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X5 would get my vote, owned two a 3.0d se 7 seater and a 35d M sport and kept each for a year and made money on both. They are superb cars, look for one that hasn’t had to many owners and with good history and invoices for work if possible. The 3.0d is a lovely engine, I took the wife and kids down to the south of France the year before last with no complaints at all. The 35d is a twin turbo and does go so well, once driven it’s hard to go back to the 3.0d I bought both from auction with problems, se looked sorry for itself, needed two rear airbags and air compressor, and as MarkTVS said the bags are cheap and readily available. The 35d was a 2 owner car with full history but had a multitude of random warning lights on start up so came really cheap. As soon as I looked thought the invoices and found one from a garage who 6 months ago fitted a Lion battery, I changed the battery for a decent make and bingo problems fixed!! I still regret selling that car!! Apart from servicing the only thing one needed was a sat nav drive which I bought from BMW and wasn’t that expensive and was easy to install and didn’t even need coding.

Of course there is. Last few months I've met quite a few bright-eyed wet behind the ears laddies telling me how great business is going. I just nod and smile. There's a hard economic winter coming for sure. I'm praying they get a Brexit deal done. A no-deal Brexit with tariffs and a falling pound on top of Covid will just about totally f'ck this country. No need for car dealers if half the population are out of work and can barely afford a pair of shoes!

I’m worried you could be right and this is why I refuse to buy overpriced stock at the block at the min. I don’t want to end up in negative equity with a load of stock I can’t shift that I’ve paid to much for. It’s all about playing the game at the min I think, I picked up a load of bargains just after the first lockdown ended and managed to shift most of them for top money when the demand shot up. Still got enough left to tie me over for now.

Ok I’m going to go against the grain here, I always buy this type of stuff, personally I wouldn’t buy a pre facelift Range Rover sport though as they are very dated looking now in my opinion. If you do buy a Range Rover make sure it is the 3.6 TDV8 as it’s a brilliant engine, not had many issues other than boost pipes cracking etc. They can be expensive to maintain but I love the driving position and comfort so I don’t mind it. If you do manage to stretch to a facelift try get a Bali blue one, it’s a rare colour and brilliant for resale point of view X5’s are also good, I would avoid higher mileage x35 d’s though as have had bottom end trouble with a few. Common for rear airbag issues but only £40 per airbag to replace. I would only buy an M sport model aswell and the 7 seaters seem to be the best sellers for resale For all out reliability it has to be a Mercedes ML or Volvo XC90, Volvos are best on fuel but a bit underpowered and old manish. if you get a late 2011 Mercedes ML grand edition they look fairly fresh, have the nice piped leather inside and aside from eating abs sensors for fun I would say they are the most reliable of the bunch.

Sub £10000 I would agree Rav4/Sportage/CRV/XC60 all good and reliable. If you want the height then an S-Max/ Galaxy etc offer better value, mpg etc. They will have a more useful boot space and, if you need 3 child seats in the rear, offer individual seats which move independently. After all they are designed as kid carriers, unlike the Chelsea tractors. Top tip. If you feel you have enough kids and don't want a vasectomy then buy her a Zafira. Because if you do you won't be getting any "sexy time" again!!

Cheers and agreed Ahhhh, yes I agree, but on the current crop of vehicles more and more their is no viable alternative, so i will charge what I like, and it's my way or highway ............... At least I can do my own stuff, I hate anything other than what I affectinately call "vehicular self sufficiency", in other words whatever happens to one of my personal or sales cars, I can sort it out in my own workshop What I really need is someone who want's to do the same as me but on a much bigger scale, so they invest in a huge repair facility and take on staff to do the menial shit, perhaps in a larger target area, and row out all the yee ha's ................. In an ideal world lol

Thank you for your kind words. Best advice I can give anyone is learn how a Cars CAN Bus(es work) and learn WHY one module talks with another. I personally wouldn't bother with the Motor Trade now, the business to be in is IT , trouble is this, Cars use Computers BUT ........................ We had a lad who was brilliant with computers, micro electronics, binary, hexadecimal, programming etc, he wanted to apply this to Cars, because he loved Cars ...................... Problem was he did not know how an Engine, Gearbox, ABS / ESP etc etc actually worked mechanically. Whoever comes along these days need to understand and be fluent in BOTH. Most who can do this are older gits like me, who grew up with Carbs, Points and Condenser, spent all their life in this trade and also moved with the times, and are still moving with them. And on that note, the reason I am AWOL right now is because I am now training myself to do EEPROMMING here in house, have just bought a load of SMD kit, tools, programming hardware and software, and have so far sucessfully cloned a Mercedes V8 ECU to allow "Drive Auth" on a V6 Car .................... Yeah, my SLK R170. Nothing got bricked, V6 ECU put back on Car, Car running fine, and I now have a V8 ECU to plug and play when I fit the V8 over the winter. This all came about after talking to a guy who I regard highly in the EEPROMMING game, and have used for standard module cloning etc, but he didn't have a clue what I wanted him to do when we spoke. The thing is this, you can't just Virgin a V8 ECU, or Clone the V6 one, because either way, it won't work, if you clone it with the Cars ECU will then have V6 Programming, wrong firing order, wrong fuelling etc etc, and if you just alter the V8 ECU Immo, it will not work with things like the V6 Cars ESP, Auto Box, Electric Fans etc etc ...................... So you also need to be very selective about which lines of Code in which of the 3 main files you alter, and that takes some real skills. So, that's why I'm AWOL, no time for forums at the minute, customer work, sales and this self teaching project. I'm enjoying and doing very well with it at this stage, in actual fact I don't know why I didn't get into this years ago !! Cheers