80’s and 90’s stuff that was unsalable

[Zelandeth]

Pulsar Yellow is the colour name. It certainly divides opinion. There are only around 8 yellow V6 coupes left in the UK so it can't have been a popular choice optioned from new. Personally I love mine!

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I think I hated it primarily because it went flat the moment you blinked - so it felt like I was polishing the blasted thing every other weekend.

 

Was a lovely thing to drive and made a fantastic noise. Was 12995 in the window when we got it - was down to 7995 when it eventually sold.

[lesapandre]

I had a 2.8 XJ6 manual. Was considered undesirable but it was a lovely old car. Revvy and certainly no slouch. Had overdrive and was nice to drive. Sometimes cars get a reputation which is undeserved.

[bangernomics]

I remember these, they all had the same pattern interior cloth, did they batch register them too? I recall loads had similar number plates and I always wondered why.

Sort of batch registered although usually 1st of August.

 

Usually a nightmare as you made nothing on them.

[Formula Autos]

My Uncle got stuck in a situation where he could only justify buying another nearly-new Toyota off the local main dealer's lot time and again in the '80s. No other dealer would offer him a decent part-ex on his current one. "Japanese, innit mate?Nobody wants 'em."

 

Eventually he bit the bullet, took a hit on a part-ex for his Corolla, and "upgraded" to a Mk3 Escort Laser.

[Felly Magic]

Cherry Europe/Alfa Arna, Opel Mantas in the late 80s, my dentist had an F reg one he bought new! It must have depreciated like a Steinway off a cliff, oh and on the subject of Ladas, the Samara 1100, that must have made an old Riva 1200L seem fast!

[Alusilber]

Blue cars in the trade are known as doom blue because of the impact on sales. Here in London the police use mostly silver cars these days heavily stickered. I'm assuming because the end of use resale is better. 

 

Haven't they heard, silver's gone out of fashion now, and white's back in!

[warren t claim]

I had a 2.8 XJ6 manual. Was considered undesirable but it was a lovely old car. Revvy and certainly no slouch. Had overdrive and was nice to drive. Sometimes cars get a reputation which is undeserved.

Right up until they hole a piston.

 

Anyone remember the Rover 800 fitted with the 2.0 O Series engine? Or on similar lines, the Omega fitted with the 8v 2.0 Carlton lump?

[rml2345]

Renault 25s round here seemed impossible to shift second hand. Probably because they ate cooling fans and new ones from Renault were eye watering. FATHA_RML eventually part ex'd his for a Carlton Diplomat...

[Mrcento]

Missing RED key on the Fiats- AVOID

 

And the best part of that whole scare of that time was that it's mostly bullshit based on one or two people who had immobiliser issues and told by the stealerdealer that the red key was ESSENTIAL. Not having it = bills of £1500 for a new system and keys. Lost blue key and no red? NEW SYSTEM, £1500 please...

 

The issue was normally the receiver ring that clipped on the barrel. Even new from Fiat they were about £40.

 

The blue keys were so low tech, they were cloneable at shoe repair shops.

 

And there were aftermarket chips out there that disabled the whole system.

 

The amount of people who have actually needed the Red Key? Probably not even 0.1% of people who owned a car with the Fiat CODE system. And likely most of them probably could have had their issue solved without it....

[PhilA]

Yup. The red key stayed in a drawer for 11 years that we had the Cinq, the lock barrel mechanism failed before the electronics did.

[Bren]

I had a 2.8 XJ6 manual. Was considered undesirable but it was a lovely old car. Revvy and certainly no slouch. Had overdrive and was nice to drive. Sometimes cars get a reputation which is undeserved.

Yes - that VW is good.

[lesapandre]

Right up until they hole a piston.

 

Anyone remember the Rover 800 fitted with the 2.0 O Series engine? Or on similar lines, the Omega fitted with the 8v 2.0 Carlton lump?

Yes it was diagnosed as carbon build up on the positions which then blew them when the engine was later used at high speed. Mine was over 20 years old when I bought it. The earlier 2.4 did not seem to have the problem. I had no problems. Rust got it in the end to the extent that the rear suspension pulled off the tub on a drive one day. The early XJ's - pre Leyland have nice interiors even had wood fillets round the side windows inside held in by little chrome screws. I could not afford the costs of one these days. 

 

Another unloved car I had was an early Audi 100 - the first shape. Bought it for peanuts. Big ends went on that at about 100,000 miles. Was sucessful abroad but there was little interest in the UK I recall.

[Magnificent Rustbucket]

Talking of Audis, the Audi 200 of both shapes are a good fit for this thread. They were good cars and very competent against the likes of the Granada, but comedy over-pricing pitted them against the XJ6, the S Class and the 7 series. Vanishingly few were sold - and discounts were huge. I only ever saw one at a dealership, never once on the road.

 

 

 

[rantingYoof]

Right up until they hole a piston.

