Which one do you wish you kept?

[Retr0naut]

He is a few from my past, all long gone although the Golf did last  until 2010/2011 so an 18 or 19 years on the road. It was still extremely tidy when I sold it around 1997. Should have kept the BX but a guy I knew wanted it and I gave in and sold him it cheaply in the end. The Renault 19 1.4 Energy drank fuel so had to go. The Escort had been  in an accident some time previous to my ownership, I did however get more for it when sold than I paid for it.

[Turbowomble]

For me, it’s this one. Bought on eBay for £370 in September 2010, in the middle of fresher’s week at uni after I came home late one evening after a few too many sherries and browsed the classifieds. Absolutely loved it, from the big woofly V8 to the comfy leather bum-warmed armchairs. It had a fault whereby the transmission wouldn’t select 1st gear whilst in D, so setting off from a complete stop involved popping it into 1st manually and then back into drive.

Owned it for a sum total of a month, as petrol prices were £1.40+/litre at the time and this did not mix well with being a skint student and single-figure urban empeegeez. Back onto eBay it went, and sold for a £30 profit to a Dutch bloke who flew over from Utrecht to drive it back home and rob the engine for his other RRC project. Have pledged to myself that I’ll have another someday, but price are on a sharp incline, even for conditions akin to a badger’s backside. We’ll see...

[Jerzy Woking]

I knew I had a photo somewhere! Bought this sight unseen for £500 in Birmingham, rather than face travelling from Stafford to Essex on a Fiday evening and going back on Monday for a few weeks.

Ad never mentioned the factory fitted AMG body kit (quite subtle) AMG wheels, air con and leather (not MB Tex) interior, and a fresh 12 month MOT. It drove really well.

Should never have sold it, but about 18 months later I bought a VW T4 and got dragged into the whole T4 scene thing. The 190e was just left on the drive for months, then sold at a 50% profit in 2006/7.

Found some more pictures on a Photobucket account. Reg G36 EAB, and DVLA shows the MOT expired March 2009. Probably bean tins now.

[Amishtat]

Mine was my E30 318i, G436TYE. £225 unseen off a mate of a mate, with mot and tax (remember that?..). My hopes weren't high but someone in 1989 had spent some money, it had a sunroof, electric windows and mirrors and bottle top alloys. I was in love within the first mile and a rumbling rear wheel bearing and an unreliable fuel gauge weren't enough to stop me enjoying ten thousand miles in eight months. The front corner got clipped by a cunt on a country road and one way and another I couldn't get another mot on it, my landlady wouldn't let me keep it on the driveway so over the bridge it had to go. None of its problems would be a bother nowadays but we've all been young, right? The next day my other mate asked where it had gone, then when I told him replied "why didn't you put it  on my drive? There's loads of room.." I felt like throttling him. I've wanted another ever since but fuck they're expensive these days. Just such a fun drive. 

[sofarsogood]

Land Rover V8. Should never have sold.

[Tamworthbay]

3.0s Capri for the princely sum of £35 at Albert Looms. It was fucked (by the standards then) but would love it back.

[Sir Chocolate Teapot]

No pics sorry.

Must have 2

My firts ever car reliant bond bug in purple.

Sold after about a week as my dad took it for a drive and said no way.

Volvo 360 gls, small chunky car with great seats and 2.0 ltr engine. Felt it would last forever.

[anonymous user]

This one, sold because I needed the money quickly as a house move was going down the pan.

[anonymous user]

And this one, it was being repaired, I bought another to tide me over and stupidly kept that one. Wrong decision.

[Matty]

On 4/22/2020 at 7:06 PM, 95 quid Peugeot said:

Gilbern Invader

TR4

Bristol 603

Porsche 928

Mustang Mach1

Renault Dauphine 

invader! Our first car when I was 4 was an invader 2 teal blue (JLU5K). My dad and our Tony bought one each at the same time (1985) his was a green invader one. Imagine my mum with a toddler a baby and a dog in one of them as a daily (better than the bus or shanks pony isuppose which was what we were on with before). When I was 19 our Tony rebuilt an invader 3 in white with rs 4 spokes and my dad bought an invader 2 chassis and shell to restore. "Travellers" appropriated the chassis (don't have a unit in Accrington) so the car never did live. An invader 2 is still an ambition for me but good ones are now well outside my money. Any photos of yours?

[mk2_craig]

Been looking through some old photos tonight - can't help thinking I should have hung on to this one a bit longer 

Lovely old wagon this.  Heather Mills-compatible gearbox, though for reasons that were never fully identified I did have to get into the habit of whacking it into neutral at every junction to avoid stalling.   Was going to spend a bit of time and money fixing it up, but in the end @colc took it off my hands.

