First Car

farso

Hey, just been reading though all these posts, a lot of good advice, but i though id add mine too. Im 23 and just re-entered the studnet game once again. But anyway, Ive got a little bit of history with cars.
First car i had was a corsa 1.0... Not bad looking, pretty cool inside and everything, but its only for 3 cylinders... Bad news if you ask me.
My second car was a 306 deisel, really good value if you want to buy one, cheap to run, and not too bad on the power side. Trust me, your going to want more than a 1.0 clio, even after a few weeks of driving.
Ive also had a 1.4 16v clio. REALLY good little car, really nippy and quite cheap to run, id really reccomend one of these, or the deisel model im sure would be cool too.
Just for interests sake, im on a 1.6 Civic sport now, pretty cheap to buy and run, but great for looks and a bit of speed, if thats your thing.

In short, Dont just look at initial price, if your budgets tight for the next few years your unlikley to want to buy another car or pay for expensive repairs, economy is the lowest price over time.

Good luck anyway, and i know a first car is loads of fun, so enjoy it.

Blacksheep1979

thing is if the op is learning then the difference between a 1.4 and a 1.0 on insurance is going to be quite a bit.

pinkshoes

Blacksheep1979 wrote: »

wouldn't necessarily worry about the gearbox over 80k but the cambelt should have been changed (most cases) and the clutch may be on the way out. Get something cheap under 1k and go for something like a ford/vauxhall that has cheap parts and is easy to fix - if you're handy yourself you can pick bits up from a scrappy and sort things yourself cheap.

Good advice!

If you're male, then insurance will be pretty steep, so if you buy an old banger, you can get 3rd party insurance (MUCH cheaper!!), then if you have a bad accident and your car is written off, you can just buy another old banger! I know quite a few people that STILL do this!

Buy something that's just passed an MOT (or perhaps 10 months left on it...) at maybe £300, then if it dies, get a new banger!!

SO much cheaper than other options when you're first starting out.

I agree about Ford cars having cheap parts. V important when buying an older car.

Tahiti

Mileage depends on how well the car's been looked after. I've known cars to go over 200k miles without any major problems (people doing lots of motorway miles for example).

£2k could get you a pretty nice car. Fords and Vauxhalls for example are easy to get spares for (relatively cheaply). Japenese cars tend to be reliable if looked after but are relatively expensive for parts.

For your first car, you really want it to be simple though as it minimises the cost of repairing things that wear out or get damaged.

burf16

Citroen Saxo's are a good cheap option. 1.1 engine and they are pretty reliable. My dad has one.

lolly-i-pop

Me and my brother both learnt to drive between 2003 and 2005 so my parents got us a 1 litre corsa to learn in. Its really cheap on insurance (group 2 i think). For us it was cheaper to spend more on a better car than to get a cheaper car and end up paying higher insurance and more on services and repairs and stuff. After 5 years of having the car the only time it has had to be repaired was the time my mum (who must have been driving at least 25 years) crashed it into a wall!
I'm probably going to get a new car when I graduate in summer and i'm going to be pretty sad not to have colin the corsa anymore

toasterman

I phoned Admiral recently for quotes, and got chatting to them. They told me they deliberately charge more than logic would suggest, for insuring cars like saxos, novas, etc.. anything that gets chavved up and raced around supermarket car parks at 2am.

My first car was a company car. Astra estate, electric windows, air conditioning, all of 2 years old. Lovely.
HOWEVER, what you lack when you pass your test is any proper experience of driving. So when I scraped that on a wall coming out of a car park (a very small scratch I thought), it was nearly £300 to repair...and it was white.. the cheapest colour to repair.
And on a day when I hit some ice in Wales, and slid it into another car - wrote off the other person's car (theirs was a £300 banger) and did about £1400 of damage to mine.

I'm not saying you will, but statistically you're a risk.
Young people aren't more likely to have accidents because they're stupid, or because they're all into racing - they just lack experience.
I don't know any of my friends that have caused motorway pileups, or wound up upside down in a ditch, but the vast majority of them have scratched it coming out of a narrow car park, or done some other small amount of damage.

