How reliable has your car been?

My Peugeot 205 Diesel had over 340 000 kms when I decided to retire it ! Original clutch and very little else went wrong ! 20 years loyal service ! Atmospheric diesels are / were rock solid !

However, as we live in the countryside and reliable cars are indespensable. I’ve just bought for the second time a Peugeot 308 estate. Lovely car. Diesel of course, but the additive makes it more eco-friendly ! Probably keep it 3 years.

I’ve got 1970s and 1980s Italian cars and a tuned 2005 Renault. Keeping them going costs the turnover of a small country.

It is a lottery. You can have endless grief with a Rolls Royce, or no trouble at all with an ancient Fiesta

Our Skoda has been pretty good

Bought 1999 reg pug 306 2l turbo diesel for £300 in 2012. Annual repair costs about £250. It never let me down and repairs were found at MOT time. At almost 400 000 miles (hoped for the 400k but failed) the turbo failed, in Wales in 2016! Got £75 for it for spares. Replaced it with a turbo diesel 407 (2007 reg) for £700. It now has 250 000 last MOT was clean but have since spent £150 on two wheel bearings (due either to Rotherham potholes, or charging up and down dirt roads around Europe!) MOT due in two months and have been warned it will need a couple hundred spent to keep it up to scratch!

Taken both down to Southern Spain and the Alps repeatedly and generally all over the UK. Both gave excellent mpg (quality driving is the real reason!) the 306 being just over 50mpg and the 407 just under 50mpg overall

I like them to be mechanically sound but both had superficial body damage, enhanced by me parking in awkward places and up grass banks!

Pretty much every car we’ve had in the last 25 years has been reliable, but particularly the Octavia.

Except for the Renaults. They were terrible.

We’ve just got a Kodiaq – lots of things that could go wrong, but hopefully it’ll be OK.

VW Polo 1.2 petrol….had it 7 years, done 130k, back box of exhaust and nothing else apart from pads/tyres! Hoping it keeps going forever!

My first car was a 2008 Nissan Note (1.5 diesel). It had 85000 miles on the clock when I bought it, and about 160000 when I sold it 3.5 years later. In that time the only issue I had was with wheel bearings and brakes, both of which I’d consider consumable. The brakes didn’t actually cost me anything; I eventually sold it with virtually nothing left on the brake discs or pads, as I’d already decided I needed a bigger car and was planning on selling it when it was paid for in a few months fro when the problem surfaced.

My second car is a Volvo V60 D3, which hasn’t caused me any actual issues but which came with a £2000 bill for its first service. I blame not being thorough enough with pre-purchase inspection, combined with having it serviced at a main dealer.

So far no breakdowns – fingers crossed that that continues!

As a household we have over the years bought 4 cars > 80,000 miles and 2 <12,000 miles.

The only problem one was a Fiesta bought 2nd hand at 6,000 miles. 4 wheel bearings and two springs went over the next 20,000. Someone (not I) bought an ex motability car and my guess is it had been regularly clobbered up kerbs for parking.

I really don’t subscribe to the view that “new cars make sense” for people worried about breakdowns. Anything under 50,000 miles that isn’t a known bad model and is well maintained is going to have basically the same reliability. Buying used low mileage filters out the duds sometimes. If you’re worried about breakdowns, get good breakdown coverage and try not to travel on Christmas Eve or Christmas day. Two of my three strandings were not “breakdowns” as in not related to mechanical failure but driver error (Over optimistic approach to potholes and leaving the lights on… Being with the AA made far more difference than having a new car would have done…)

My 11 year old car failed its first MoT last year with a CV joint. Its not far off clicking 100k and has not broken down yet or failed to start during any winter morning.

100k is running miles for any self respecting diesel. Change the oil regularly and you should get 250k out of one.

240,000miles and no sign of stopping.

I don’t service it as such, it gets topped up with oil as it needs it which I count as an oil change or rather a drip feed of fresh stuff. The alternator siezed one winter and I replaced the batteries. In 10 years of owning it that’s pretty good I reckon. It’s had tyres and I think 1 set of pads.

Toyota

Last umpteen years I’ve had a series of Peugeot diesel estates, from a 405 in the early 90s to a 308 now. Touch wood they have all been good for 200,000 plus (except a 406 which I drove into a flood and knackered the engine). All good work horses you can sleep in or put a couple of bikes in

03′ Seat Ibiza 1.9 turbo diesel since 2013. Got 130,000 on the clock.

