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Any recommendations for a used car? - ADotD
My lease is coming to an end soon and need to look for a bit of a runaround for awhile as I’m currently in the middle of a house purchase!

Can anyone recommend some good reliable used cars? Ideally budget wouldn’t exceed 5k (the lower the better!)
Also anything I should keep an eye out for if I’m buying a used car? (I’ve only leased for the last 5 years and haven’t actually purchased a car since I’ve been driving!) a
Looking for Anything that suits a young family!

I’m based in London if that helps!

Any recommendations for a used car? - badbusdriver

Plenty, but you really need to judge on condition. A neglected example of a car generally regarded as being reliable could be more of a liability than a well looked after example of a car generally considered not that reliable!.

As a general rule, stick to a n/a (non turbo) petrol and manual gearbox. Think Japanese and Korean manufacturers (Toyota, Honda, Mazda, Hyundai, Kia) with a couple of exceptions for some Fords (1.25, 1.4, 1.6, 1.8 and 2.0 petrols spread over Fiesta, Focus, C Max and Mondeo), some Vauxhalls (1.2, 1.4 and 1.6 petrols spread over Corsa, Astra, Meriva and Zafira). I didn't mention Nissan amongst Japanese makes because most of them are Renault's underneath. That doesn't mean they are all unreliable but going by reliability surveys, they aren't the best. A worthy exception though is the Nissan Note, first generation cars (up to 2012) are very reliable, second gen cars are fine as long as you stick to the lower powered 1.2 petrol (the higher powered one is badged 'DIG-S')

Any recommendations for a used car? - Adampr

Can you extend your lease? Given used prices at the moment, that might make sense.

Otherwise, it depends how far you want to get into it. You could have lots of fun shortlisting, visiting private buyers, test driving etc or you could go up to Car Giant and buy the Nissan Note they've got for £5.5k and be done with it.

Any recommendations for a used car? - Andrew-T

I wonder if anyone in the 'backroom' can suggest a way of catching the requests for 'What reliable car should I buy for ... ' (etc) that appear every few weeks and are dutifully answered by SLO, BBD and the mods ? The answers are usually pretty much the same, and I don't suppose they change very often. Those asking seem reluctant (or unaware) to look for posts from others in a similar position - and there seem to be quite a few :-)

Any recommendations for a used car? - Adampr

There is a car chooser on the homepage, but it's somewhat limited. I don't think you can replace individual thoughts and experience. The answers given are always the same because a lot of people only quote budget, and sometimes size. That will always default advice to something reliable and reasonable value. I think the key to it being a more interesting question is for people to give some detail on what they actually want. A few have done that, and got a much wider variety of answers.

Any recommendations for a used car? - badbusdriver

I wonder if anyone in the 'backroom' can suggest a way of catching the requests for 'What reliable car should I buy for ... ' (etc) that appear every few weeks and are dutifully answered by SLO, BBD and the mods ? The answers are usually pretty much the same, and I don't suppose they change very often. Those asking seem reluctant (or unaware) to look for posts from others in a similar position - and there seem to be quite a few :-)

I remember not too long after joining the forum asking SLO if he ever wished he had some kind of pre-set response to a query like this. Where with just one click he could put the same answer in place!.

I had been watching The IT Crowd and was thinking about Chris O Dowd's character (Roy) having a pre-recorded message for when anyone from 'upstairs' phoned. The message kicked in, "Have you tried turning it off and back on again?" :-)

Any recommendations for a used car? - Xileno

I've always found the Search facility a bit 'hit and miss' regarding what it returns. One possibility might be a Sticky thread but there are some disadvantages - off the top of my head:

The stickies have historically been used for announcements. Also about a year ago I pruned them and merged them as some members commented there were too many and it was a bit of a problem on their smartphones. I wouldn't know, I only browse the site on my laptop.

Stickies are read-only and members have opposing experiences which is good but read-only doesn't allow for discussion that.

We need to be sure any recommendations are the suggestions/opinions of the member(s), not some kind of HJ endorsement.

I'm not sure many look at the sticky threads judging by the low view rate.

A possible solution is we could start to keep a list of useful links to these threads in the private mod forum, then they can be copied over to the public thread as appropriate. That's the best I can think of.