Stuarted

Name names! If what you say is true, you have nothing to lose by doing so. I have had 4-wheel alignment (on my Mazda MX-5) carried out by Tony Bones at Wheels-in-Motion in Chesham and the service was excellent. The (brand new!) car was miles out of adjustment - correcting the alignment transformed it.

. Er, yes, that was rather the point of my question!

This may not be the correct forum, but: I hear criticisms that some insurance comparison sites are not really impartial, do not cover the full market, and can be distorted by alliances with the insurance companies themselves. Given that, do members here have any advice, comments or reccommendations please? Or have any particularly favourable / unfavourable recent experiences with any of these sites? How do they rate - Compare the Market - Money Supermarket - Quotezone - Confused

Thanks for this! My car is fitted with the original 15" Skoda wheels and, as I said, almost-new 195/65R15 91H Continetal Contiwinter Contact TS850 tyres. The car is better with these than with the previous nonedescript tyres. The new dampers are Bilstein B4 replacements for the original spec. Skoda ones, not stiffer or the B6 uprated ones, and the car feels just the same with these as it did with the original dampers. http://www.motorsportworld.co.uk/frame-detail.asp?PAGE=/bilstein-suspension.htm _ _ _ It would be a pity to have to consider buying something else - the Octavia is spacious, soldily-built, handles OK, seems reliable and has perfectly adequate perfomance. But the harsh, clunky ride on anything but perfectly smooth road surfaces is tiresome and irritating. And I am not impressed by the 42mpg fuel consumption (which improves to only 45mpg even if I drive everywhere with a super-light foot and with the lying built-in computer showing 50mpg+ at the end of every journey). I am disappointed - I had consistently heard such good reports of the Ocatvia estate, and they certainly seem very popular. Is it just me, or is it just this particular car? (And as an additional question for other owners of 4x4 Octavia estates: if you had the money to buy any car you liked to replace it, but had to continue to pay all the running costs yourself, what car would you choose, please? I do NOT want a great ugly SUV; what I like about the 4x4 Octavia estate is that it is what I call a "stealth" 4x4 with a 6' long load bay!)

. Yes? What, please?

Does anyone have any constructive suggestions, please? Having looked at suspension bushes, dampers and tyres, it is difficult to think of anyhting else which might cause the car to ride badly on poor surfaces. Why should my car be particularly bad? Or are they really all like it? Does everyone else think the ride of an Octavia is at least as good as most other modern cars, or are they a bit diappointed by it?

. Have you ot some specific figures, please? What were the terms of the PCP deal, please? What discount (if any) did you get on the price of the car? What is its residual price assumed / predicted to be? What is the second-hand value likey to be for a 42-month-old car? What exactly are your options after 42 months, please?

If you've got the cash to pay for exactly the car you want, outright, are there any circumstances when it is cheaper to buy a car any other way? I can't think of any, especially while there are very few profitable places to invest your savings even using ISAs. But maybe I'm wrong - someone please educate me, preferably with some worked examples! Even if you know that you will probably want to change the car after, say, 3 years, you can simply sell it. I wouldn't imagine that the price you get will be much lower than the value assumed in any PCP or other contract. I can understand why dealers (or banks or other financial institutions) want to flog various finance deals - there's profit in it for them! But that means you're paying more, surely? That profit has to come from somewhere.

I would have thought was PCP was more expensive - just that the expensiveness is diguised.

. What on earth do you think I've done? I am talking about poorly-surfaced roads I travel on very day and have done for 50 years, having covered around half a milliom miles in a wide variety of cars cars ranging from a Ford Focus, a Mazda MX-5, a Jaguar XKR and a BMW 330D to a Reliant Scimitar GTE, a Citroen BX, a Morris Minor and a Triumph TR3 - among many others. (As a matter of interest, the most comfortable of all was a Renault 16, followed closely by a Citroen BX and a Jaguar XKR. Better than a Rolls.Royce or any limousine I have travelled in!) For a modern car, the ride in my Octavia on poor roads is bad. It jars, jolts. clunks and thumps worse than almost any other car I've driven. We're not talking about hitting massive potholes at high speed - we're talking about driving at normal traffic speeds on poorly surfaced roads. And it doesn't get any better at low speeds - if anything, it feels worse. Yet the car is fine on motorways or any other smoothly surfaced road. _ _ _ I'm not sure about what you mean by "having spent all that money". All what money?

