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Yup, MoT AE here and I've failed plenty of these sheds on terminal tinworm. Some of the small fords are real rotters, Ka, Fiesta, Puma. Not worth repairing a P reg.
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My only surprise here is a P reg Ford KA had not already rusted away.
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Your friend bought a 14 year old car and complains when she only gets ten months out of it?
Luck of the draw. Scrap it and move on to the next one.
I assume she didn't pay too much for it -- more than £400 and there's your lesson for next time!
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you wont buy a ka with 10 months mot for £450
the owner will have paid at least £695 to £995 for it
and yes they can rust out in 10 months
lesson is not to buy a ka under at least a y reg minimum and thats pushing it as before this most of them have had sills,you might not notice as a novice but trust me on this one they will have and just think of the rot behind that shiny piece of rotting metal that wasnt even dipped before fitted
ka =ka no
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Oh I am aware of that BB -- it was a leading question.
Paying more than £400 for any car of this age is a bad idea. Buying one with a rotbox reputation is a very bad idea.
These cars should be £200 at this age. That's the only time I'd consider one.
But it's that image gremlin rearing its head again isn't it.
And people wonder why I settle on a Korean car half this Ka's age for 2/3 the £1000 it might have cost... Less likely to break, less likely to rust. Don't care what it looks like or goes like when it's a banger.
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We bought a Ka new 6 years ago. Only paid £5000 for it. There was some deal going on at our Ford dealers at the time. It has been faultless. It doesn't appear to be rusty but of course it might be in some places I can't see. Thing is though, even if it does eventually rot and have to be disposed of it will have provided years of trouble free and quite good fun motoring. Costs loose change to insure, is good on fuel, is cheap to tax and service and tyres, even posh ones, are as cheap as they get.
If it rusts eventually, frankly I don't care. It will have done what it was supposed to do which was to be a cheap, reliable little runabout. It costs so little to keep it that we use it as a spare car now. If and or when it shuffles off for some reason, so be it. I am very happy with the service and value it has given and, for now anyway, continues to provide.
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My better-half bought a Ka for £5k new on a 53 plate, ran it for 6 years and 60k miles, and sold it for £2k. It needed routine servicing and about £300 on minor repairs in that time. No rust visible except for a tiny bubble around the filler cap.
Say what you like, that's seriously cheap motoring, especially for a new car.
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But we ain't talking about newish ones though.
My comments merely alluded to the cost/rustiness problem with these cars as they get older.
I think it's a general problem with older small cars -- far too expensive for what they are. Nowt wrong with that, but when someone who pays a king's ransom for a rusty old heap then complains when it fails its MOT, I lack sympathy. They chose to make their image-over-function bed, now they must lie in it.
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I'm not sure we bought the Ka for any image driven reason. I'm rather struggling to imagine what image it portrays to be honest. I thought it was a fairly anonymous little car like most little hatchbacks. I think we bought ours because it was cheap and it fulfilled a transport need we had at the time with the added bonus that it turned out to be fun to drive and has been utterly reliable and cheap to own. Like I say, if it rusts eventually, heh ho, it owes us very little.
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Kas at this age are bought by young women mainly, where they want a nippy little car and for them, the Ka has a status higher than the typical old nail.
Hence they are worth 1/5 of their new value at well over ten years old.
If their value was more in line with, say, the much better-built Mondeo, then I'd say they were bought for reasons other than image by young people. 13 year old Mondeos originally sold for three times the cost of the Ka, so by rights the Ka should never be worth two or three times as much as the Mondeo when old.
I think such young buyers expect more from these cars than they can deliver. They do rust, and it should come as no surprise that a very old Ka is a potential money pit. The difference is that when it does happen, people complain.
That's all I was saying. It wasn't a specific attack on the Ka, more the silly valuations these cars have when well past their use-by date.
An old Mondeo might fetch £500, so the Ka should be worth £200. Simple.
