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Six Cylinders Motoring Notes - Well that didn’t go well!


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I don’t want to be rude, but are Carltons now that rare that the one above is worth fixing?

It’s got HGF, chassis rust and the paintwork’s looks like it’s had it. 

Normally I try to see the best in old sheds, but it just seems to define the words End of Life Vehicle to me.

Surely money would be better spent on something like the Trevi or Guilietta? 

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11 hours ago, AnthonyG said:

I don’t want to be rude, but are Carltons now that rare that the one above is worth fixing?

It’s got HGF, chassis rust and the paintwork’s looks like it’s had it. 

Normally I try to see the best in old sheds, but it just seems to define the words End of Life Vehicle to me.

Surely money would be better spent on something like the Trevi or Guilietta? 

You are missing the point!!!🙂

It is about fixing something that is broken, no matter if it makes sense or not!

When I faltered at the thought of paying a garage to do a head gasket @Andyrew interjected with “all you need is a bunch of gullible ****** and pay them in tea and biscuits”.

So we are back on track looking for the lowest cost parts to do the head gasket change.

Carltons are now quite rare with only 173 taxed, saloons and estates of all years. There are also 51 Lotus Carltons.

While I like Carltons a 2.0 manual would not be my choice, let’s get it back on the road and give it chance. The previous late owner loved it.

The photo is the alternative!

IMG_20210404_142246 broad.jpg

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HGF on that old 8V engine is not common at all.  I've known them overheated to hell and back and still in good order.  They're a really robust design.  Even non-interference, so you can cambelt roulette as long as you like.  When it snaps, the engine just stops and it's about 2hrs work to put a new on one.  Maybe even less on a longitudinal arrangement like that in an engine bay designed for an inline 6.

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The website is odd - the front page only lists the Comfort which is 11 grand but if you look into the finance options it also shows you the Access (£7,995, still black bumpers and no trimz but disappointingly now with electric front windows) and the Essential (body colour bumpers and aircon, £8,995 with the 1.0 or £9,995 with the 0.9 turbo).

I don't think it's a bad looking car really - a bit generic but not offensive in the way a Nissan Juke or most modern Toyotas are.

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21 minutes ago, wuvvum said:

For a 1.0 Essential on a 4-year PCP with £500 deposit, the monthly payments are roughly what I'm paying in VED every month for my fleet at the moment...

No wonder so many people drive modern cars.

What's the final value fee though?  You'll get to 4yrs old and then either have to pay an amount far greater than the value of the car at that point, or hand it back and get suckered into another deal.

Also, woe betide if you drive more than their pathetically small allowance of miles.  You'll get bumraped to the tune of about 50p/mile for anything more than popping to the shops on a weekly basis.

The headline figures are all well and good, but dig a bit deeper and you'll find the real cost.

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33 minutes ago, Talbot said:

Also, woe betide if you drive more than their pathetically small allowance of miles.  You'll get bumraped to the tune of about 50p/mile for anything more than popping to the shops on a weekly basis.

The finance calculator doobery has a slider to select the annual mileage you want.  I set it to 10K a year, which is pretty much what I do on average.

I'm not about to click the button to buy one, but I do sometimes see the appeal when I'm spending my weekends crawling around under old chod trying to fix the brakes for the MOT instead of chilling in the back garden with a beer and a good book.

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I didn’t know you’d got a Beetle convertible - that looks quite fun. New Beetles have grown on me now that they are just as old as Old Beetles were when I started driving!

They did a weird spec model with the much rarer second generation one (New New Beetle?) - only ever seen one or two - it was kind of like a Polo Dune with raised ride height and the usual plastic bits and pieces.

Those crazy Germans eh? 🤪
 

Re Carltons, I am a bit surprised there are only 173 or so left (I assume there are more if you count Sorned ones?). 

There’s probably 10 times as many Granadas of the equivalent era (I guess that’s the Mk2 and Mk3) still about.

I guess if they are that rare then you have to make the best of what’s available, so good luck with the head gasket! 

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18 hours ago, wuvvum said:

The finance calculator doobery has a slider to select the annual mileage you want.  I set it to 10K a year, which is pretty much what I do on average.