[Tetleysmooth]

One of these. 1963. Sadly my ex missus had a thing for Triumph 2000's, so I did a straight swap for a ratty one. Instant regret. I could never have another one, way out of my league now, and the current Mrs Tetley thinks old cars are just that - old.

[Spurious]

I sold this after two years, think it was 2011 when I sold it. 

Early Clio, a 1995. Posh spec so electric windows, rev counter and fog lights. 1.4 motronic so quick enough in a car that weighed slightly more than a bag of crisps.

Entertaining drive and leaps ahead of the Starlet I had before. Planted and solid on the road. 

A steering rack failed it's roadworthiness test. I couldn't find one so it got sold with a short test. 

Should have tried harder. Lovely car, wonder what happened to it in the end. 

[Amishtat]

Further to the 318i already mentioned, my Wolseley 6/110 Mark 1 is something I ought to have kept. Two tone blue, 3-speed manual with overdrive and a perfect example of money burning a hole in my pocket and the pitfalls of buying without driving it first. The one thing it did properly was look nice, but had a list of niggling problems as long as your arm, none of which would be much of a bother nowadays. Eighteen years later, it's still the most expensive car I've ever bought (£1750!) which just made its baggy gutlessness worse. Sold to a mate after about four years who did very little with it before selling it on in about 2012. It appeared on the ebay thread here in 2019 so at least it still exists. The advert stated it was a lovely drive, so either someone spent time and money sorting it out or it was a barefaced lie however at five bags I wasn't in the running to find out which. 

[Tetleysmooth]

1 hour ago, Amishtat said:

 Wolseley 6/110 Mark 1 

A car I always wanted, but never had. Austin Princess too. The closest I got was an Austin Cambridge Farina.

[Amishtat]

1 hour ago, Tetleysmooth said:

A car I always wanted, but never had. Austin Princess too. The closest I got was an Austin Cambridge Farina.

I'd wanted one ever since seeing them as police cars in old films, but it took until 2003 when I was 23 to finally get one. It had to be manual with unassisted steering too so I'd passed over quite a few power steered automatics before settling on that one. I'd have another, still think they're gorgeous old things but they're too rich for my blood these days. And now it'd have to be an automatic, suits them much better. 

[Tetleysmooth]

9 minutes ago, Amishtat said:

I'd wanted one ever since seeing them as police cars in old films, but it took until 2003 when I was 23 to finally get one. It had to be manual with unassisted steering too so I'd passed over quite a few power steered automatics before settling on that one. I'd have another, still think they're gorgeous old things but they're too rich for my blood these days. And now it'd have to be an automatic, suits them much better. 

I'm going back to the 70's now, when these cars could be had for absolute peanuts. They  weren't classics then, just old bangers. I very rarely paid over a hundred quid for a car back then. I got a freshly painted Rover P6 3500S for 200 quid. Most I paid I think. Cracking car too. Went like the clappers. The Vogues, Cambridges, HA Vivas and similar were always available for 50, 75, 95 quid. Good days.

[Amishtat]

Shit, you've just reminded me.. In 2007 I bought a 3500S with an SD1 5-speed in it for £350 and drove it forty miles home (not altogether legally). Dark green with a Webasto and orange cloth seats, it sounded fantastic with the back box rotted off.. Needed some money about a year later and a chap from Norwich snapped my hand off at £750. Last I heard he still had it, so that's something at least. 

[Squirrel2]

My first Land Rover; a tidy Series 3 Lightweight. Used as a daily driver for a while in the mid '90s. Never welded or repaired; it was always in above-average condition and after an unleaded head conversion it ran even better - in L-R relative terms... It was sold when I bought the 110 Tdi as I foolishly thought that three Land Rovers were too many on the drive. 🙄

From my youth I wish I still had the 1979 Renault 5 Gordini that replaced a Reno 16.. Sorry, no pics.

Squirrel2

[warch]

He sold this long before I was even born but I wish my Dad hadn't sold his one of these (stock photo). He bought a light green (first 3000 built) 1948 80 inch Series One Land Rover in the mid-late 60s, when it was just another shit old car. I have seen photos of his one and it looked really good. Apparently the 1600cc engine was knackered though.

