2004 Fiat Panda - How bad are they? Any other Suggestions?

[Morgan84]

Tell her not to buy anything without first looking at the Yaris. It has a sliding rear seat so you can have either small passengers/large luggage or largepassengers/small luggage. They are also reliable and cheap to run; our friends have a nine-year old 90,000 mile example they bought new and it does 50+ mpg and has only needed the normal replacements (tyres, brakes, etc) in that time.

 

I'd agree with that! Mine has done 164,000ish miles in 9 years and apart from general wear and tear (and the EML thing, but we'll get to that) I can't fault it.

Worth finding the 1.3 petrol though as I'd imagine the 1 litre to be quite miserable.

 

1.0 is ok in town,but if you actually want to get out on the open road,forget it - useless ! The 1.3 is quite nippy apparently,and still good on mpg

[face]

Perusing Gumtree tonight brought up a Suzuki Ignis in five door format.

 

Any opinions on those?

 

 

Yes, definitely. We bought this one new in 2006 and kept it until we moved in 2009. It's a base-model 1.3, the only extra specified being a towbar. Totally recommended. Totally. The only slight grumble I had was the folding of the rear seat. You can drop the backrest onto the base, but then the base is fixed, doesn't fold anywhere. That seems a bit dumb to me. CD player, power steering, leccy windows in the front, central locking; overall, perfectly adequate, and with a hint of the peculiar Suzuki exhaust note that sounds so much bigger and more powerful than it really is. Parking is easy as the rear of the car is almost as flat as a Volvo estate, just a whole lot closer to you, so you can keep backing up with confidence. We did long trips in it, the pic above was taken in Inverness and it had been down to Portsmouth too. Comfy, perfectly powerful enough, and capable of a frankly astonishing amount of stowage if you want to do boot-sales for example. Buy now.

 

I had one new in 2003 when this shape fist came out - pretty unspectacular and slightly odd looking but it was good to drive, decent on fuel and well equipped. Wish we had specced AC in ours, that was the reason we ultimately moved it on.

I'd quite like a 1.5 4Grip one day.

[mk2_craig]

Andreas had a couple of these on his rental fleet. One's still available, on its last season I think, his wife is driving the other as her daily. He's never mentioned any problems to me, in fact he seems very pleased with them. And that's in holiday-rental use, so they are going to get fairly abused on a regular basis. We were considering one a few years ago when we bought the Suzuki Ignis; dealer proximity was an issue for us. Suzuki dealer was around the corner, Fiat dealer was in Wigan. But the Panda was a very strong contender otherwise.

 

Having driven one of the aforementioned rental Pandas 18 months ago (when it had approx 30k on the clock) I can thoroughly recommend. Loved it and told Andreas so when returning it!

[Largactil]

I had a 100HP back in 2008...

 

 

Ran it for 2 years - Great little car (although it was only 12 months old when I had it).

 

Unfortunately, it almost failed its first MOT - Rear bump stops disintegrated, leaky rear damper, and the back box rusted through.

 

Needed a £££ spend to remedy all this - Not sure whether it was down to the occasional stint of 'rough love' I dealt it (it was a hoot through the twisties), or whether it was Fiat QC issues...

[eddyramrod]

Craig, that's the one that's still on the fleet! Come on over quick, you can get another week with it!