Jamie Edmonds

The drivetrain is all Merc SLK stuff, but the interior tends not to wear miles as well as its German cousin. Chrylser dealers in the UK are starting to disappear now as the franchise has been pulled so they aren't going to get any easier to move either. What would we buy any car offer the customer for it? Might be worth a punt if it closes the deal for you.

@jimreidvehicle and @umesh I'm glad you like Spec Chek - it was a product I developed and launched when I was at HPI so it's nice to see positive comments about it from users. @Steve92 If there are things you think aren't right then click on the 'report a problem' link and they will be investigated and fixed. If we sort a problem out it fixes it for all cars with that option so we really appreciate the feedback. Regarding the difference between the check providers, in most cases you get the same data from them all, however there are some differences. Private plates are tricky and the companies are not always in sync depending on the amount of manual processing and work they do behind the scenes. The other big thing is warranty, hopefully most customers will never need to use it but do check the small print - some companies will refuse to pay out if the finance co hadn't updated their records leaving you liable for the bill even thought he car showed as clear when checked.

Vehicle ID check is literally a plate lookup without checking for finance, total loss etc but useful if you want to just do a valuation or spec check. I'm not sure why it's greyed out but Glass's isn't, it might be worth a call to the customer services team to ask if they can 'un-grey' it for you.

You can do a CAP valuation with an HPI vehicle ID check rather than having to do the full finance/write off etc check. Just select 'HPI Vehicle ID' from the drop-down where it normally says 'HPI Check' then tick the boxes below for the data you need. A vehicle ID is a few pence so much cheaper than the full check if you're re-valuing a stock vehicle or similar.

As a private seller this is even worse - last time I sold a car in the UK it was the cheapest in the country for spec, age and miles and sold in two days but I still got 18 calls and texts from people offering 50% of the asking price. I strongly believe this is what has driven the growth of the likes of WBAC - dealing with these types of idiots takes so much time and energy it isn't worth the hassle. Don't confuse them with genuine buyers, most are just trying their luck and will only respond if you accept a stupid offer which would allow them to run the car for six months and sell it for a profit after that.

To a lot of people a two seat diesel roadster was a bit of a crazy idea in the first place, but with fuel prices and road tax as the main determining factor (as well as company car tax) they still managed to find homes. Now fuel is a lot cheaper, petrol CO2 emissions and economy figures are improving, and we've had 'dieselgate' is the market experiencing a major shift away from this kind of vehicle? Will diesel 'sports cars' become as undesirable as a petrol powered Peugeot 407 or VW Passat was ten years ago?

Is it just the wrong spec? Are buyers expecting to have built in nav? I was surprised to see a standard stereo there, personally I'd lose that pic and if the lack of nav is an issue you can at least try and convince them face to face why it's a waste of time and they're better off without it. (Having said that, most of the ones on AT don't have nav either so maybe I'm talking rubbish)

Here speaks a man who has bought a Ford with a non-opening bonnet without realising....

Steve, are they good or bad in your opinion? I love adaptive cruise as it makes motorway traffic jams so much easier. The best feature I've ever had on a car is electric memory seats I think. I share the car with my wife who is 10" shorter than me and this is so much easier than having to adjust the seat every time I need to go somewhere. Stuff I hate - stop/start on automatics, I'm yet to drive one which managed to re-start the engine before I had pressed the accelerator and expected it to move away. I'm also not a big fan of touch screen controls for everything, especially when things like the heated seats are buried in a sub-menu. I can remember where a button is, and hit it without looking when on the move but with a touch screen I have to take my eyes off the road to find it and that's a step backwards. However, by far and away the number one hate I have (and I admit this might be slightly personal to me...) is the wretched Hyundais which don't let you pair a phone with the Bluetooth while moving. Why can my wife in the passenger seat not do that while I'm crawling out of Heathrow airport?! What a daft idea!

Yeah, must be, it's £600 below CAP Retail! Can't help but think there's something missing though...

