Crap Cars

Back in the summer of 2019 when I was churning out a blog every five minutes, I related the story of my car history and how I’d arrived at the Expensive German Car. You can read about it HERE if you like. That expensive German car was an Audi Q5 and it was my intention to keep it for a lot longer than four years. At the start of the year, however, I decided that I should really downsize my car. Not because I didn’t like it. Quite the contrary in fact, I loved it. It had a lovely smooth ride, almost indiscernible automatic gear shift, a good sound system, a capacious boot and, being a ‘chunky’ car, a nice high driving position with which to lord it over inferior makes and models. The one thing that was making me consider replacing it was money. The spike in fuel price meant it cost me £100 to fill the tank on several occasions last year. Whilst the car wasn’t particularly thirsty – I could go 600 miles on that full tank – I really felt as though I was forking out more than I had to on fuel. The same with car tax. The punitive tax HMRC apply to cars that are initially sold with an invoice price of over £40,000 was costing me an extra £390 per year just to run the thing. Not that I’d paid £40,000 for it, I’d got it ‘nearly new’ at a substantial discount. Servicing was expensive. I’d recently replaced two tyres which cost me more than £500 and it was fairly inevitable that other parts were reaching the end of their useful lives. With the value of second hand cars at an all time high at the moment I thought it was probably the best time to replace it although that needed to be tempered with the replacement would undoubtedly be outrageously expensive too. There’s no harm in looking though, is there?

Any thoughts of replacing it with another Q5 were quickly suppressed. A new one was over £55,000. I toyed with the idea of a Kia Sportage. It was a similar size to the Q5, was just as well specced up if not better and was £20,000 cheaper. Elaine and I visited the Kia garage in Irvine. It was just about to close and I felt the salesman was keen to get home. He mentioned that there was a nine month lead in time for the Sportage. Bye bye Kia. I went to Audi in Ayr. The Q5 might have been out but the Q2 was promising. There was a six month lead in time but there might be a few nearly new ones available quickly. There were a couple but, well, I wasn’t overly keen. I read an article which said a good alternative to a Q2 was a Mini Countryman. You know the one, it’s a Mini but on steroids. Off we went to Mini in Irvine where we took one for a test ride. It was nice. I ordered one with delivery due ‘by the end of April’ (this was early February). What’s more, I didn’t go for the cheap one. I also added a few bits and pieces. They offered good money to take the Q5 off my hands but said I could sell it privately if I could get more money for it. I did. Webuyanycar.com gave me quite a substantial amount of cash for it, a few hundred more than Mini were offering for a trade-in. So far so good.

Facing a couple of months without wheels gave me time to reflect and not just about the Number 14 bus which I had to take a few times. Something was nagging me. I realised what it was. I didn’t really want the Mini. The whole idea of replacing the Q5 was to save money. To buy the Mini I was going to have to spend £9000 on top of what I’d received for the Q5 which wasn’t quite the idea. Yes, it would have been a nice car but nothing was going to be up to the standard of the Q5 so why bother trying? I formulated a new plan. It started with me phoning up the Mini dealer and cancelling the order. Why not, I thought, get a cheap secondhand runaround, cheap being a relative term of course. Secondhand cars are anything but cheap. A whole five minutes of research suggested that the Vauxhall Corsa would fit the bill. What’s more, there are supposedly a lot of them about. I thought I’d have a look on the online car vendors Cazoo and Cinch. Sure enough, there were a lot of Corsa to choose from so I picked 2019 model from the Cinch website. Cinch comprehensively list their cars and accompany them with a lot of photos. The Corsa I chose had no defects listed though it is understood that there might be a few very minor scuffs and chips consistent with the age of the car. It quite clearly stated that a number of extras were included when the car was first bought, namely a ‘winter pack’ and an ‘infotainment’ system upgraded to include a satnav. I paid just shy of £12,000 and awaited it’s delivery, insuring and taxing the vehicle as I waited. Sure enough, on the allocated day at the allocated time the car arrived on my allocated drive. It looked ok. The delivery driver gave me the once over and off he went. Easy as you like. Later that morning I went to check the car out. I popped on the infotainment system and found that there was no satnav. Needless to say I gave Cinch a call. Sorry, they said, there’s nothing we can do, there is a little disclaimer saying that the ‘extras’ mentioned in the listing were added during the manufacture and may have been removed in the meantime. Like anyone is going to remove the satnav? The truth is I didn’t need a satnav. The system had Apple Car Play which allows Google Maps to be used as the satnav. I was, however, somewhat peeved at being led to believe there was one when there wasn’t. Cinch offer a 14 day money back guarantee so I thought sod it, you can take the bloody thing back. After a few more phone calls, a date was arranged for the car to be collected. A full refund would be made when they received it minus £250 which would then be refunded once the V5 document was returned to them.

