rabbitstew

I thought P2 & P3 were identical, so if its just had one, id go for a P1, plus any extras which may need doing at that mileage/age, maybe break fluid, plugs etc.... If you are doing it yourself, then if there isnt much difference in price between P1 & P2/P3 then go for the P2/P3.

hahaha, my wife got caught out by this too... not realising it was from like 2 years ago. Doh!!!!!!!

My OEM pads lasted 30k before i replaced them. The OEM discs still looked fine so I left them. But as others have said, depends on how its been driven.

That is my take on it. The claim would be on Car A so Car B is not affected with regards to NCB. But, the entire policy as a whole will be affected as you have made a claim & thus next year your premium will go up regardless as a result.

What i did was to knock up a spreadsheet working out total cost per month of running the zed as a daily runner compared to running it at weekends and having an old shed for the week. For my mileage it wasnt worth it. My zed was costing me about £1300 a month all in including £450 of petrol plus insurance, servicing, tyres, depreciation etc. One of the biggest things as you mention is the insurance on a 2nd car. Whilst you can get an old banger for £500, you`ll end up forking out £500 on insurance, then tax, then tyres, servicing and all that stuff. For me it didnt work out any cheaper. Where I was fortunate is that my wife ended up getting a company car so I had her NCB to play with. So I bought an old diesel banger, ran it with her NCB for about 6 or 7 months until we sold it. Running the shed saved me a bit each month, It saved me about £200 on fuel alone, but that was about it really as I still had insurance, tax (my zed was the £490 a year or whatever). It still depreciated at the same amount and I still needed MOT etc. I guess it didnt need servicing so quickly & tyres lasted longer, but thats about it. In the end, I sold the shed & the zed and bought one car which I felt would be best of both worlds. One thing I will say though is that if you only use your zed at the weekends you`ll appreciate it much more. When I was running it on my 100mile daily commute I started to resent it. Id be stuck in traffic watching the fuel gauge go down. Having to fill up twice a week. Then when it came to the weekend I just didnt fancy going out in the car having been driving it all week. But, once it becomes a weekend only toy. My god the difference is amazing. You dont care about the mpg and you just get in it and have a really enjoyable ride out. I guess some of it might be psychological. If its a weekend car you associate driving it with having fun and enjoyment. If its a work day car you get in it and are feeling crap cos your off to work. Still, coming out of the office and getting into the zed after a days work was quite a nice feeling.

Hang on... so they have offered a full refund? In that case if you are not happy id be tempted to take it, wash my hands off it and buy another one?

That should be fine. The wheel nuts will hold it all together anyway. Ive had no end of cars where people have snapped the bolt off and they have been fine.

The daughter shaparone trunk monkey one is one of the best...

Have to say I can understand the picking the less common car totally. Ive always been one to want to be different to the usual run of the mill person and that has been true of some of the vehicles ive bought in the past. Back in the 90`s most of my mates had Ford Escort XR3i`s, RS Turbos, XR2`s and that kind of thing. I bought a Renault 5 GT Turbo. A couple of reasons I went for that. Firstly it was quicker, handled better, it was easy to mod and rarity. Around my way, at that time, only a few people had them. I had narrowed the choice down between a 205 Gti and the 5 Turbo and what swung it in the end was that the 5 Turbo wasnt as common. So it wasnt a case of picking a car just because it was rare, but that was one of the deciding factors. It turned out to be a great choice, I had loads of fun tuning it and improving it and I still own the car now. It used to get lots of looks and was a talking point whenever you went anywhere. Likewise, many of my mates, they loved their XR3i`s etc and for them it was the perfect choice for them. With other cars, ive made the choice on what was important for me at the time. For example a MK4 Golf TDI I had for a while was purchased because I liked the styling, it was the perfect balance between performance & economy and after test driving all the other cars in that same market I felt the golf felt better to drive. The MK4 Golf was a mega common car and for that particular choice that wasnt something I even considered. Then with the 350z, I had quite a wide choice of cars for my £17k budget at the time, and rarity was again a plus point for me when I had finally narrowed my choice down to a short list of cars including a porsche, bmw z4, rx8 & s2000. Again, I didnt buy it solely because it was a rare car (in my neck of the woods), but it was certainly one of the factors on the list which I considered after I had driven a few different cars and narrowed the choice down. So for me, I think Coldels formula does apply.

