New Cars

Its that time of year again, new car time.

We have four cars in the business and one of them is a right pain in the arse.

Its a Peugeot 307SW and its a money pit, if anyone is considering buying a three year old Peugeot 307SW HDi then either buy the one I've got for sale at £5000, or don't buy one at all, avoid them at all costs.

Three years ago Peugeot made an almighty cockup when sourcing the fuel tanks for their 307SW's, they picked a fuel tank that deisel fuel can rot, so after two years or so the inside of your fuel tank resembles an old crumbly dried out christmas cake with extremely delicate powdery icing - or something similar if you canthink of another thing that is crumbling to bits.

The stuff inside your fuel tank then gets sucked down the fuel pipes and fucks up the fuel filter, the fuel pump and then the cylinder injectors - its repairable under warranty and we had the whole fuel delivery system replaced last year on ours. The we found out the there is a suspension problem at around 70K miles, we've just had our suspension problem fixed on ours too.

So we're not enchanted by the car and its time to gte rid and the only people who will give us a decent trade-in given its reputation for design faults is the Peugeot dealer that supplied it to us, so I'm looking at replacing it with a Peugeot 407, despite promising that I'd never buy another Peugeot.

And while I was in the showroom I saw the new Peugeot 107, its the sort of car that only young people should drive, young people like Amanda our 17 year old daughter would qualify for instance, so I took her down to the dealership to show her the funky yellow one in the showroom. She loved it and refused to leave the showroom without it, that very one.

She's currently waiting to take her driving test for the second time and was going to share Suzannes car if and when she passes, but we're now seriously considering buying her the 107 instead, well not so much buying it for her but stopping her allowance and paying the finance off with that instead, her monthly allowance actually more than covers the repayments on the ridiculously cheap deal that our local dealer has going - £99 deposit and £110 a month, and now that she has found work in a bar three nights a week she has more disposable income than I have - time to make her understand that the real world does not permit disposable income, you must be in debt in real life and now is a good place for her to start learning.

Now when we drive past the Peugeot dealer (like nearly every day) she makes me slow down so that we can see the yellow 107 in the showroom properly and gaze at it lovingly, I picked her up from her bar job this morning at 1.10am and we had to slow down outside the Peugeot dealer to gaze lovingly at the 107 in the middle of the night.

She retakes her driving test on May 12th and I think we'll sign up for the car for delivery around then, daughters are for spoiling and ours get spoiled, maybe we're not doing them any favours but my dad bought me my first car (not a new one mind) when I passed my test so its just going around again.

I just hope they've fitted a decent fuel tank to it.