Petrol or diesel new cheap small car around a grand

chrishar

I'm looking for a car around a grand and wondered if I should avoid diesel based on the pollution and possible government taxes on it?

I'm looking at either a polo around 10 years old or a similar age aygo c1 or 107. Can anyone recommend anything else?

forgotmyname

I recommend anything thats got a good service history and owned by one or two owners rather than some shed with 8 owners that gets serviced when hell freezes over or when something breaks.

All cars pollute. If they don't tax it this week they will next week.

10 Petrol cars are polluting buy diesel, oops no we got it wrong diesel is polluting buy petrol

20 GOTO 10

Ebe_Scrooge

As per the above, ignore the tax - tax is a very small component of the overall cost of running a car.

What sort of driving do you do ? If you do 40 miles a week of town driving, then something like a Polo/Aygo/Fiesta/Yaris/etc. with a small petrol engine would be ideal. If you're doing 600 miles of motorway driving each week, then you'd ideally want a larger car, and a diesel engine would be a sensible consideration.

Broadly speaking - and this is a very broad generalisation, but generally true - diesels cost more to buy than an equivalent petrol, and they don't like pottering around town. But for high-mileage situations, with lots of good long high-speed motorway blasts, they're ideal.

Of course, you need to take into account repair costs, whatever car you end up buying. You can spend £350 on an old banger and have years of motoring from it with no issues whatsoever. Or you can spend £15,000 on a "high quality" used car, only a couple of years old, and have no end of trouble. Certain brands have a reputation for reliability - most Japanese cars, for instance. That's not to say you can't get unlucky and still end up with a lemon. The other consideration is popularity - for instance, a Fiesta, for the sake of argument; there are so many of them around that parts are cheap, and any half-decent mechanic can fix them easy-peasy.

Whatever you decide, buy on condition and history. It's an old chestnut but it's true - a well-looked-after and regularly serviced car, with high mileage, is usually a better bet than a very low mileage car that's never had the bonnet lifted in its life.

sun-n-moon

I paid a grand for a 2002 1.3 120k miles Yaris Verso over 3 years ago. Never spent a penny on it till a month ago when I decided to change a noisy waterpump. They seem to be totally reliable. Easy to work on and the mechanic commented on how "that engine is as sweet as a nut".

muhandis

People will need more details to be able to make informed suggestions.

How many miles do you expect to do a year?

What kind of use will it mostly see - regular motorway commutes, mostly short trips to the station, supermarket, etc?

Manual or automatic?

I wanted an automatic small car which would do about 2000 miles a year (at most), primarily short trips within a 5 mile radius of home. I looked for a used Japanese hatchback and ended up buying an 8 year old Mitsubishi Colt hatchback automatic which had done 80k miles, for £1,200. Not spent a penny on it over the past year and just passed its MOT last week so should have it for another year at least.

chrishar wrote: »

I'm looking for a car around a grand and wondered if I should avoid diesel based on the pollution and possible government taxes on it?

I'm looking at either a polo around 10 years old or a similar age aygo c1 or 107. Can anyone recommend anything else?