKnownSid wrote: »

The good news is that once a new design gets to 5+ years - the majority of these real world issues are known about, and by the time a car is 10 years old, there are probably fixes on eBay for the simpler ones (be that improved components, or repair/exchange solutions).

That is a good point, and I would add that older car designs can often be a better bet than the latest and greatest.

Both of my cars, a Ford and a Mitsubishi were already elderly designs when the cars were made (in the case of the Mitsubishi the engine design dates back to 1992, and is very similar to engines going back a decade or more before then, despite the car itself being a 2003 model). Down side of course is that neither car is NCAP 5-star.

This isn't great when you're looking at refinement, but it does mean that they're pretty much bulletproof designs now. There's a lot to be said for an old 8-valve Japanese lump like that -- I suspect it would be pretty difficult to kill it even if you tried.

tberry6686

It's a bit of a balancing act really. Older cars are more likely to go wrong but are generally cheaper to fix, newer cars less likely to go wrong but often very expensive to fix.
I prefer older cars as they are generally easier to work on myself cutting down on garage bills dramatically.

jase1

tberry6686 wrote: »

It's a bit of a balancing act really. Older cars are more likely to go wrong but are generally cheaper to fix, newer cars less likely to go wrong but often very expensive to fix.
I prefer older cars as they are generally easier to work on myself cutting down on garage bills dramatically.

They do tend to become a bit of a pain as they reach the end though.

My last old car remained completely reliable to the end, but silly things started to go wrong with it at a rate that was getting irritating. Just little things like O2 sensors, temperature sensors, speed sensors and the like, nothing expensive, but when that MIL comes on for the third time in a year it does get annoying.

colino

The "Jaguar" engine block problem wasn't only for that marque. The nikasil coating on the bores reacted with our UK blend fuel and rapidly disappeared, leaving the piston rings to quickly wear out the aluminium block and lose compression. Just other manufacturers using the nikasil patented process, actually reacted more quickly to the bad PR (like BMW) and kept it relatively quiet. All of those affected have either been fixed or scrapped.

IamNotAllowedToUseMyName

I don't think it is an easy question as it used to be. There was a point where Ford and Fiat were in a race to the bottom, building nasty, cheap, disposable cars in the 80s and early 90s. Since then they have learned their lesson and just about all manufacturers build to a reasonable quality. That being said, every manufacturer seems to produce the odd bad apple, either a particular engine or model with poor electronics, and so on.

If you recall, Rover had their hidden gem, the Rover 600, which was bullet proofed by aviation engineers, but was always considered just too small to be right so was slightly unloved and dragged down by the reputation. A colleague had the 2.0 turbo and it was scary fast down a slip road.

One of the places to look is run out models of cars, these tended to get loaded with extras at no cost, so they are good value for money, and have had several years of modifications for any glitches that might be around. The only thing to be careful of is sometimes they also get used as testbeds for new generations of things like engines, or gadgets so before lumbering a new launch with an engine untried in the wild, they might fit it to the final face lift version of a previous generation (case in point the W204 Merc with the 2.4 V6 engine).

reeac

The Nikasil problem was due to the high sulphur content of petrol prior to early 2000 when ultra low sulphur fuel became standard. It didn't affect all cars - probably those used for short journeys - my Jag is over 17 years old now and has no detectable engine wear. The process is still used for very high performance engines ....some motor bikes and chainsaws and also, I believe Porsche and F1 engines.

bigmaz

reeac wrote: »

The Nikasil problem was due to the high sulphur content of petrol prior to early 2000 when ultra low sulphur fuel became standard. It didn't affect all cars - probably those used for short journeys - my Jag is over 17 years old now and has no detectable engine wear. The process is still used for very high performance engines ....some motor bikes and chainsaws and also, I believe Porsche and F1 engines.

I'd love a nice Jag, amazing how cheap you can get them. Just the running costs scare me, lol!

reeac

Glad to hear that those big 4x4s stay on their drives....leaves more road space for the rest of us.