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I pick up my new (to me) car tomorrow...


sayerbloke
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After nearly 6 years with the Astra Coupe, I'll be picking up a new car tomorrow. 

 

It's not a Vauxhall (or any other GM product), which would come as a surprise to anyone that's known my car choices in the past. Vauxhalls were certainly on the shortlist but a dealer near here had something else which seemed a decent enough car at a reasonable price... so I took it for a test drive, decided I liked it and, so, tomorrow I become the owner of a...

 

Details to follow tomorrow! :).

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Nothing quite that interesting, I'm afraid!

 

The missus said she didn't mind what I went for, providing it had 4 doors. That was a sensible enough suggestion, given the boy is now big enough to be in the next stage of car seat and whilst swinging one of the baby seats into the back of a coupe was one thing, having to climb into the back of one each time to get him in/out would be rather more of a trial! We'll likely still be using the Signum as the main family car so it wouldn't be a daily occurrence, but it was something I was happy enough to go along with.

 

I went into it with a relatively open-mind but still expecting there was a reasonable chance I'd be getting one of the last Vectras. I was OK with that, because whilst the first generation Vectra was generally regarded as one of the worst cars of its time, they got it right the second time round.

 

This will be a long post if put everything in here, so I'll send this one and put the rest in a second post which I'll hopefully have done in a few minutes... :).

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I set up some basic criteria in Autotrader to see what sort of cars were out there and then did the same in Drive24 (Which has some absolutely fantastic filters available!). I did the same thing earlier in the year and there was quite a bit more variety around at the time.

 

Having found things that met the basic requirements, I could start paring it down in other ways. I eliminated anything that was too ugly to my eyes, which of course had to be done manually because neither site has a filter set up to do so :P

 

Next to go was anything I deemed too slow, which in this instance I decided should mean anything taking more than about 10 seconds to do 0-60mph. Perhaps that shouldn't have been quite such a priority but I'm not going to apologise for that (And I feel I'm perhaps in sympathetic company!). Also, I had a 1.2i loan car a couple of years back and for my journeys and driving style, it was no more economical than my 2.2i Astra coupe. Something capable of about mid 30s MPG would be fine and anything over that would be a bonus. Same approach with tax and insurance; ideally costing no more than the Astra and a bonus if it's less.

 

After that I had a list of cars I decided I'd like to go see first, with a few more in reserve if they didn't work out. Mostly it was Vauxhalls in the first wave but I decided to start with something that wasn't. I figured I'd either be able to knock it off the list pretty quickly or, if it turned out to be any good, that I'd be comparing it to cars I already knew a fair bit about anyway and would hold few surprises.

 

(Very) long story short, I took it for a test drive and decided, yeah, why not, something different will be a nice change! :).

 

Mini review and pictures to follow later, of course, but I will tell you now what it is.

 

Rather unexpectedly, but later on this morning, I'll be picking up the keys to a...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

'57 plate Honda Accord.

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