Modern Cars Are Shit

[Guest Noam]

My Mrs has a 52-plate Renault Clio.I drive it sometimes. The second worst thing is the engine, a 1.2 16v. It is nominally rated at 75 bhp, but what this does not mention that barely any of this is available until about 4000-4500 rpm, when it feels as if chip opens up the second eight valves, the exhaust note changes radically and the car starts to move. As a result it is very sluggish most of the time, and to get the car to move you have to drive like a backwards-hatted chav with a Max Power sticker and acne.THe worst thing is the gearbox. I thought it was notchy when new, but assumed this would wear off. It is now up for its 36k service and is still notchy as f*ck. It was very informative when the gaiter around the gearstick became unstuck the other day. THis revealed that the gearstick is not moving around in a gate as one would expect, but fixed in a plastic ball covered in... notches! You couldn't make it up. Why would you want to actually MAKE the gear change notchy?Is it any wonder I get the bus most of the time?

[Triang]

Don't mention Clios.... my mother in law has had about three of the buggers and the insides seem to give way after 18 months.Nicole - you've got a lot to answer for.

[pogweasel]

Haha. Sounds exactly like the 1.6 03-plate megane i had for a bit. All the power between 4000 & 4100 rpm and none anywhere else. I loved the whacky styling of the car (despite it meaning the boot was tiny and reverse parking was impossible) but everything (and i mean EVERYTHING else about the car was soooo wrong.Sounds to me like you yearn for a bit of 'pub landlord cruiser' in your life. Something with effortless waves of torque.It's a similar sort of deal with my BMW vs. my Focus TD. The focus has all the power at about 3000rpm and is completely out of puff by 4,000 wheras the BMW is like a slug up to 3000 then explodes into life & howls like a banshee all the way to 6500. Leads to some slightly erratic driving......

[r.welfare]

Not all modern cars are shit...I like the way my 7-year old Accord has never needed anything outside of servicing and one set of tyres in 60,000 miles - it frees up the weekends to play with my fleet of Vauxhall tat. Having said that, it's job could probably be done just as ably by a 20-year old BMW 7-series or MB W126.I will say that moderns are a pain in the arse to do any work on - I managed to service my Accord without too much hassle, but trying to remove the oil filter on the missus' Fabia 16v last weekend took 2 hours - the usual quandary of needing the strength of Charles Atlas but wafer-thin fingers. Anything that needs 'special tools' to do standard servicing chores is the work of Beelzebub in my book...maybe that's why Mr Haynes is still to produce a manual for it?

[Guest Noam]

I'm not sure if I yearn for a pub landlord cruiser, I've never thought about it that way. I used to drive diesel vans and got very used to having all the torque at the bottom end. Another example of modern crap-ness: I got a lift in a hire car the other week, a brand-new C-class Merc, the bog-standard model not the sports one. THe ride was incredibly harsh, with every bump audibly broadcast around the passenger cabin, even when stuffed with five adults. I thought Mercs were supposed to be comfortable? You'd expect a harsh ride in a sport car but not an exec saloon. It was nowhere near as refined as the old Vauxhall Carlton my dad used to have (maybe the pub landlord theory is true...)

[r.welfare]

Hah! My brother has been driving a lot of hire cars on business recently - his top cars are the Mundano and Mazda 6, the worst being (unsurprisingly) the Vauxhall Vectra - an on/off clutch, hideous interior and gutless 1.8 engine being the main gripes. Once upon a time, Vauxhall built decent engines...

[reanimation-films]

and to get the car to move you have to drive like a backwards-hatted chav with a Max Power sticker and acne.

 

 

Right apart from the hat.

 

Chav

 

Non chav but loved/hated rap rock star!

 

a clio in the wrong hands

 

My sis has one she's inherited from her boyfriend, seems pretty perky, too perky for her, thats only a 1.2.

[r.welfare]

I know it's resurrection of an old thread, but I have just had to pay out slightly over £1,100 on my wife's 51-plate Fabia 1.4 16v to get it back to A1 mechanical condition.The hall of shame includes:- New starter motor (£130) because the spring had gone inside the old one, letting it grind on startup, and of course you can't dismantle it to replace the simple, duff component;- New lambda sensor (£130) to stop it running lean (but perhaps - finally! - we have solved the problem of the intermittent 'CHECK ENGINE' light);- New discs and pads all round (OK, so 70k out of the original brakes isn't bad - but genuine Skoda discs and pads ain't cheap! About £200 all told);- Full service including incredibly-expensive spark plugs due to their 'change 'em only every 100k miles' nature, plus of course the special 0W30 VAG oil that's apparently required to attain 20k service intervals - I get National Tyres to change it every 5k anyway;- And the real doozy, a new kit of two cambelts and all the tensioners (4 in total) - this was done 10k miles ago by my (once-reliable) local garage who I have been using for 10+ yrs, however the new garage (Skoda specialist) tells me that only one of the belts was changed. WTF? So as you can't get the belt on it's own, another full set goes on for £200 fitted (Gates belts, apparently very good - what say you SL? ).So once you add in the labour and magic vodka-and-tonic, you get to four figures. That would buy you a nice piece of tat (or several)...Having said all of that, it hasn't cost much to run over the last 50k miles and 2 years up to now, is great to drive and has never stranded us, and my wife gets 40p/mile back under her business (Fixed Profit Car Scheme - quite nice given it does about 50mpg) - but either way, the savings take a big hit this month.So - looks like I'm going to hunting eBay for genuine Skoda parts to stockpile, do a lot of the work (aside from complex stuff like cambelts) in future, and look for a new garage closer to home to handle the non-Skoda stuff in the fleet...

[Manbearpig]

Thanks for that, obviously I have just clicked all of your links. Now fuck off.

[Albert Ross]

Holy thread resurrection/spamfest Batman!

[MrDuke]

Srsly though, are bots that clever that they can pick up on existing threads now? Or is there some poor emaciated cretin chained to a desk somewhere in Jhizbuggerstan actually trawling through obscure niche-appeal motoring forums and posting up spam old-school stylee?

[Split_Pin]

He could have at least taken the trouble to spam the Proton thread instead.