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I must inform my wife that we own a high status car. She will be pleased ! We do have an old Mondeo too to sort of balance the equation. Wouldn't do to be getting too many airs and graces eh ?
;-)
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Fine, don't take relative aspirations into account. It doesn't take a genius to work out that a certain group of buyers think these little cars are cool.
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I think it's a general problem with older small cars
Sorry to harp on, but not with ALL older small cars. Say what you like, but Peugeot put the 205 together properly (at least as far as rusting went) right from the word go, in 1983. You very rarely find a rusty one, and if you did it was due to collision damage and poor repairs. There is an almost totally rust-free 20-year-old one in my garage as I write.
Can't comment on the Ka, but it seems that Ford may be carrying on their tradition of the 1960s and 70s.
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> Sorry to harp on, but not with ALL older small cars
The "problem" I was referring to was the stupidly over-inflated prices of small cars in general. Say what you like, but little cars are rarely as well-made as larger ones, so to demand a premium is a product of the cool factor/low insurance for the younger drivers. I avoid like the plague as a result. Those who don't, all I'm saying is don't complain when your OLD car acts like an OLD car.
Peugeot are no different in this regard -- 106 hopelessly overpriced at 15 years old.
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Quite so re the Ka.
My dad had a Wolseley 6/110 from new until it was five years old. It was seriously rusty towards the end of that time. He reluctantly sold to to a friend who was determined to have but it didn't last much more than a couple of years after that.
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But were newer cars galvanised. The early ones were not and rusted. The P reg example in the OP's post clearly was a problem. Maybe newer ones much less so.
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Might be wrong Rob, but I don't think any old shape Ka was galvanised.
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I wonder how this Ford rusted:
tinyurl.com/y86ulpe
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I saw one of those on the road just last weekend. Fab.
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None of them were, there are even 56 reg ones starting to show signs of rusting. My friends W reg was a rotten shed, I could litterly put my hands through the chasis and the cross member. She told it two years ago £500 in the rusted heap it was. Amazingly its still on the road. There is a big demand for small cheap cars so these Ka's often get welded and welded and welded.
My 96 Fiesta was the same failed on break pipes etc, my dads Fiesta failed on this 18 months ago. If its just the break pipes its not a big job but in thsi case it soudns like the chasis is extremely rotten too. I got a quote of £80 to weld up my old Fiesta (chasis) but with the clutch going and everything else I decided enough was enough.
The Ka was probably the last car ever to come with rust as standard :) That said they are only a problem by modern standards, if they were made in the 70's then I think the rust protection would have been first class. The Ka is no alfasud but rust does cause problems once they get to ten years old.
I do like Ka's but you have to be very careful with rust, there are a lot of 14 year olds about still though.
Edited by Rattle on 05/02/2010 at 22:40
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rattle , i wish you were old enough to remember the vauxhall viva ha , dorn n dead within 5 yrs
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I am old enough to remember then as bangers. I remember in the late 80's seeing lots of cars like that, Escort MK1s and MK2's too with lots of different coloured wings. The care taker of my school had an Astra MK1 Y reg by 1992 that was pretty rotten.
Of course my dads old car was rotten through too.
Ten years old when that taken
i167.photobucket.com/albums/u141/amazingtrade/lada...g
Of course the problem with cars like the Ka is they put plastic bits all over the bits which were known to rust so it can be a lot harder to tell.
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> There is a big demand for small cheap cars so these Ka's often get welded and welded and welded.
Yes, such demand that they aren't cheap any more!!
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The Ka is pretty much where the Mini was in the eighties.
Being the car your Mum had and the car you learned on meant rust buckets could be sold for a premium.
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. . .the stupidly over-inflated prices of small cars in general.
But are they really over-inflated? There is a reason that small cars are in demand - in general they are cheaper to service, cheaper to insure, cheaper to fuel, cheaper to repair, and cheaper to re-tyre than larger cars - as Humph has pointed out.
