Cars on it way out

foxy-stoat

You dont need to spend £7-8K + £3K for your car - you could probably get a reasonable car for £4-5K that will do the job.

Herzlos

Your credit is stuffed, so don't even consider looking at £10k cars, the ones you might get with poor credit history will be £5k cars listed at £10k.


60 mile (each way?) commute 3 times a week will be fine in almost anything. I'd be either:


looking to see what you can pick up privately for under £2k, judging it solely on condition, or
figuring out how much it'll cost to keep your car going - what's actually wrong with it?


How much money do you have in savings?

silverwhistle

I'm another going to say you don't need to spend so much.



As an example, five years ago I moved back to the UK and, with no car bought a 4 year old Hyundai privately for £4K. I've had it 5 years and it's never broken down, if you exclude the flat battery earlier this year. I replaced the original ~9 year old battery and all was well. Every year it has done a fully loaded trip to the Alps with no problem. It takes a full load of passengers too when my football team plays away. It's certainly now worth less than your car is.



I appreciate electrical and ECU faults can be a right pain, but initially it might be an idea to follow the suggestion above and let the main dealer have a go as a last resort.

Mark_Spade

> intermittent ecu fault.


With no fault codes and being hard to replicate I'd guess it's probably a relay at fault - if the circuitry is dodgy then heat from the engine will affect their function - eg, if the fuel system relay interupts the car is dead till it cools down and then when you diagnose it, it doesn't appear to have any fault. (Alternatively, either yourself, or get someone else to log the data as the car is driving and try and replicate the fault)



Cheapest option is to either change the likely black boxes with second hand ones from a scrapper (and then sell on the ones that don't make a difference) - or buy a Mk4 Golf, Bora, Seat for 1k



What type of car is it? Merc/BMW?