If, however, you plan to keep the car a long time (say 10 years or 100,000 miles) and it is a private purchase, there can be arguments for buying new: (1) there is a much greater time over which to amortise the cost (2) all the time you have the car, you have exactly the car you want - you won't spend 10 years or so wiishing that it was a different colour and that you had (say) a heated windscreen and split-folding rear seats. I have only bought new cars twice and am still enjoying the fact that both are exactly to the spec I wanted - one 39 years and 250,000 miles ago (Reliant Scimitar GTE) and one 7 years and 65,000 miles ago (Mazda MX-5 coupe). I have never understood how anyone can justify buy a new car every couple of years. Presumably the economics of this are distorted by business accounting practices and taxation in some way.

. Notwithstanding what the manual says, the best tyres should go on the back. However, this does not mean that the rear tyres must be better than the front ones (what about a new car!) but simply that the rears should not be significantly worse than the front, to minimise the risk of the car spinning if the rear end should let go first. You can ensure that the rears are never significantly worse than the fronts by rotating your tyres front-to-rear frequently, so that they wear evenly and you can then replace all four at the same time as a matching set. If, however, you have a front-wheel-drive car and you intend to replace your tyres with the same type again, an alternative policy is to wait until the fronts need replacing, than fit a new pair to the rear and move the part-worn rear tyres to the front. This way all the tyres get moved around eventually (so that none of them deteriorate just due to old age) and you always have better tyres on the rear. This is an option which you don't have with a rear-wheel-drive car, where the only really good policy is to rotate front-to-rear regularly and then replace all four as a matching set.

. Me likewise. No problem whatever, and I live out in the sticks. I wonder why some people have a problem? Why should some cars' lights deteriorate, and not others?

. Yay! Imagine that stuffed into an unbadged 3-series - especially an anonymous-looking touring version ...

. That's quite a bit - about half the tread, so equivalent to trying to match a new tyre with a half-worn one, or a half-worn one with one at the end of its usable life (i.e., down to about 3mm. Wouldn't want to drive a powrful car like that with any less than 3mm of tread!) Makes a good case for buying 5 and rotating them all - wouldn't cost any more, overall, and you then have one matching spare. _ _ _ I like comfort and would want the smallest rims and highest profile tyres I could safely fit. I'm not into big bling wheels and low-profile tyres, which actually don't get you round the corders any faster - just ruin the ride comfort and cost a fortune for the ultra-low-profile tyres. I have doubts about the comfort of runflats, too - I would consider having a spare set of winter wheels with non-runflat tyres, probably Comtinental TS850s, and maybe even replacing the original summer tyres with non-runflats when they eventually needed renewing. I'b be happy to carry a spare wheel in the back if needed, although Holts repair gunge will cope with many simple punctures.

Just as an aside, really, but: I see that the BMW 5-series is available with most of the 3-series engines but in each case of course is slightly slower because of the extra body weight and size. However you can also get a 5-series with a 350d engine - still a 3-ltire, 6 cylinder turbo diesel but even more powerful - about the same compared to a 335d engine as the 335d is compared to a 330d. A 350d engine stuffed into a 3-series would be real fun! But probably impossible due to incompatible engine-management electronics. A fascinating pipe-dream though!

Exactly like my Octavia 4x4 - or a Scout.

You mean, you have to go slower in an Octavia than you would in any other car? That doesn'r say much for the design of an Octavia's supension, does it? My MkIII Mazda MX-5 has firm suspension- it's a sports car, for goodness sake - but even that does not crash over potholes like my Octavia.

Good comment - thanks. Luckily I do not need an especially large luggage volume, just a long-enough-to-sleep-in (6') load bay. I would not have thought the xDrive transmission would make any difference. The BMW is a rear-wheel-drive car with a prop shaft, rear diff and rear drive shafts anyway, even without the xDrive.

