Brainstorming cars...

We've had a brainstorming session tonight, me and my brother.

We've got a car in the business which, I believe, is called a lemon in the car trade - a car that spends more time at the dealers repair shop than it does on the road.

Its a Peugeot 307SW, a sort of smallish 7 seat MPV, looks nice, its got a glass roof and other gubbins, but its fooked.

I got it for a family holiday to France in 2003 then gave it to one of my engineers to use, he's done 90,000 miles in it since and two weeks ago it had the latest of its nervous breakdowns on the M62. Our garage has replaced its deisel additive injection thingy and got it going again but now the turbo charger has packed up and it won't do more than 3500 revs, in short its going to cost us another £1000 for a new turbo to get it back on the road.

We'd dump it somewhere if it wasn't for the fact that we still owe £4000 on it, we'd trade it in if it wasn't for the fact that no dealer will offer us any more than a balloon and a goldfish for it, I actually had a private buyer interested in giving us £4000 for it but I just can't sell it to him if he cant drive it round the block without wondering why its got all the pulling power of an old lady pushing a zimmer frame, in a treacle pit.

So we're stuck with it and my new idea tonight would be to park it up at one of our houses and forget all about it and lease the engineer another car, then maybe sometime in the future when we have a spare £1000 lying around, get the turbo fixed and flog the bastard.

Sounds good, my brother agreed, and if it works slowly on the roads then maybe my brothers wife could use it too, sounds good.

And the more we thought about it it got to be a better idea, and then I hit the jackpot - we have an old Dyson vacumn cleaner in the workshop that doesn't work very well but it still whizzes the dust and fluff around in its plastic tub thing a treat, its turbo works just fine.

So maybe, just maybe, we could take the turbo thingy off the Dyson and fit it somehow under the bonnet of the Peugeot, that wouldn't cost us anything, OK we'd probably have to cut a hole in the bonnet to fit the purple Dyson turbo to the engine, but I reckon it would work.

There is a problem though.

Suppose the Dyson turbo starts to pick up all the dust and fluff off the road, as is its habit, and whizz them around and around inside the car while Jon our engineer is driving it, making a loud sucking buzzing noise at the same time - it wouldn't present a very good image for our company when our engineer turns up at customers in a car that whines as loud as a vacumn cleaner and that has a cyclone of road kill whizzing around inside it, would it ?

Time for a slight rethink.