Thats a hell of a car jack, looks like its jacked the car up like 6ft!!!! Awesome. I do all my own mechanics myself, but not sure id fancy pulling the gearbox off.

I have done more kitchens than i can count and its an easy DIY job. Rip out old one, units are well easy to build, floor is easy to tile, rewire no problem, fiddly bit i find it cutting worktop and thats the bit everyone sees. Last one i did i spent about a grand on and it was huge. Had i replaced the cooker then id have budgeted another grand for a decent double range cooker.

If you do get lucky and they replace the tyres, make sure they dont replace them with mega nasty ones. They should all be the same make front/back else the traction control etc. can get upset.

The P1 from memory is just oil + filter, its that simple. The bits came to hardly anything. Nissan seem to use the same oil filter on all their cars, so whether its a micra, a navara or a 350 its the same little filter. The actual service process is very easy on the HR. You`ll find the biggest time consuming bit is removing the big plastic under engine tray which has about 18 small rusty screws holding it on. Run the car for a while so oil is hot, then drain it out, swap oil filter over after putting a bit of fresh oil around the rubber seal, put drain plug back in and fill with oil. As a matter of course I would also check the air filters as whilst they are not part of the P1 service, if they are dirty then it pays to replace them. Either go with stock nissan ones or cosworth, theres very little if anything in the difference between them. Someone else will advice on the exact plugs you need, the HR ones are different and a *LOT* more expensive than the earlier zeds.

I had a similar choice to make last year. The M3 was on my short list, plus an Evo. In the end I went for a 123d Coupe. 0-60 is a whisker over 6 seconds, in gear acceleration is awesome, has 4 seats (loads of room in the back for 6ft adults, its a 2 door RWD coupe and on my daily commute im getting over 50mpg. Another car to consider is the M135i apparently they are immense and mega good value. You could probably nearly get a virtually new one for 25k. http://www.topgear.com/uk/bmw/1-series/road-test/m135i-driven

Sorry, I tried to insure with both you, sky, sureterm, greenlight... All the specialist guys, you're all the same. I can uderstand why, but surely there is a flat rated scheme for risks that are actually disirable? Cheers I had similar problems when i first got my zed, the companies mentioned above all wanted me to have had recent experience of similar cars. Whilst id driven dozens of fast cars in the past, had 20 years ncb on my car and 15 years ncb on high powered sports motorbikes (was riding a 150bhp R1 at the time), because id been driving a diesel golf for the last 2 years they felt i was not experienced enough in handling a car like a zed and therefore was a high risk. I think the cheapest estimate I got from the "specialist insurers" was £1200. I ended up going with a non specialist insurer who came in at £900 for the same cover. I realise insurance companies have to reduce their risk by ensuring someone who is used to driving a 30bhp FWD Ford Fiesta doesnt jump into a 300bhp RWD zed and crash it on the first bend, but in my case with my many years of accident free motoring in both sports cars & sports motorbikes I felt that I should have been a safe risk.

This is one of the problems with HPI checks. If for example you have a 54 reg car and it gets 3k's worth of damage then it'll probably get written off as a Cat D, however if your 2012 car gets exactly the same damage it'll get repaired without anything going on the log book, that's how I read it anyway . Pete True, but the other problem with HPI is that even if a vehicle is written off by the insurance company, HPI very often dont seem to know about it. Ive bought 2 vehicles in the past, including one which was a few weeks old which I knew were written off by the insurance company and yet when ive done an HPI check months later they came up clean.