People who buy at the cheap end of the market don't want to pay the running costs of larger cars, hence they buy smaller cars, hence the price of small cars rises. Not every small car is going to rust through instantly like a 10 year old Ka.
;-), since our Ka is only 6 years old!
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All fine tyro, as I have repeatedly said.
However, as I have also repeatedly said, we should not show them much sympathy when their 15 year old car breaks like a 15 year old car, and they come bleating because they've spent £1000 on it.
Horses for courses.
The OP was talking about someone who clearly thinks that an old car has a god-given right to pass an MOT. It doesn't matter that she's paid good money for it -- it's still a BANGER.
Hence my original sentiment that I hoped she did not pay more than a nominal sum for it -- but we all know that won't be the case.
This is when paying good money for small cars becomes silly IMO -- a banger should be, first and foremost, a disposable item. It should never "owe" you anything.
These 14 year old Ford Kas bought for a grand do owe their owners, or at least that is how it seems when they inevitably land said owner with a big bill.
As I said in the first place, it dies you throw it away and buy another one. First rule of bangernomics. If the initial cost hurts, rethink your strategy of buying small -- spending £1000 on a 15 year old car breaks the first rule of bangernomics. That is all.
Edited by primeradriver on 06/02/2010 at 00:02
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"But are they really over-inflated? There is a reason that small cars are in demand - in general they are cheaper to service, cheaper to insure, cheaper to fuel, cheaper to repair, and cheaper to re-tyre than larger cars - as Humph has pointed out."
Is this really true though? Let's have a look at the figures on this one:
1) Cheaper to service: my indie charges £55 for a short service on a Primera and £120 for a full service. Brake discs/pads cost £50 plus fitting (so £90). For a Ka, err, £55 for a short service and £120 for a full service. Brake discs/pads cost £30 plus fitting (so £70). So the Ka owner is £20 up so far.
2) Cheaper to insure: according to Confused.com I will be charged approximately £265 this coming year to insure my Primera fully comp. If I change the details to a Ka, the cost reduces to £230. So That's £55.
3) Cheaper to fuel: a typical small car owner might do 6000 miles a year. If we say that the Primera averages 35mpg and the Ka 50mpg, and fuel costs £1.10 a litre, then the Primera costs £848 in fuel against the Ka's £594. So that's £310 saved so far.
4) Cheaper to repair -- well this is a moot point -- luck of the draw really whether you get a good one or not, and the first rule states that if the cost gets too big you shoot the car anyway. Can't make any allowance for this one.
5) Cheaper to retyre -- well according to my usual online place four budget tyres for the Primera would cost around £160, against £130 for the Ka. So £340 saving in total.
Now the elephant in the room -- purchase price. That Primera at 13 years old would be very lucky to fetch £300. The Ka, on the other hand, £1000.
So over the course of one year I would be £360 DOWN by buying a Ka. Tax takes this down -- a bit -- but you'd still be £250 down. That pays for a fair few repairs.
I just don't see how bangernomics works here.
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What about insurance? For many people the difference in cost on a Ka and a Primera can be £1000's in insurance.
I now have two years no claims bonus, I have been driving over a year and yet still the price cheapest price difference between a 1.6 Primera and a 1.2 16v Corsa (my car) is £400 a year.
Oh and on the subject of tyres, £42 fitted for Contentental Eco Contacts :)
I will probably get a load of call centres ringing me up tomorow trying to sell me insurance for a car I don't have now!!
That said it turns out I can now insure a 2.0 petrol BMW :) Last time I tried a quote as a joke a year ago the cheapest I got was £5000, now the cheapest is coming back at £1200. It certainly means for my next car I may not need a small eco box but then I live in a crowded city with narrow streets so smaller cars are better for me anyway. On the other side I do so little mileage (3k a year) that I could afford the higher fuel bills of a bigger car.
Edited by Rattle on 06/02/2010 at 01:06
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