At the same time I was arranging the return, I spied another Corsa on the Cinch website. I double checked the listing to see if there was any other way they could catch me out and when I was pretty sure what it was I was buying I bought it. It was ten pounds more than the original one. I was in a situation where I could actually afford to pay for two Corsas and not wait until the refund had come through on the first. Consequently, it turned up and the first one was taken away. This Corsa had everything that the listing had promised, including the upgraded infotainment system with the satnav. Unfortunately it also had a few extra ‘features’ that hadn’t been listed. A very obvious deep scratch in the driver’s door and a less obvious but huge scratch across the roof. My guess was the scratch on the door had been caused by another car door blowing open onto it whilst it was parked whilst the one on the roof was as a result of a petrol pump hose being dragged across it. I wasn’t too happy about this. I phoned them up again with my concerns and followed it up with emails showing the damage. After a day or so they contacted me with their verdict. They would pay for a ‘machine polish’ of the roof but they were unable to help with the scratch on the door as it didn’t fit the criteria for being a listed defect. Apparently a scratch has to be 25mm or longer, this was 20mm. That there was another criteria which said that no paint defects should be visible from a distance of 2M didn’t seem to count. These scratches could be seen from outer space for heaven’s sake. I was incensed. No way was I going to accept the ‘solution’ they had offered so I told them to come and collect it under the same money back guarantee as before. Cinch’s advertising tagline is ‘Cars without the faff’. I’d suffered quite a faff overload by now and still didn’t have a car. Not only had I had the dealings with Cinch, I’d had to get insurance, change that insurance, get car tax twice and cancel it twice. That’s faff taken to a new level. I’d done a Trustpilot review after the first one which was actually not all bad. A customer service bloke contacted me and offered a few quid compensation which I accepted. He contacted me again after the second one and suggested that I might like to change the review. I told him that he really, really didn’t want me to change that review. I haven’t yet. I still might.

Needless to say I’d gone right off the idea of getting a car from Cinch, or any other online Honest John car sales outfit. Second hand cars were losing their appeal too. Was there any new car that could satisfy my need for a practical car for not much money? As it happens, yes, there is one. Dacia is the daddy when it comes to budget cars. Part of the French Renault group, their cars are made in Romania where presumably that unlike in France, the unions don’t insist that lunch hour lasts two hours. Dacia cars were famously so basic that the baseline model didn’t even have a wireless installed. You could, however, pick up that baseline model for a several thousand quid less than just about anything else that was on the market. Whilst still very much at the lower end of the price spectrum, Dacia has some competition nowadays from Kia, MG and even VW who can match the price, albeit with slightly smaller cars. I went along to the Renault/Dacia dealer in Ayr which happens to be just across the road from the Audi dealer where my much loved Q5 had come from. The young salesman advised that there was a bit of a long lead-in time for Dacias at the moment, However, if I wanted to take the showroom model off their hands I could have in a week. The car in question wasn’t the baseline model, the Sandero. It was a Sandero Stepway, a slightly chunkier version that tries to convince people it is an SUV type of vehicle. I had liked owning a ‘chunky’ car when I had the Q5 so why not try this pretend chunky car? I went for a test drive in a similar vehicle. It seemed to tick all the boxes. Press the accelerator and it goes, press the break and it stops. Turn the steering wheel and it goes round corners and it had seats to sit on. That is all I needed. Back at the dealers I agreed to buy the showroom model. It was more expensive than those Corsas but had zero miles on the clock, a three year guarantee, no scratches and a few little extras that I found surprising for a Dacia. Rear parking sensors and a reversing camera for a start. Zonal door locking was a new one on me. The oddest thing about it though was it was a duel fuel vehicle. As well as a conventional petrol tank, there was an extra tank for LPG.