 

Anyone remember the Rover 800 fitted with the 2.0 O Series engine? Or on similar lines, the Omega fitted with the 8v 2.0 Carlton lump?

Being a Vauxhall sadist, I'd really like a 1995 Omega 2.0 8v Select.

 

 

Sent from my GT-I9505 using Tapatalk

[sierraman]

Or a Granada 2.5 diesel Taxi spec.

[GeordieInExile]

Talking of Audis, the Audi 200 of both shapes are a good fit for this thread. They were good cars and very competent against the likes of the Granada, but comedy over-pricing pitted them against the XJ6, the S Class and the 7 series. Vanishingly few were sold - and discounts were huge. I only ever saw one at a dealership, never once on the road.

 

 

 

The top one really does just look like a bigger contemporary VW. Getting a lot of Polo MK2.

[Stevebrookman]

I had a 2.8 XJ6 manual. Was considered undesirable but it was a lovely old car. Revvy and certainly no slouch. Had overdrive and was nice to drive. Sometimes cars get a reputation which is undeserved.

I had a J reg Daimler Sovereign 2.8 mod. Lovely thing to drive, made a lovely sound. Think I paid £400 for it in around 89. Replaced it with a Rover 3500S-went like the clappers. Wish I kept both.

[ProgRocker]

Like the 1980s Sierra and Montego 1.3s, my old 1990 Fiat Tempra 1.4 must fit right in here on this thread:

 

1990 Fiat Tempra 1.4 by Matt W, on Flickr

1990 Fiat Tempra 1.4 by Matt W, on Flickr

 

Going up one spec level, the list price of the Tempra 1.6 'standard' was £800 more in 1990 (£8,600 odd) but it was perhaps better value for money as it gained the more powerful engine obviously, power steering, rev counter and I think it also got central locking too. The digitial dashboard was available on the 1.6 SX and above.

 

Wasn't the Tempra available with a 1.1 litre engine in it's home country? That must have been pitiful to drive!

[Tadhg Tiogar]

Jaguar XJ220 - when new and second-hand for quite a while! Same for the last of the V12 E-Types. I guess that's not what you are after though.

Similar thing happened to the BMW Z8. At £80,000 (later rising to £86,000), the ones shipped here (maybe 150 at most) sold only very slowly. I remember Hexagon in Highgate had a fair few of them new and used, and they weren't exactly flying off the shelves back then. I would see the same cars stuck on their books for ages, almost permanently in their newspaper adverts. Even the starring role in The World Is Not Enough wasn't quite enough to shift them at the time. Hexagon even resorted to offering one under 60 grand.

 

Nowadays of course, values seem to be going north of £150,000 but BMW must have lost a fair amount of money on each one they built.

 

Talking of Audis, the Audi 200 of both shapes are a good fit for this thread. They were good cars and very competent against the likes of the Granada, but comedy over-pricing pitted them against the XJ6, the S Class and the 7 series. Vanishingly few were sold - and discounts were huge. I only ever saw one at a dealership, never once on the road.

 

 

 

Agreed.

 

I actually liked the C2 Audi 200. They were priced at about £13000 back in about 1979, and I sat in the turbocharged one (the 5T) in the Dovercourt dealership in St. John's Wood. Wouldn't mind having a go in one now, but when was the last time we saw one on the road?

 

As for the C3 200, here's one for six large

 

....or a C3 100 Avant Quattro for under four bags.

[Tamworthbay]

Talking of Audis, the Audi 200 of both shapes are a good fit for this thread. They were good cars and very competent against the likes of the Granada, but comedy over-pricing pitted them against the XJ6, the S Class and the 7 series. Vanishingly few were sold - and discounts were huge. I only ever saw one at a dealership, never once on the road.

 

 

 

Good looking car, but as you say, killed by the stupid price sadly.

[ChinaTom]

The V8 didn’t fare much better but I think they were designed for US anyway. Audi 5000?

 

I remember when I was much younger, I was looking to replace my Escort with something (anything) better and I was offered a straight swap for a 4 years younger Hyundai Lantra (square shape, not melted one). The fact that I drove away in a Nissan Pulsar 1.6SLX and paid a fair wedge on top of the escort points to how undesirable the Lantra must have been back then.

 

Back in the 80’s when there was car trading in the family, my uncle had a beige Ital 2.0 Auto in the showroom until people thought it was a museum piece. It survived a change to Lada, to Yugo/Zastava and yes folks, a brief spell with Lonsdale and finally got straight swapped for a Rover 213.

[Tadhg Tiogar]

The V8 didn’t fare much better but I think they were designed for US anyway. Audi 5000?....

I think there was a near-V8 lookalike (well, it had the red lens tail clusters) which came as the 100 CS. Only ever saw one locally; and it was probably the only one!

[Pillock]

Flicking through any old mags with a classified section at the back, there was a point in the 90s where anything with a GTI, XR or RS badge seemingly became cheaper than a mid spec model. Insurance costs? Demands for trackers and alarms meaning you wanted money off?