A very good point! I've been away from garages for a few years now, and I guess these are all into 'worthless bangers' territory but the really bad ones were Renault Laguna 2, Megane 2 and Scenic 2 - all had catastrophic faults baked in all over the place with clutches, DMFs, ECUs, general electrical stuff, handsfree key cards, EGR valves, body control units and handbrake mechanisms depending on which engine you had the misfortune to be dealing with at the time. Then there are the headlight/sidelight bulbs on the Megane... The fact that window regulators and ignition coils were basically a consumable item was a mere sideshow when compared with the impending mechanical doom likely to be round the corner. A colleague ignored all the advice and bought a top spec Laguna 1.9dCi as it was a grand cheaper than a Mondeo. Within six months it ate that in repairs and in not much over a year it needed a body control unit, ECU, clutch, flywheel, EGR (twice, I think) and other sundry bits. The alloy wheels were also made of cheese and buckled if you looked at them in the right way. I'd also like to preemptively nominate any of the PSA 'Hybrid4' models for this category in the future. Most of them will have covered plenty of miles, they're hugely complex, have the 2.0 HDi engine and an automated manual single clutch gearbox and frankly I just wouldn't trust one.

The Grand Picasso is a real shame, they're brilliant family cars, and the cockpit makes you feel like you're driving something which is actually interesting - a feat which most MPVs can't manage. We had a one year old model and even that had issues with the stupid electric parking brake (don't get me started on which moron put the handbrake button on top of the dash so you have to lean forward to reach it...) Do you guys generally avoid particular vehicles as a whole or is it more down to the engine and gearbox combination? I guess with the Picasso the 1.6 HDi is the only one which sells, so even if the 1.6 petrol was more reliable it would be hard to find a buyer for.

I agree entirely with the above diagnosis, however it is possible that one pack was failed and two were showing issues when tested so the garage recommended they were replaced too - this is normal for a garage as the coil packs are pretty much consumable items. A cheap coil pack on these engines is a false economy, often they don't work properly in the first place and they are likely to fail within months in any case. We tested several different sources for VAG coil packs and only the OEM supplier made ones actually lasted any reasonable length of time, the cheap ones flew back under warranty at an alarming rate. In summary, I don't think the garage has done anything wrong, the driver can't possibly have put diesel in the car as the pump won't physically fit in the filler neck. It's just one of those things which can happen I guess.

MG ZS? At a place I used to work we managed our own fleet - disposals and refurbs etc. A sales guy's Mondeo came back and it looked like he'd put a wood-chipper in the boot before feeding three quarters of a forest into it, It took the valeter five hours to get the bits of wood and leaves out of the boot, the back seats were full of dog hair and various bits of trim were cracked and scratched. Goodness only knows how he trashed it so badly in four years, it would have passed for a 12 year old farm hack.

Hi Dave, I guess by 'Hybrids' you're talking 95% about the Prius as that's what the workshops will be seeing. I recall a little while ago Scott Brownlee from Toyota saying the Prius has the lowest warranty claim rate of any car they sell so I'm not surprised people aren't seeing many. From my days in the parts industry I remember the engine oil being very specific to the vehicle, a 0W20 or something else strange. The procedures for battery disconnect and reconnect are now available through companies like CarweB but you have to be very careful when working on the high voltage electrical systems. For a well equipped and competent workshop they shouldn't be worried about working on them, but it's often the unfamiliarity and fear that results in garages turning them away or sub-contracting the work.

They seem to sell a lot of cars through there, so I guess they work on the basis that most will be fine and if they get the odd issue the extra profit they make over putting everything through the auction will cover the costs they incur.

As above, they sell a lot of trade in stuff on eBay to anyone who wants to buy it, not just trade. I nearly bought a Lexus RX300 from them a while back but it went for too much as it was late November and snowing at the time...

Vauxhall have put out a press release explaining that the cause of the issues has been confirmed as ' improper repair of the thermal fuse of the resistor in the heating and ventilation system, undertaken outside of Vauxhall’s authorised service and maintenance processes and schedule.' However, they have been told to 'upgrade' the campaign to a safety recall and will replace the resistors FoC. There is an interesting line at the end of the release though: 'As a matter of extra caution, we will also install additional water protection below the windscreen scuttle panel to minimise any opportunities for water ingress following improper refitting after removal.' I guess this is the root-cause of the resistor failures in the first place?