As for me I wish I'd kept my 1993 Calibra Turbo, which was running well when I sold it but which needed new rear suspension arms and hub components (back when you needed to email scrapyard websites to see if any were available. Of course once I'd sold the bloody thing, I was deluged with emails for the bits it needed. This is another stock image but absolutely identical to mine which looked innocuous in blue with standard propeller alloys and no bodykit. 

I also wish I'd kept my 309 GTI. Bought for autotesting which never actually happened but far too good for such a fate. A new rear beam would've sorted it and I loved the way it went, cornered and looked, especially in white. This diecast model looks just like mine did.

[Marina door handles]

11 hours ago, Tetleysmooth said:

One of these. 1963. Sadly my ex missus had a thing for Triumph 2000's, so I did a straight swap for a ratty one. Instant regret. I could never have another one, way out of my league now, and the current Mrs Tetley thinks old cars are just that - old.

That's funky but what is it?

 

[antony denman]

regretted minute it went 2000e cortina

[Marina door handles]

I regret selling most of mine, but for a long time didn't have space to keep more than one.  I particularly regret flogging my Manta, it needed some engine work, possibly  new lump so I got rid. It even had headight washers whats not to like?

The other I didn't really want to sell but was my 944, it suffered a major and unexpected MOT fail, the timing was all wrong. It needed welding in a very awkward spot, I couldn't get anyone to do it with out massive outlay as the rear mounted gearbox and fuel tank needed to come out for access.  A118 LLM were are you now?

 

 

 

[Alfaisti]

Couple spring to mind, stock web photos but identical to what I owned, Sud was the best fun you could have with your clothes on, absolute blast, blew the engine and scrapped her in the end.

Races against RS31 Capris with the Fiat, really quick although brakes were marginal, this one caught fire when getting welded, engine was transplanted into a 1600TC and lived to terrorise the blue oval brigade once more.

[Scrubworks]

Bringing the shock paddles to this thread.

Facebook reminded me that, 7 years ago today, I bought this Metro:

This car had lived one of the most luxuriously stress-free lives of possibly any Metro. It had full service history, and had only covered 19000 miles. It had also spent virtually every minute of being undriven living indoors. To top it all off, the previous owner had just treated it to two NOS front wings, along with a proper, professional full respray. The price for this unicorn? £1500 via eBay auction. Utter steal.

I have to say, for all its faults, the Metro nailed its design brief. It was more spacious and better-riding than a Mini, and handled just as well. I am 6ft 5, and so driving Minis for me has always been a slightly cramped experience. In the Metro I definitely had enough space, and the hydragas was very smooth on our lumpy roads. It was, dare I say it, quite comfortable. It was also more than able to bully fat heavy modern hatchbacks on roundabouts and on city streets. It also achieved stonkingly good fuel economy, as advertised. To top it off, someone in the 80s had fitted it with a Pioneer tape deck, and some high quality parcel shelf speakers, which still sounded very good, even by modern Pioneer standards.

So why don't I still have it? Well, after running through a full tank of fuel, its years of sitting caught up with it, and the subsequent fiil-up dislodged a load of junk that had accumulated from years of old petrol sitting in the tank. This led to it contaminating any fuel that was put into it. It wasn't enough to prevent the car from starting, but it would not run on more than 2 cylinders, and would jump and bog all over the place. I tried rebuilding the whole ignition system and rebuilding the carb before figuring out what the real problem was. Running the car with the fuel pump connected to a jerry can of fresh fuel solved the running issues. The solution would have been to drop the tank, and have it professionally cleaned out. In a Mini, removing the tank is a 15 minute procedure. In a Metro, you have to drop the rear subframe to get it out; not a huge job in the grand scheme of things, but by this point it had been months of the car not working properly for seemingly no reason, and I was sick of it. I sold it at a £700 loss to a Mini restorer, who then did what I should have been bothered to do, got it running and then sold it on to a collector, who did such silly things as replacing the steering wheel with an HLS one (even though this is a basic L model with the Efficiency engine), and replacing the Pioneer stereo with an original, no doubt very shit Austin-Rover one.

Every now and then it gets papped by someone on the road and gets posted to a classic car spotted page on Facebook. It then gets forwarded to me by my friends, who recieve torrents of expletives in response. An utter turnip-brain move of mine.

[MiniMinorMk3]

Alfasud Sprint. I got this in 1986. Around the same time I got a job that meant having other vehicles to take home so this did not get driven much.

It was a hoot to drive and made a fab noise. I guess not driving it much meant that I did not really see how reliable it was, and as it was not getting used much I sold it after a year.

They earlier chrome bumper cars so rare now and decent ones sell for well into 5 figures these days, so I guess I will now just have to live with those distant memories.