Cheapest most reliable shite you bought

[Morgan84]

What was the cheapest,and most reliable shite you ever bought,and did it keep going despite all odds ?

[Volksy]

£50 for a '86 205 GLD with nigh on 200k. Epically reliable, hoot to drive, and entirely capable.

[Guest]

My Volvo 460 Turbo has been driven with determination everywhere. Then SCTSH_ANDY ran it for a while.

 

460 Turbo wins 'most reliable shite' award in the WAT_FLEET.

[Spiny Norman]

Bought this for £350 a couple of years back and it ran perfectly for the 7 or 8 months I had it. Never spent a bean on it other than a tax disc and petrol, and sold it at a profit. Shite motoring at its most painless.

 

[pompei]

Fiat 127 Palio bought for £50, ran for years, sold for £50 (big mistake)

[Micrashed]

Cost £300

Ran for 12 months, did shy of 20,000 miles, spent NOTHING on it.

Sold it for £300. It actually made me money with my mileage payment from work.

 

Its still going strong with its present owner to this day.

 

Not a car, bought this for £50 with no MOT off a bloke who had been made wheelchair bound having come off it.

Put it through an MOT, passed, ran it for a couple of years and got £300 for it when I sold it.

Ultra reliable, ultra frugal.

[jonathan_dyane]

This 306 TD:

 

A friend gave it to me for nowt after it had been used in a community arts project. I spend about £100 on coach paint, a radiator and a heater matrix and a few sundries and it looked like this:

 

 

Ran it for about 10000 miles and it needed nowt, but a combination of the rear beam collapsing and a load of smoke escaping from the loom (after which it still went but did without many electrical refinements) led me to send it over the bridge. Good times!

[skattrd]

Mk2 Scirocco, not the cheapest car I've bought by a long way, or even the cheapest 'rocco I've bought (its predecessor cost me £190). I paid £600 for it and covered 80 000 miles in it in two years with only regular servicing and averaging over 40mpg. One breakdown in that time, flat battery in Edinburgh, I got a jump start then drove 300 miles back to Lincs, new battery fitted the next day.

 

 

I still have it, its currently awaiting a gearbox swap after I swapped the engine for a TSR version and (stupidly) fitted a 4+e box with 90mm driveshafts.

The old engine with 180k on it has no issues and is sitting in the corner of the garage.

[messerschmitt owner]

Mercedes W123 230TE - bought blind off Ebay for £625 - used for two years, nothing other than servicing, had 195000 miles on the clock when I bought it, had 230,000 when I sold it - MoT'd it the day it went - flew through and sold for £750.

 

Total cost - five home services, petrol, couple of tyres, two MoTs.

[RichardMoss]

In 1990 I had an 8 year old Renault 20 which I bought for £500. I ran it for a year, sold it to my brother for £500, he ran it for a year and then was rear ended and got a £900 payout from the insurance company (including return of the car). The damage was cosmetic so I repaired it and used it for a while before selling it for about £500! So several years of motoring at a profit of over £1000 - unbeatable.

 

Lovely car to drive, too.

[Guest]

Rover Maestro 1.3LX. Cost £60 for welding (the car was free as it was a MOT failure) and we ran it hard and fully loaded for about 18 months. My girlfriend moved from Bath to Worcester to Newcastle and it shifted everything. I was living in Newcastle and I visited her most weekends and we'd often go further afield, like the south coast. It just ran and ran and was very comfortable.

[dollywobbler]

Easy one for me. In 2007, I paid the grand sum of £195 for this Honda Civic with MOT. Did a few thousand miles in it but sold it before the MOT ran out due to rampant corrosion in the rear arch. Ran like an absolute dream. I gave it a service and had two CV joints changed.

 

I have some surprising also-rans though, starting with this CX. Cost me roughly £850 (was a swapsie) and other than having to replace the air intake tubing (broken when I got it and the mixture had just been tweaked up to compensate) it never failed to complete a journey. I never got around to servicing the thing and it once overheated as the cooling fan wasn't working. 109 degrees and it survived. The coolant also froze at one point and it survived that too. Much more robust than you'd expect! Shame about the crap electrics.

 

Another honourable mention for my £375 Alfa Romeo 164 V6. Again, came with lots of MOT and tax IIRC. You'd expect it to be hopeless but the only problem was an occasionally binding caliper. I was a fool to sell this for £300!

[Largactil]

Hope I'm not speaking too soon, but my peasant Pug 205 I bought from Will of this parish has been bloody fantastic, covering around 5000 miles in the last 5 months and coping with x4 return trips from London to central Scotland at 900 miles a pop.

 

 

Cost £250 with 9 months MOT and 3 months tax - Have thrown £200 at it on servicing, changing the belts / water pump / springs and replacing the wheels and tyres.

 

(None of which I should have bothered with if I applied true bangernomic principles, but I've got a major soft spot for the little car, so heart ruled head).

[John F]

Possibly a 1979 Audi 80, bought in Germany with 6 months' TÜV for £20, used to transport me & all my beer home after I'd had a bust-up with the lass I'd travelled over with.

 

I used the car as a shed for about a year, then sold it to a breaker for £35.

[ashmicro]

1975 (?) Avenger bought for £40 in 1990. I put about 5k miles on it in a few months and it only needed a new king lead. I swapped it for a gold Samba and a bottle of scotch, and the new owner had it for about 18 months with no issues. Then it got torched in some heavy-duty civil disorder.