I'm not about to click the button to buy one, but I do sometimes see the appeal when I'm spending my weekends crawling around under old chod trying to fix the brakes for the MOT instead of chilling in the back garden with a beer and a good book.

I can very much see your point.  When I've been scrabbling about in the wet to change a corroded brake pipe to be able to get an MOT because I need the car to get me to work on Monday, I often question my sanity.

Interesting that you've set it to 10k a year and still got a reasonable* montly cost..  I've heard of some of the PCP options being limited to 8k or sometimes just 6k miles a year.  25k/year is more like average for me.  I suspect the monthly payments would be rather higher if that was chosen.  And you'd still have a massive final value fee at the end of it.

What I do wonder is if you bought the same car outright on finance, did the same miles per annum, paid the same amount as a PCP amount back against the finance each month, how much finance would be left at the end of 4 years?  I suspect nowhere near as much as the final value fee.

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11 hours ago, Mr Livered said:

Is that the Merc I gave you hiding shyly behind the Beetle there? Nice to see it still going, if so :)

Yes! :-)

We twiddle its acupuncture pins in the driver's door card every now and then, which seems to keep it good health and it continues to proceed in its steady, solid, three-pointed-star kind of way and do whatever is asked of it.

 

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On 4/5/2021 at 1:29 PM, Talbot said:

What's the final value fee though?  You'll get to 4yrs old and then either have to pay an amount far greater than the value of the car at that point, or hand it back and get suckered into another deal.

Also, woe betide if you drive more than their pathetically small allowance of miles.  You'll get bumraped to the tune of about 50p/mile for anything more than popping to the shops on a weekly basis.

The headline figures are all well and good, but dig a bit deeper and you'll find the real cost.

The thing is, APR is APR. If you finance a £10,000 car on 4.9% APR it's not suddenly going to have a REAL cost because the balloon payment is due, it always had a real cost.

And on the flipside, yes, if you think that a £38,000 Mercedes C-Class is £299/month for three years and that's the price and somehow the PCP is ripping you off, then you really need to go back to school for a while. If you finance a car on 0% you've still got to pay for the damn thing?

And most excess mileage charges are between 4.9ppm and 15ppm unless you've signed a really vicious deal.

Every PCP deal I have been involved with the car has been worth more than the final value fee. Even a Citroen C3.

IME if you can spend less than £3Kpa on a car, excluding fuel, including tax and maintenance, then you're doing okay. £2K per year is a more sensible level if you can do it, but that's surprisingly limiting.

By all means, avoid finance if you want to and can do so, but be realistic. A Golf with some fancy bits is £35,000 these days. Want a nice Skoda Scala? Up to £29K. That white amorphous blob of a CLA Shooting Brake I've been testing  is £38,000 list price. Even at 0% APR that would take 100 months at £380/month to pay off.  I am sure this will spark a rant about the number of people driving fancy cars they haven't earned or don't deserve, but fundamentally new cars are a thing you subscribe to, lease, treat as a monthly payment; they're not a status symbol or an asset, they're a device.

People spend more to get fancy ones, but you could lease an Audi A3 e-Tron for £237/month inc. VAT and the value of a 12 year old Focus - there are always deals like that. The real cost is of course the number of cars that get thrown away rather than maintained - the lack of servicing, the state of these not at 3 years old, but at 7 to 12 years old; how many 56-plate cars do you see that still look great? Manufacturers have to encourage them off the road to stay in business...

The Dacia is unusually good for a car you could realistically buy with savings though - I am looking forward to talking about it properly elsewhere :D

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So the monthly payments must be more than the depreciation value of the car.

They have to make their money somewhere.

I simply cannot believe that the initial buy-in price + all montly payments + final payment can be less than the cash price of the car.

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Without getting into the PCP argument, I've always thought that if you manipulate the list price, so that the depreciation looks even worse, and the monthly payments look reasonable, the second hand value of the car after 3 years might actually be what the price should have been.  Given that lease companies buy in bulk, or are tied into the manufacturer, or are the manufacturer, we really don't know how much they paid for the car.  

My daughter is actually prime target for PCP.  

The reason she doesn't? She wants to buy a house and having anything on finance would screw up the figures on how much she could borrow.  

 

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