Be Excellent To Each Other

Ford Ka's are absolutely bloody awful, seriously don't get one. My mum has Ford tattooed across her very soul hates my dad's year old one. The build quality is shocking, the back end is ugly as sin, and there simply isn't enough room in it - plenty of cars the same size out there but none have the claustrophobia or negative boot space of the Ka - the mini cooper they had for years for example.

Would a year-old Ka be the newshape, same-as-the-Fiat-500 one?

...perhaps some kind of desert Cameo job?

That reference is now one quarter of a century old.

Your mum

I'm neither polite nor a good cook but thanks for the compliment. Hope you're feeling better today?

"INSERT FIGURE 1 ABOUT HERE"?

That's sooooooooooo 2010.

Sigh. I'll be over in records for however long it takes to un-screw this student."

Personally, I don't like Ford Kas. Not as bad as a Corsa, though. The new Fiesta (goes back to 08, I think?) is excellent, though.

It has a horrible, horrible interior, though.

Off out running for the first time in months. I'm actually scared, it's going to be horrible.

Yes, it's all ghastly, hard, cheap-feeling plastic.

The looks are awful, and all of the space appears to have been given to the front passenger as the driver has none

Is any of it actually made from titanium?

I used to drive one comfortably.

We've had this argument before Cavey. I think pretty much all manufacturers nowadays build their cars to broadly equal quality controls nowadays. Any mass produced car will undoubtedly have problems, that's a simple fact which I'll get back to in a moment.

Yes, there's a difference in the materials used on the premium brands, and VW is a classic example of this with their sliding scale modular cars across their various marques. The big difference is that if you drop >40k on a Merc/BMW/Jag/Audi and you get a problem, then the dealers will smoothly, rapidly and efficiently deal with it if the anecdotal evidence I've heard is true. It was probably true until a few years ago that you wouldn't get this treatment from the likes of Ford/Vauxhall/PSA/Fiat, but I've heard that they've improved considerably in the last couple of years.

The simple fact is this, there's a possibility that any new mass produced car you buy, regardless of who makes it, can have problems. It's how willing to look after you the dealer is transforms that from being a horror story to one of undying love for the brand. IIRC your first TT was a bit of a lemon but Audi bent over backwards to look after you, didn't they. You didn't get the same treatment from Ford with your cars.

The thing is, I've had experience of numerous Fords in the last decade that have been very reliable, Hondas that have been similar but no better, VWs that have ranged from fine to fucking awful, terrible Fiats (electrical problems obviously and the dealers were beyond fucking useless) and I have friends with Porsche's, Beemers, Audis, Mercs and Jags and I do enquire what the ownership experience is like. The "satisfaction" is wholly dependent on how the problems are sorted. Out of that lot the only one who had no problems was the Jag owner, the Beemer had numerous niggling problems which were fixed quickly, the Audi was fine with some teething issues and the Merc was an absolute dog which needed a new engine with 30k miles on the clock, had paintwork problems that required a respray(It was a CL600, which correct me if I'm wrong is a >£100k car). My friend's Porsche had a problem with a porous rear alloy leaking air all the time and Porsche failed to resolve it in the three years he owned the 997 S.

The thing is, I know this isn't empirical but all I'm suggesting is that all modern cars can be faulty. The dealers make a difference and hopefully if you're paying a premium for a premium brand, there's no guarantee that the car will be better built, but you WILL get better looked after.

Hell, one friend of mine went to another friend's 60th birthday and parked his 2 week old 5 series estate on their lawn and couldn't move it the following morning as it had sunk into the lawn. BMW sent a tow truck at no charge to get it off the lawn. Yes, it's a £50k car, but that's the kind of service I'd want if I was dropping that kind of money on a new car.

The fact of the matter is, there is no comparison at all between the likes of Ford/Fiat and Toyota.

Why else would Toyota haave become the largest, most popular car brand in the world, from nowhere perhaps 30 years ago, and the likes of GM and Ford near bankrupt?

I saw my phone about 2 weks ago. Any idea where it might be. It is definitely in the house, somewhere

Just shaved dog's face, dog moved, dog now has a mullet.

Would take pictures but she is hiding from me.

Well, there is - lovely numerical comparisons. 25% of all Fords (in the last ten years) are taken in for repair, compared to 14% of all Toyotas (same period).
We don't know a couple of things, however. One is the severity of the problems (although the Ford repairs, on average, cost 2/3 of the Toyota repairs) and the other thing is the actual model breakdown (although I'll have a hunt for that later) so we can do like-for-like comparison. Even here, though, 25 cars out of 100 isn't exactly 'night and day' difference from 14 cars out of 100.

Do you have a land line you could call it on and listen for the ring tone? I guess not, or you wouldn't be asking. Perhaps you could PM a non-stalker on BETEO (if such a person exists) and get them to ring it.

Well, there is - lovely numerical comparisons. 25% of all Fords (in the last ten years) are taken in for repair, compared to 14% of all Toyotas (same period).
We don't know a couple of things, however. One is the severity of the problems (although the Ford repairs, on average, cost 2/3 of the Toyota repairs) and the other thing is the actual model breakdown (although I'll have a hunt for that later) so we can do like-for-like comparison. Even here, though, 250 cars out of 1,000 isn't exactly 'night and day' difference from 140 cars out of 1,000. If you'd have said 'Land Rover', though, you'd have been right (52% ).

I'm going to suggest that if it's been missing for two weeks it will also be flat by now. Or at least turned off.

Or was that a thinly veiled attempt to get mimi's phone number?

Oooh! As a long-standing Xbox Live user (first signed up when the original Ghost Recon was released on the original Xbox, so a while then!), they've offered me a 12-month auto renewing subscription at £23.99. Gotta take that really, eh?