[jonny69]

Not quite as barganacious as some on here but we bought a Renault Scenic with tEh dEaTh autobox for £1500 in 2005. It started playing up at about 97k miles but just soldiered on and only really got annoying at 137k when we scrapped it 6 years later, but by that point the rest of the car was falling apart around it due to complete and deliberate neglect. I used to look after it and service it on the dot each time, but by a certain point I was convinced it was about to die so I just stopped doing anything except filling it up with fuel. And it did 20k miles on the £3.99 15W40 oil that I'd put in it and was still going fine. The perished exhaust amazingly had another new shiny one inside it, like a snake shedding its skin, so I changed the oil one last time and I think it did another 10k on top of that and still didn't die. At the end, the gearbox was genuinely playing up a bit and the battery had died, but apart from a driveshaft and a track rod end (which came to a total of £115) I don't think we ever spent a penny on it.

[Cavcraft]

Absolutely loads, here's sone of the ones I can remember for now:

 

Mr B01's old Cavalier with differently abled gearbox. Superb motor, never put a foot out of place and was both pleasant and effortless to drive. 27.2/3.

 

Mk4 Astra Sport. Typical Vauxhall, took masses of abuse and refused to give in. I bought it about £500 under book at the time and it didn't owe me a penny when I finally sold it.

[Guest]

£150 of '93 Peugeot 405 leather and wood infested estate shaped tow bar wearing lovelyness.

No MOT but sorted with a new fuse to the ABS.

25,000 in 18 months and the bastard let me down once. The O/S headlight bulb went.

Used at the Spa 6 Hour as pit bitch, tow start car for mate's Mk 1 Escrot racer that liked the Ardennes dampness.

Then did 692 miles til the Reserve fuel light came on.

Towed a drift car all over the show with ease.

Had the most comfy seats ever.

Robbed numerous XMs for parts so easy to source.

Towed an Escort out of a ditch in reverse in 6" of snow with snow tyres. Bloke admitted he thought I was off my nut thinking it would pull it out!

HAndled quite well for what it was and gave ample notice of impending doom by way of little sideways skips by the back end.

[Pete-M]

VLV189V Yellow Datsun Bluebird saloon, with a truly horrific shit beige interior.

 

Bought for £60 from son of original (now deceased) owner. 60k on the clock, not been serviced from new. It was about 10 years old at the time. Needed a clutch £40, an oil flush and change and a set of points. MOT'd it, taxed it, abused it mercilessly for about six months (the most skint six months of my life to date), during which time it received one set of brake pads (as the old ones nearly fell out) and a bulb. It was driven by lots of people all over the place as insurance just said "Any driver over 21 with a licence". The front six inches of the bonnet were a three layer composite material: mud, cardboard and gaffer tape.

 

It wouldn't die. I sold it to someone who'd done loads of miles in it for £150. It lasted another year or so.

[Mat.T]

 

my saab 900! Bar rusty front arches (welded up) and sticky front handbrake calipers (both rebuilt) Has been no bother in 18k miles apart from general servicing bits. Cost me £690 from ebay I was after a 99 but this looked to good to miss, driven every day for the last 2 years all round the country. I am a fanatical rust proofer and oil changer which helps its cause, but still I would happy drive my saab across Europe tommorrow with out worrying about it, unlike the rest of my fleet!

[HMC]

250 bought me a e34 525i in 2008. Long tax and test, just put fuel in it, took it to Germany, commuted in it, and sold it on for much the same.

[CortinaDave]

£170 for a B reg 1.3 sierra base in 1998. it gave me no grief whatsoever in the year i owned it and did everything i asked of it (very slowly) I, being an irresponsible 18 year old even crashed it several times and managed not to kill it.

 

Scrapped it and got £65 back, then a few weeks later saw it running about again so someone must have bought it out of the yard.

[fordperv]

My cheapest most fun shite was when I was 18 it was a 80,000 mile y plate sierra 2.0 automatic in metallic blue/rust that apparently had 11 months m.o.t on it I looked around it and it must have been m.o.td by Stevie wonder wearing a welding mask there was that Much rust knocking around so paid the guy £50 for it as I needed a car and almost run the m.o.t out sold it to a mate for £100 then bought it back for £5 when he bumped it then I used it as a donor car to save another sierra, i had so much fun in that old barge, I was driving that the night I met Mrs fordperv but thats another fun story

[trigger]

Ford Sierra 1.6 GL by Trigger's Retro Road Tests!, on Flickr

 

This. Paid £100 for it back in 2001 with a years ticket, smoked it about for a year before being sold to a banger racer and had never any issues with it what so ever, bloody good car it was.

[Rusty Pelican]

This

 

 

Bought for £50 from a local Scrappys and flung together with S/H bits , still going fine now , added shite points for being a rear engined estate

[ProgRocker]

Purchased on 1st April 2010 - but this car was no April Fool. £250.00 with 9 months MOT and half a tank of diesel, + £112.50 to tax it for 6 months. Spent nothing else on it other than refuelling - which I didn't do often as it was uber economical.

 

The driver's door lock failed after a couple of weeks. The bodywork was starting to rot (as you can see by the rear wheel arch). It took 2 or 3 seconds to turn over and occasionally wouldn't start on the first attempt but this tank never let me down in 6 months of ownership.

 

1994 Ford Escort 1.8 LD diesel by ProgRocker77, on Flickr

 

This former police car with 150,000 miles on the clock was bought from my dad's drinking buddy in April 2010. The photograph was taken shortly after I picked it up. I removed the damaged wheel trims to reveal the steel wheels caked in braked dust. The paintwork was very dull and rough to touch. I spent a happy few hours that day washing and polishing the car, which looked more respectable by the end of the day.