[Stanky]

And the best part of that whole scare of that time was that it's mostly bullshit based on one or two people who had immobiliser issues and told by the stealerdealer that the red key was ESSENTIAL. Not having it = bills of £1500 for a new system and keys. Lost blue key and no red? NEW SYSTEM, £1500 please...

 

The issue was normally the receiver ring that clipped on the barrel. Even new from Fiat they were about £40.

 

The blue keys were so low tech, they were cloneable at shoe repair shops.

 

And there were aftermarket chips out there that disabled the whole system.

 

The amount of people who have actually needed the Red Key? Probably not even 0.1% of people who owned a car with the Fiat CODE system. And likely most of them probably could have had their issue solved without it....

 

I'll dust of my interesting* story about Fiat red keys now you've mentioned that.

 

in ~2007 I bought a mk1 Fiat Punto ELX, so all the toys and the 1.6l 8v 90bhp engine, basically the top of the range one that wasn't the sporting. It was a fantastic car, the spring on the accelerator pedal came direct from a BIC ballpoint pen, it wanted to do 90mph everywhere. My brother lambasted me for speeding everywhere in it until I gave him the keys to drive it back from southwest London one evening and about halfway down the M3 he conceded that I was right and thats just the speed it wanted to do.

 

Anyway, I got 2 blue keys with it, but no red one. This didn't really bother me, but after clumsily getting in one day I snagged my foot in the lanyard hanging off the key in the ignition barrel and snapped it off. bumhats. Anyway, i managed to extract the snapped off bit but was down to one key.

 

I took the last working key into a local locksmith who charged me £20 to cut and code a new blue key. Except it wasn't, he'd run out of blue 'ends' and only had red plastic handled blanks, did I mind? Megalol, I didn't care if he whittled one from a rooftile as long as it worked, but I knew about the difference between the red and blue ones so though it'd be handy to have what appeared to be a 'genuine' red key when it came to sell.

 

A few months later it blew the head gasket in a massive way, idling in Tesco carpark. Had I known then what I know now I'd have tried to K-seal it, but alas I was younger and didn't know these things existed. I took it to a local 2nd hand car place (which soon after went bust) and part-ex'd it for a Mk3 golf as 'I needed something bigger' - the dealer thought he was getting a billy bargain, and even gave me an extra hundred quid trade in (£650) because I had the 'red' key. I drove off in the Golf laughing like a drain that the colour of the key fob was really the very least of the next owner's worries.

 

I did see it about a few months later, but never again so not sure what happened to it, they probably filled it with k-seal themselves when they realised what was wrong with it, and it probably played a part in their demise.

 

Karma caught up with me because I smacked a hole in the gearbox of the golf after an emergency off-roading event a couple of months later in a retail park in Brislington, necessating a replacement 2nd hand gearbox which appeared to have come from a car found in a peat bog, though it was a weird ratio and went like shit of a shovel (for a mk3 golf), though ran out of revs at 105mph, and where 70mph was about 4000rpm in 5th.

[HMC]

90s top gear mag used to have little individual model overviews in the used section was which always included an “avoid” section......

 

From memory Toyota supra- Avoid; “white ones as they look like whales” harsh and very period - I’d see one in white as a plus these days.

[Tadhg Tiogar]

...weird ratio and went like shit of a shovel (for a mk3 golf), though ran out of revs at 105mph, and where 70mph was about 4000rpm in 5th.

4000 revs for 70mph? That is feckin' mental!

[Richard_FM]

VW Golf Mk2 1050cc is called a bad joke on one of the bangernomics sites, though I guess a 3 door would be wanted these days for the body shell to turn into a GTi replica.

Big Audis used to hard to shift due to high parts costs & premature rust, the 200 turbo was especially DIY proof.

Renault 25s suffered from the usual big French car jinx of fading paint electrics that went haywire after a decade high & hard to find parts.  Like the Audi 200 the turbo was a dealer only service item though the power train had a niche with kit car builders.

 

[CortinaDave]

A mate of mine said the Hyundai Stellar was known as the Horrendous Seller in the trade as they were totally unwanted by the mid 90s

[GeordieInExile]

On 3/16/2019 at 9:38 PM, HMC said:

90s top gear mag used to have little individual model overviews in the used section was which always included an “avoid” section......

 

From memory Toyota supra- Avoid; “white ones as they look like whales” harsh and very period - I’d see one in white as a plus these days.

White ones remind me of Gran Turismo. Best colour.

 

[HMC]

On 3/15/2019 at 9:19 PM, HMC said:

Tweed interior xj40 2.9 xj6 manuals, at least according to Quentin Wilson circa 1994

Other stuff that Uncle Quentin used to single out from memory circa TG magazine 1995ish (ones to avoid/ difficult to sell on) in no particular order 

BMW 525IX (4x4- do any they exist still?)

White Toyota Supras 

Ford Capris

Austin Metros (I sensed a personal dislike as they must have been easy to shift surely)

Renault 25