Just over one year and 1650 miles and a £50,000 depreciation

[dude]

When Aston Martins were totally independent they were like most low production cars, pretty dire, and most things were "adjusted" by hand on the production line, making body repairs, or even a screen change, the stuff of nightmares. the Tadek Marek straight six was a good engine, very Jaguar like. The early V8 was a jewel, and very powerful with almost 2JZ reserves of strength. Dude will know David Martin of Austec, he has done a lot of development of both the straight six engines and the various iterations of the early V8 units, which I think are as much a gem as the Toyota 2JZ engines. The DB5 my mother had was OK, quite fast in its day (1965) but by the early seventies it was nothing special, performance wise, she just liked the shape and the colour, which was about as far as her criteria for buying a car went

 

No idea what current ones are like, but I distrust any low volume car, if people are totally honest they are all quirky, with things that need further refinement, development or simply totally re thinking. Whether you call these things faults or character usually depends if you actually have one, or have just sold one for a big loss

 

Ah Dave Martin, whose lovely little daughter is named Aston !!!!!!. Dave is no longer at Austec, he is now involved in Marine engines with David Vizard, its Dave's new place where I do my crank balancing and any machining etc. David is indeed a very clever guy.

[Chris Wilson]

Because it's too cold to venture to the pub I have spent an evening on the PC. I found myself looking at a replacement for my Matiz, which is beyond even the generously myopic attentions of my favourite MOT tester. We have a local garage that sells these weird, basically cheap and nasty looking Gallic Aixam cars. They seem to be driven by Greens (no offence...) and are usually found travelling about 10 MPH inside the speed limit, in the middle of the road, and seemingly intent on stopping anyone from passing them without gestures, flashing lights and general ill feeling. I thought I'd look up just what these abortions were, and found that, on a somewhat less frightening scale, they too seem to suffer horrendous running costs. My initial gut feeling that "they look *rap, so probably are *rap" seems well founded. They suffer transmission failures of their Variomatic drive system, monotonously regular failure of the brake light switches, which is not good for a car made of plastic that is hard pressed to top 40 MPH The electric ones have £2400 plus VAT battery pack failures, and some dealers were allegedly buying cheaper batteries from China, only to find they had minimal lead content, their weight being bulked up by the addition of sand. The charging systems also fail regularly, at £1600 plus VAT a pop. Some people are getting less than twenty miles between charges! It could hardly get to my local and back!! For a car that would be an embarrassment to all but the most robustly charactered tree hugger, they seem to have all the running costs and depreciation of the Aston, on a relative scale. I intend to take the time to see just how much replacement accumulator packs are for the more up market hybrid and electric cars. A friend has just bought a brand new Insight, but never thought to ask how much spares were, despite his intention of keeping it "for years". It seems poor residuals affect cars from both ends of the price scale.

 

http://www.batteryvehiclesociety.org.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2747

[Abz]

Guys, I am looking for nearest offer so if you have £110,000 I'll let you have it, might even throw in a Supra!