MattDB

Newbie here but been reading posts for a while. My Peugeot 307 has just given up and I've got my heart set on a Skoda Octavia estate. I'm on a fairly modest budget although there are loads of cars around -generally in smaller garages - within my price range. Typically they seem to be with 80K on an upwards and anything from 5-15 years old (newer cars in my range often have much higher mileages ~ 135k). I drove a 2012 car today with 90k on it and records of a good service history, but I could feel the clutch juddering so assume it would be replaced soon. This has made me think, is every car I look at with these sorts of miles on going to be a bit of a timebomb in terms of some major components giving up e.g. clutch, injectors, dpf... i.e. is it unreasonable to expect to buy a car with this number of miles and it be good to go? The engine I'm particularly interested in is the 1.6 diesel although open to the petrol ones too. I've previously ously bought a couple of (non Skoda) cars at 200k quite naively but with very few problems but those were very cheap cars that I took a punt on. Any advice much appreciated.