F**king cars

Too late insurance cancelled

BATA deliver, and will deliver a cylinder tomorrow, so it's what ever I can find that can go on the microwave or the microwave's convection oven without hop prep first.

Alison

TBH, in your situation, you need to either do proper bangernomics, (i.e. buy really cheap and either do DIY repairs, or scrap it when it goes wrong) or buy a cheap, small, year old car, with a warranty, so someone else foots the bill. (And if the kids don't like being squashed up in the back of a supermini, they can catch the bloody bus!)

Anything in between is potentially going to cost you big bucks at some point.

Personally I've the skill and equipment to do most repairs, but no time. So I suck it up and pay someone else to do it.

And as an aside, anything sold within the last ~8 to 10 years, the difference in reliability is pretty much statistical noise. The best and worst are within a couple of points of each other. The killer is the cost of repair.

I really can't understand why you wouldn't even get a diagnostic. You could then sell the car with the faults noted. It is just going to sit there losing value over winter, and even modern cars suffer being sat out of use.

Because it matters not if I get a diagnostic today, next week or next year really. I looked at completed listings on ebay and it cost us £2700 and if I sold it as spares/repairs even with a diagnosis I'd be lucky if I'd got £800 for it, so it seams better to wait till next year and then decide whether to keep and repair it, repair it and sell it for loads more than it cost to repair or sell it as is.

Alison

It might be a tuppence ha'penny repair.
Resetting a fault code, swapping a fuse or such like.

And even if it's a few quid (50 ish), you'll be spending that on the bus in no time at all.

It's also due for an MOT and needs 4 new tyres to pass that's £200 for value ones

There'll be no bus catching, Dom cycles to work and if I need to go into town I can walk/ride it's only 7 miles away

In the end we all will be a lot fitter and no money will be spent on diesel either.

Alison

OK, you seem to have it all worked out.

It would be worth spending some time of the various Mondeo/FORD forums to pick some brains and find someone local who could perhaps run the diagnostic for a bargain price. Just like here, some people are nice like that.

For what it is worth, a diagnosed fault openly noted in a sale can often result in a price not too far from book minus private repair costs.

You don't know what is wrong so you can't assume the cost of repairs would mean selling way under book once repaired if you decided to do that.

Leaving it to rot over winter is entirely your choice, but I would look to get it inside at least. Start it, run it for ten minutes and move it around once a week over the coldest months.

Leaving it exposed will f the brakes up. The calipers may seize. Discs may become pitted adding more costs to the mot. After January certain advisories become failures as the MOT changes.

Enter it in a demolition derby

Alison