Possibly thinking of buying one of these at some stage in the future - maybe. Never previously ever considered buying a BMW, mainly because I don't really want to be regarded as a BMW driver (I'd have to forget how to use my indicators for a start, and also have to get used to always having the right of way in any traffic situation). However I am looking for an economical, comfortable estate car with a 6' load bay (long enough to sleep in or carry a touring bicycle [which has mudguards and a rack] easily, and preferably with 4WD: not for cross-country expeditions, but just to avoid getting stuck on a wet grassy airfield or on muddy country roadsides or in muddy gateways. My Skoda Ocatava 4WD estate is solid enough but clunks and bangs on potholes and poor roads (see my other post) and is much less ecomomical than the 2WD version. What attracts me about the BMW is the recent availablity in the UK of their xDrive (4WD) option. And the 335d seems, on paper, to be amazing: 0-60 in well under 5 seconds - as quick as an XKR Jaguar and quicker than most Aston Martins yet is a full 4/5 seat estate car which does 50 mpg (on paper - so probably about 40mpg in reality). OK so this is no more economical than my Octavia, but you get vastly more performance for your money! It's also a lot more expensive, but I can put up with that if I'm getting my money'sworth. Lesser 3-series BMWs are cheaper, but much slower for not a lot less fuel consumption or purchase price. Does anyone have any experience of BMW 3-series, or of the xDrive system, or of their adaptive suspension option please?

I have an 07 reg 2.0 litre diesel Octavia 4x4 estate (not a Scout) with 110,000 miles on the clock. It is fine on good roads, but I find the ride quality poor on bad roads - it seems to crash and thump badly on potholes etc. It has almost new 195/65R1591H Continental Contiwinter Contact TS850 tyres all round (which are much better than the nondescript previous tyres) and these are at the recommended pressures. I have even had all four Bilstein dampers replaced, together with any worn suspension bushes and drop links. Yet the ride on rough, potholed roads is still poor - nowhere near as good as even a modest car like a friend's largely-neglected 100,000-mile Ford Focus. However mechanics who are familiar with Octavias say that there is nothing wrong or unusual about the way my car rides. I note that in a recent comparative road test of the newer Octavia compared with other similar cars, there was a passing reference to the low-speed ride of the Octavia, saying that on poor surfaces it was not as good as that of other similar cars. Is this what other owners find, please? If this is what they are all like, I might start looking at alternatives ...

. Why is it garbage? As other have said, this is a choice which many owners face when changing their car. What may be garbage is comparing totally different types of car, even if they are both new (or both second-hand). There is not much point in comparing a little 2-seat open sports car with an estate car, for instance. You buy the first for fun and the second for practcality.

Lots of useful comments here on cleaning - thank you! Being lazy (cleaning a car is tedious) I use a hose brush, which is not good on modern, rather soft paint - it leaves a lot of micro-scratches. I'd buy a jet washer if I were convinced that that would enable me to clean my car quickly and easily without also having to go round it with a brush / rag / mop / sponge / mitt / leaher as well. As for colour: this may upset some people (and is of course always a matter of personal opinion) but I always find that white cars look as naff Essex girls in white shoes or blokes wearing white socks with shoes and jeans / trousers. Almost any colour is better than black or white for keeping clean. Silver is easy but not a very conspicuous / safe colour. Yellow is the safest (according to official statistics, and why contractors' plant is yellow and why 40 years ago I chose yellow for my Reliant Scimitar GTE which still looks good). Red is close to yellow for conspicuity, and both are reasonable to keep clean. If it is a sports car (like my MX-5) then, of course, being red makes it go faster. Red sports cars always go faster, handle better and have better-looking passengers. Well-known absolutely proven scientific fact. If I were to buy a new estate car as my "sensible" car, not sure if I'd go for grey (looks smart, doesn't show the dirt) or red (more conspicuous and therefore safer, but might clash with my red sports car or - if it matched - look as though I had some stupid "team colour"). Unfortunately Skoda don't offer 4WD diesel Octavia estates in yellow.

In my non-Scout 2.0 litre diesel 4x4 estate I get between 40 and 42 mpg overall, measured properly (from fill-to-fill). The on-board computer gives a far more optimistic figure. I have learned to ignore it.

How well was the tracking done? I know of a reputable garage with experienced mechanics and with all the right equipment, but who still didn't do a very good job of it., and the customer subsequently suffered bad tyre wear. Did you get a computer print-out of all the settings, before and after the adjustment? If not, then possibly all they did was the basic (and crucial) check on the toe-in. A proper alignment check is far more than that and really needs a skilled, experienced and dedicated technician with all the right kit.