LPG, or liquified petroleum gas, is a fuel that isn’t in widespread use in this country. It’s a bit more common in Europe but the fact that Dacia offer the duel fuel version in the UK seems strange. There are petrol stations that sell the stuff but not many of them. As it happens there are two in Kilmarnock, not too far from where I live. Whilst I might not have bothered with the LPG/petrol version had I been ordering a new Dacia, the fact it was already fitted to the showroom model meant that is what I was going to get. What is the advantage of LPG? It costs 80p a litre as opposed to £1.40 per litre of petrol. What is the disadvantage? It’s bloody scary filling the tank with the stuff.

On the appropriate day I pitched up and paid for the car with Amex. That was a nice surprise and I’ll look forward to spending all the Avios I earned with that transaction. I was allowed to drive it straight out of the showroom and off I went. The petrol tank was full but there was nothing in the LPG tank. The first place I visited was the petrol station at the Bellfield Roundabout in Kilmarnock. I literally had no idea how you went about filling the thing but I eventually worked it out – there’s an adaptor you screw into the filler onto which the hose from the pump is attached via a bayonet fitting and secured by pulling a lever. You then press a button on the pump and fill the tank. It can only be filled to three quarter capacity before it clicks off, about 32 litres, then you have to dismantle it all. Release the lever and turn the hose. There will be an almighty hiss followed by a rather unpleasant smell as some of the LPG escapes whilst before the valve completely closes. This scares the shit out of you the first time you do it and, I can now relate, it scares the shit out of you the second and third time too. Then unscrew the adaptor, which was very difficult the first time I did it, put the cap back on and go and pay for it feeling both smug that the tank was filled for thirty quid and relieved that you haven’t managed to blow up Kilmarnock. It turns out that the best place to get LPG is at Morrisons in Kilmarnock where it is 20p per litre cheaper but it is all part of the learning process. I also own a pair of sturdy gardening gloves to be worn on every subsequent fill-up.

Apart from the LPG aspect of the car, it is altogether underwhelming. This, however, is the point. If I’d wanted a whelming car I’d have bought one. It drives okay, is light on the steering and if you put your foot down it can get a bit of a shift on. There is not too much in the way of tech to worry about and Apple Car Play takes care of the music and navigation. I would have preferred automatic transmission and the touchscreen entertainment system is not that easy to adjust safely when you are moving but I do like having a reversing camera so you win a few and you lose a few. I might be imagining it but the engine seems to run slightly rougher on LPG than on petrol but not enough for me to ignore the financial benefit of utilising it. All in all, it is precisely the sort of thing I was after even though I didn’t realising it when I first considered replacing the Audi. Is it a crap car? If it cost 34 grand then yes, it would be a steaming pile of ordure. At 17 grand, however, it is a perfectly acceptable vehicle. I’m happy to have moved on from the Expensive German Car to the Cheap Romanian Car, although I do shed a tear whenever a Q5 drives past.

Postscript: Since selling the Audi, the diesel that powered it has come down in price so much it is cheaper than petrol at a couple of the local garages. Filling the tank would be a third less than when fuel prices hit the peak last year. Also, I had only one more year of paying the £390 car tax premium before it reverted to standard tax rates. Maybe I was a bit hasty in disposing of it…