Cars to choose - the update

Sitting on my drive right now is a Peugeot 407 saloon for me to thrash to buggery to within an inch of its life for the next 24 hours courtesy of my local Peugeot dealer who has always offered me good service over the past ten years and the six Peugeots during that time that we have purchased/leased for the company.

Which is far more than can be said for all of the other dealers that I have contacted in the last week, I shall update on the situation ...

Mercedes.
The rep contacted me in the same way as he contacts me every year at this time to see if we want to buy a Mercedes Benz - I don't know why he does this or where he got the idea from in the first place, but he does and this year he got his chance to quote me for the new C class Merc.

He was £120 a month above my already generous lease budget, I gasped and told him so, he offered to quote me for the old ladies version of the C class, the C class coupe, under my breath I declared that he must be joking, still I sat and waited for the quote - it was still £30 a month over budget.

Conclusion - Mercedes Benz are so overpriced and so over-rated for what is actually a taxi in any other european country that I'd be ashamed to jump on board their bandwagon.

BMW
Haven't even considered BMW, enough people already think me to be a dickhead without having to advertise the fact to the world - if such a thing were possible they are even more overrated and over-priced than a Merc.

Saab
I contacted them, picked up a brochure, spoke to the business sales rep, he promised to contact me and quote me for my requirements for two cars despite the fact that the inside of their 93 saloon is a bag of crap and looks like its come straight from an episode of Starsky and Hutch.

He did ring me back but he hasn't quoted me yet, I can't even remember why he rang me back, the call was so underwhelming - I don't want one of their 1970's throwback cars anyway.

Audi
After tempting me with some very competitive prices for an Audi A6 in the showroom the business sales rep rang me back to say that he'd quoted me the wrong prices - £64 a month wrong which took him above the budget for a car who's design is at least eight years old, has nothing like a modern spec inside (the satnav is from the ark) and is just plain boring from outside - for sheer fuckwittery this rep has waved goodbye to my business.

Nissan
Ned still wants to consider the Qasqui, we're contacting a dealer tomorrow, I'm not sure, I'll be convinced if they come in £50 under budget.

Which brings us to ...
Ford
I quite like the look of the new Mondeo, so I visited one of the three Ford dealers in Leeds. They had two models in the showroom and judging by the contract hire prices ont he windscreen of one we could afford the top range specification plus the optional satnav - optional ? Who do they think they are, Mercedes Benz ?

That particular dealership sent a young girl across to see me and to explain that their business sales rep was on holiday that week and that no-one else could help me but that she'd get me a brochure and ask him to ring me when he came back to work - she appeared two minutes later to say that they had no brochures - this is the main Ford dealership in Leeds, fourth largest city in the UK by the way.

I returned to my office where I took a phone call from another young lady at the same dealerships slightly smaller branch just on the outskirts of Leeds, she apologised for the main branch not having any brochures but promised that they "had loads" and she'd post one to me, and in competition with their head office she'd also get her business sales rep to ring me next week when he came back from holiday (it must have been a convention for Ford business sales reps).

The next day a large envelope appeared in the post and I eagerly removed a large Ford car brochure - for a Ford Focus, the daft bint is obviously in the wrong trade, she is wasted selling cars, should be working in a shoe shop bringing you shoes that you like and then taking the wrong pair to the till, silly cow - and neither business rep has contacted me yet.

The next day Ned found himself some miles away from Leeds in a delightfull little town called Keighley, home of the BNP and other fuckwits, so he popped into the Ford dealer there and at long last procured a Mondeo brochure and a promise to quote for two.

And today I was passing the third Ford dealership in Leeds, a quite large dealership actually, located right on the edge of one of the motorways heading out of the city - I took the exit ramp and tried to find a way into the place - had to drive around it twice before I spotted the gap in the high security fence - its in a rough district.

Turned into the gate and came to a halt as a guy in a truck was blocking the way waiting for someone else to remove a car from a parking space that two other drivers were threatening to fight each other over - bottom line is that this large Ford dealer has fookall in the way of customer parking because all of their stock has to be parked inside the security fence, which it was, leaving me to park my car outside at the mercy of the toerags who inhabit the nearby slums - I headed off without stopping for more than 30 seconds - thats the third Leeds Ford dealership who won't be getting my business.

Tonight Ned received the quote from the Keighley Ford dealership - its nearly as much as the C series Merc, I think he's joking, I think thats the price for two Mondeo's but Ned says its because the top of the range Mondeo comes with bugger all in the way of toys and if you want stuff like satnav and metallic paint then you have to give blood for them, they can stick their Fords where the sun don't shine.