One thing I will say though is that Vauxhalls are cheap to repair. When a part of my engine broke (I didn't break it), the AA man told me it would be very expensive, and I should be glad my company is paying. It was £200. While not cheap, it's not what I would call "expensive".

My first car I bought myself, was an 11 year old Rover 200. 3rd party insurance (given my accident record), for £575. It had done just under 60,000 miles, had 2-3 months tax left, and the full 12 months MOT. The cambelt had been changed about a month before I bought it.
Rover's are cheap to buy, because they're *really* unfashionable. And a lot of people seem to think parts aren't available because the company is bankrupt (not true).

While I paid a bit more on insurance (1.4l engine, plus its a 5-door hatchback..bigger than a clio/fiesta, etc), I could be sure that it was pretty much mechanically sound for a year.
I've had it 2 years now, and in that time it's needed a suspension bush thing replaced, the brake pads replaced, the alternator and battery replacing, a cv joint gaiter thing replacing, a part of the exhaust pipe replacing, and the fanbelt adjusting. None of these major though really. It's also needed 4 new tyres - 3 of them because the rubber had perished through old age.

I stupidly had the early repairs done at an official Rover garage (they do still exist), so my suspension bush replacement was best part of £200.
A mate of mine replaced the alternator, and the battery. Since then I've switched to a much cheaper local garage, where the guy understands you don't want to spend a lot of money keeping it on the road, and has friends in scrap yards to save you on replacement parts.
So there's another tip.. if you buy an old banger, don't get it fixed at a main-dealer garage.

toasterman

lolly-i-pop wrote: »

Me and my brother both learnt to drive between 2003 and 2005 so my parents got us a 1 litre corsa to learn in. <snip>
I'm probably going to get a new car when I graduate in summer and i'm going to be pretty sad not to have colin the corsa anymore

:eek: That's wrong!
Cars, boats, and aeroplanes have to be named after women. It's the unwritten law.

burf16 wrote: »

Citroen Saxo's are a good cheap option. 1.1 engine and they are pretty reliable. My dad has one.

While they are cheap (aren't all Citroens?!), I would have a go in one first. I'm about 6ft 1, and I've got big feet. I found it awkward to drive my sister's Saxo, as the peddles were too close together that my big clumpy clown feet would hit two peddles at once.

I seemed to always have the steering wheel digging into my legs too, because the seat wasn't very adjustable either. I bizarrely also had difficulties getting in and out of it too - a problem I didn't have in a Corsa or a Clio.

A friend of a friend of mine.. looked at buying a Saxo, and he's a bit on the porkier side. He had to decide against it, because he couldn't physically get in it and do up the seatbelt comfortably. He drove a small Fiat no problem, so I guess it must be something in the design of the Saxo that caused him an issue.

ajdadd

always get something small, i am 18, male, drive a ford ka which cost 1500, its a cheap that all of my friends due to the small size. I have driven Corsas before and find them to have poor handling. Fiesta are always a good car if you want a bit of space.

Remember the older the car, the more petrol it burns. The more faults are likey to appear if its over 15 years old. But if you have a engineer friend its not so bad.

Depends where you are you can get good 10 year old cars for about 1000, leaving you with a 1000 to go with the insurance,but you may need to find some to cover the insurance.

Lokolo

The older the car the more petrol is burns...?

Um don't want to argue but my car, 1993, does 11p a mile (based on £1 a litre) whereas I know my friends does (which is a new corsa) almost double this....

I think what you should consider really is the engine size for petrol costs, as don't forget, even if a newer car can burn fuel better, its usually a lot heavier (my car can be picked up by 4 people.... yes picked up and moved ha, good birthday prank)

Also, faults really do depends on the type of car and the drive... my fiesta has been decent, the only things I h ave had to change are the tyres (my fault :-D), the fuel line (b******s stealing my petrol) and the catalyst convertor as that was old.
Saying that, my car has only done 48k miles or so.