They're both popular on Motability which is why there are so many lower mileage ones around. On the 2WD vs 4WD thing, (and utterly unrelated to the original post) Nissan have stopped offering a 4WD automatic with the new Qashqai, which has lost them two sales just from people in my office. I guess this shows that the vast majority of buyers will take better economy and a lower price (and tax) rather than all wheel drive, and that the Swiss market isn't hugely important to Nissan's product planners!

That's what a friend of mine did a few years back when he was selling his F355 - it went to a specialist dealer on sale-or-return, the dealer appeared to be sitting on £ millions of stock but didn't actually have a stake in any of it.

Wow, 11 former keepers, last keeper since June 2015 and now in an auction - that'll ring some alarm bells for most I'd say... If you're a gambling man the other car in that sale is a Gallardo showing as having a colour change in May, current keeper since June and a lot of bad paint and 3 keepers since it was registered in the UK in March 2014. I think I'd be inclined to pass on both of them personally! Both scream uninsured or TPO accident damage to me, badly repaired and thrown through the auction to get rid with no comeback.

As someone who has spent a reasonable amount of time driving both I'd take a Transit any day, but a VW Transporter over either of them. I never got on with the seats or the gearbox of the Sprinters but could happily spend all day in the facelift model Transit (with dash mounted gearlever) and not complain. In terms of reliability, based on my sample-of-one we have a 2004 Transit with 235k on the clock and it still works, even after 8 years and 60k miles of general neglect for months on end, followed by a heavily loaded 800 mile round trip (rinse and repeat for the whole time we've had it).

The DMF is a big thing with these, I worked for a parts supplier and our overall starter motor warranty return rate spiked noticeably (across all partnos sold nationwide) and analysis showed it was entirely down to Transit DMF failures filling the starter with swarf. Any starter replacement on one of these should be viewed with suspicion unless the DMF was done at the same time as in the majority of cases the starter should last longer than the flywheel. Look out for rot in the sills too, it's not hard to fix but looks scruffy post-repair. They can also leak from the seam to the rear of the roof as it isn't sealed from the factory so if it's damp inside that's probably the cause and can be fixed with a bit of seam sealer (or bathroom silicone if you're a bit of a pikey). It looks really tidy though, most of them look really dog-eared at that age.

There's a dealer down the road from me here in Switzerland who seems to sit on stock forever. I moved to my current apartment in April 2014, and they had this car then. It's still there, so 17 months and counting! http://www.autoscout24.ch/de/d/renault-wind-kleinwagen-2011-occasion?vehid=2292253 It's a long way from what I'd call 'desirable' and not typical Volvo dealer stock, but I'd expect them to have just got rid by now! Chatting to the salesman there back in October he said all the stock is owned outright, 100+ cars and the site is freehold too, the amount of capital there makes my eyes water Here it is on Google Street View, a mere 11 months ago

As a buyer I find the attitudes of different dealerships really interesting when it comes to test drives. I've ordered new cars without driving them but personally I'd never buy a used car without a decent drive to check it out properly. Buying my last car I'd made an appointment to look at it and within 10 minutes of arriving the dealer had put the trade plates on given me the keys and sent us out for a drive. After five minutes we had already decided to buy the car and without the test drive I can imagine I'd have allowed rational things like fuel consumption, boot space and the sheer cost of buying it to help persuade me to change my mind. I have a (probably incorrect) perception that if a dealer makes it difficult for me to test drive a car then it has something to hide and I should look elsewhere. The times when I have been able to test drive the car properly I've bought it more often than not, unless there was something catastrophic about the car (the £600 Almera which dropped down to three cylinders when going up hill, the Citroen C2 VTR which had the atrocious semi-auto gearbox, the VW Bora which had no clutch so couldn't get off the forecourt ramp...) so I really do believe that test drives sell cars. What I do understand though, is if you're a one-man-band and have to lock everything up to go on a test drive then it's a massive pain, however I still want to drive the car before I buy it so that's where the qualification needs to come in.