The shortlist of the Mondeo and the Merc and the Peugeot will be going down to head office for some arm twisting of their own on their regular supplier and we'll see what comes out of the wash, in the meantime I have a Peugeot 407 to break - I've already let Amanda have a go in it after driving the Peugeot 107 for a year, all she could say was "its fast isn't it ?", as indeed it is, compared to the 107, I'll let Suzanne have a go in it next, if she can't break it then no-one can.

Shopping for cars

Every three years Ned and I get to shop for a new company car each.

Three years ago in October we took delivery of two Nissan Primera estate cars, not because they were the most beautiful cars on gods earth, for anyone with more than 10% vision in each eye can see that they are exactly the opposite, if they were a child they'd be the one that gets pushed to the back of the school classroom photograph.

And it wasn't because of their incredible acceleration away from traffic lights, although the twin turbocharged 2.2 litre diesel engine is no slouch until you hit the point around 60mph in third when the carbon emission sensor in the exhaust detects that you are being too dirty and cuts the fuel supply, forcing you to be cleaner to the environment until it decides that you can go fast again - some sort of hippy japanese fuckwit designed that special feature and I have him to thank for the countless numbers of soiled underpants that I now own when the engine fades away as you're overtaking a bus.

No it wasn't for either of these reasons that we contract hired the Nissans, it was because they were cheap.

In fact they were dirt cheap, in fact it is no exageration to state that the total monthly hire cost of two Nissan Primera estates came to the same sum of money that I was paying out for just one of the Peugeot 307's that they replaced - they gave the Nissans away because they couldn't sell the ugly gits.

But in October they go back to the hire farm and Nissan don't do anything similar now, they've replaced the ugly Primera with an even uglier four wheel drive semi-monster truck thing called a Qashqai which I pronounced "Quash-kay" in the Nissan dealership but the haughty salesman pronounced something like "Key-key", fucking stupid name for a car and so I don't want one.

Our friendly local Peugeot dealer has been making overtures to us again and with the budget I have been given by our head office I can get the top model of the 407 range, but I'm finding it rather bland and while all of the toys inside are rather nice, including a big colour monitor, a 40gig music hard drive and a mobile phone built into your dashboard, the outside just screams "company rep" in a choice of bland colours.

So we called in at our local Audi dealer and when he asked which car we were interested in I answered "the A4" because I knew our budget wouldn't stretch to an A6 - how wrong I was, in fact its the A4 that our budget won't stretch to but an A6 falls well within the boundaries and we got quite excited for a while until I'd followed a few on the motorway and realised why they were flogging them off cheap - they look so boring that they are doing a Nissan and getting shut of the last of them as cheaply as possible ready for a new model launch.

I've looked at the Saab 93 - nice small-ish car on the outside, horrible tacky interior that hasn't been redesigned since 1972, I spent some time searching in vain for the eight track tape player that should have been in the dash, the hole was there but time had moved on although the saab interior designer hasn't.

I spent a pleasant half hour in the company of an Irish Mercedes rep at the Leeds dealership looking at the new C series, a nice car, looks nice, feels nice inside, price is not so nice, price is fooking outrageous to contract hire at 25000 miles a year, fooking outrageous.

So we keep coming back to the Peugeot, its insides are top spec, I can't fault its inside specification and the optional hi-fi system that still fits within my budget s far better than the one I have in the house, its just very, very boring on the outside and I'd have to buy a trilby and some driving gloves if I ended up with one of those cars.

Suzanne has always liked Fords.

I've only ever had one Ford and that was the old style Granada Scorpio which was a fantastic car to drive, rather like taking your old leather settee out for a spin on the motorway together with the walnut brandy cabinet, you didn't set off very fast in the Granada for fear of spilling the brandy but it could go fast, eventually.

And so yesterday I called in at the Ford main dealer in Leeds, and was pleasantly suprised by the new Mondeo Titanuim X, and even more suprised by the fact that I can have this top of the range model with the top spec diesel engine with the top spec automatic gearbox with those F1 manual over-ride gear button thingys, and still have loads of change every month from my budget, something must be wrong somewhere because Ford are giving away their new Mondeo and if you are walking past a Ford dealership at any time in the next month or so you will certainly be given one of the overstock of old style Mondeo's even if you give it straight back, because they can't sell the buggers.

So what's it to be.

Test drives arranged in the next couple of weeks and then whichever one is chosen it will be a black one, for I covet a black car.