I would say I spend about £500 a year on servicing. Its had new tyres, brake pads and a…. dashboard. Dodgy electrics meant the indicator light wasn’t flashing which is an MOT fail.

Only one roadside call out due to the engine coolant perishing with age.

Apart from that its great on the motorway and non-urban driving at around 50mpg. And its better than the Polo diesel I had before known affectionately as the ‘rust bucket’.

I kill cars. I do approx 3-4k miles a month, carry a lot of weight and am not always on roads. Cars are all dealer serviced.

My last cars, 2000-2018

Rover – crap, died at 85k miles.

Citroen Xantia – dying @ 100k miles

Skoda Ocatavia – 100k miles no problem

Skoda Ocatavia – 150k miles no real problem

Hyundai I40 estate – 150k miles so far, issue with master cylinder on clutch, going well but now ready for new clutch.

Honda Accord. No longer sold new as apparently overengineered therefore uncompetitive price. Current one is 08 plate, with 190k miles. Everything works perfectly, and the only non service parts / consumables its had is one battery. Its even on the original exhaust. The bodywork is however, not showroom condition, but neither I, nor clearly the previous owner, are too bothered about cosmetics.

I was shocked at how much they go for on ebay with high mileages (200k +), especially the 2.2 diesel.

I’m going to keep getting these until they arent available anymore, but as current one shows no sign of falling apart, that may be a while.

I used to drive Transit’s for work every day. They took a ridiculous amount of abuse and 24/7 use (literally) and never really went wrong.

I found a decent one, test drove it, went over it with a fine tooth comb. It was solid and well looked after so I bought it. Then it went through 3 bearings in 12 months. Wheel bearing, clutch release, prop in that order. Painful. Used vehicles are always a lottery!

I know they get slated, but I loved my Ford Escort 1.6 LX petrol – mk5, I think. Had 146k miles when I sold it to my cousin, who ran it for another year before trading it in to a dealer, who, I believe, used it as his runaround for a while longer. Best bit about it was being able to get 2 mountain bikes in the boot without having to put the seats down. Worst problem I had with it was a dicky ignition barrel and even then mainly because it was such a bitch to diagnose why the car wouldn’t start. Oh, and the dodgy alarm that kept going off through the night – eventually solved by just disconnecting the horn! Just don’t mention the rusty rear wheel arches. A vague memory says I might have had to replace the steering rack on it.

Followed that with a Focus estate 1.8 diesel. Only 2 real issues with that were having to replace a few bits of the front wheel linkages due, I’m sure, to an incompetent mechanic at a Ford main dealer that made a hash of replacing a wheel bearing and the water pump exploded once. Sold that with 170k on it, as it was starting to develop some issues and my wife hated driving it, as she claimed the steering was too heavy.

There’s a video on YouTube of an engine strip down on an old Octavia turbo diesel that’s done 430,000 miles. It looks pretty grubby on the outside but the engine itself is excellent.

My old focus gave me some grief with things like front brake calipers and rear wheel bearings but nothing excessive for its 139k miles and amazingly the exhaust and entire reat suspension (which was fairly complex on the mk1 focus) was all original as we’re the front shocks and various other bits I’d expect to have worn out.

The most irritating thing going on with my new civic is the annoying wind noise it developed one day after I washed it and now can’t find the source of.

The most reliable car I’ve had so far has been a 55 plate focus I had for work. I put 150000 miles on it in 18 months, driving just about everywhere south of Birmingham, mostly motorway miles. It was serviced by ford when it was due, and from what I remember, nothing went wrong with it. The boss was a bit unhappy though, as it was meant to be returned to the lease company at 100000, with a fairly large charge per mile for anything over.

Our main commuting car is a Kia (first a cee’d then two consecutive Sportages). We trade in against new after 80k which takes less than 4 years. Never done anything except put in fuel and have them serviced. Other cars run in parallel tend to be older and used for picking up buildng materials and mobile skips. Best of them was a Nissan Pathfinder which was indestructible, and a big surprise was a Discovery which never let us down, did loads off road, and still scrubbed up ok.

best of all is a bit obvious, but my old Toyota pickup had 250k on the clock when I sold it, and I spot it occasionally in Shef 15 years later. Same for a Nissan Patrol I had. Both were indestructible.