I used to love top gear when I was a kid and remember Jeremy Clarkson first joining the show. He soon became very anoying with his ridiculous comparisons and dismissing cars over the most silly of reasons. I used to fast forward past bits with him in. Then top gear seemed to suddenly change from being an informative car review show into being "the jeremy clarkson show" and at that point i stopped watching it and think ive only ever seen a couple of episodes ever since. So personally I couldnt give a monkies if Clarkson liked or disliked a car, and it certainly wouldnt have any bearing on whether or not I bought one.

Hmmm. if they are going to replace the cross member then thats good. The tyres, depending on make are more than likely the ones which came on the car originally. They do wear on the inside more as normal due to the camber they run, but if they are not road worthy then they should really replace them. The reversing sensors were standard on these cars, they were an after market option some nissan dealers fitted, so it wouldnt necessarily be something this particular dealer would know about. All in all, when I bought my HR zed from a Nissan Main dealer I found they were keen to look at any problems, but the "warranty" they give you when you buy a used car doesnt seem to cover anything and its more of a case of "good will" from that paricular dealer. Have you also checked the front drive belt? On mine it used to shred itself every 20k miles - its the one at the front of the engine when you open the bonnet. Good luck.

+1

Any recommendations?

I was fortunate I didnt spend much on my zed, mainly because to get much more power out of the 313 you`d end up spending a small fortune. The car was also a 2007 minter worth around £13k so I didnt want to devalue it by adding a bodykit or anything like that. However, with my Renault 5 GT Turbo, when I first started modding that back when I was a lad, I ended up spending 4 times what the car cost on it and that was nearly all "under the skin". It ended up with 220bhp and twice the power-to-weight ratio of a lotus elise, and with FWD it was pretty mental. How I justified it was that back then there was no way id be able to go out & buy a car off the shelf anywhere near as quick as that for the money it cost me to build. In fact, you only "loose" money on it when you come to sell the car, and thats probably why ive never sold it and still have it in the corner of my workshop.

Mental just show you how stupid some people are. I was driving to the train station this morning in the fog, and had to laugh as I was following this bright yellow Punto, We came into the fog and visibility was reduced down to about half a mile, so Yellow Punto driver sticks there fog lights on dazzling me. I could easily see about 8 cars in front of me, let alone this bright yellow punto right in front of me and yet they still stuck there fog lights on.

He was apparently in the Army and don't forget that chest tattoo Doesnt Justin Bieber have a chest tattoo also?!

What did they do as part of the service? Did it include plugs?

I had this dilemma when I bought my Ducati a few weeks back. It needed a major service and had full Ducati history on it. Ducati wanted £900 just to change the belts, oil + filter. A major part of the work is stripping the bodywork, tank, seat, airbox, cam covers, battery etc. off and I failed to see the point in paying some qualified Ducati nearly £100 an hour just to undo some fasteners and strip a bike down when the only bid they need to be experienced in is tensioning the cambelt. I bought the bits required for about £140 from Ducati themselves and with the savings also bought Fuel Filter, air filter, chain, sprockets, brake pads, brake fluid and a few other bits. All in, It came to miles less than Ducati wanted for their major service, plus I got much much much more done on the bike. The bikes virtually like brand new now! What ive done is ive kept all the receipts plus photos to show the work which will go into a nice binder along with all the previous traceable service history on the bike. Any buyer can clearly see im an enthusiast and once they see my workshop can see im a fairly competent mechanic and not some cowboy out to save a few quid. As a buyer myself, if a seller had done the same then id be happy and would always buy on condition / history rather than a main dealer history, especially after the dodgy experiences ive seen at main dealers with YTS mechanics working on cars and rushing them through. Last time I took my zed to a Nissan garage the mechanic sat there taking great delight in red-lining my engine in the workshop so he could hear the full roar the K1 exhaust system made. At least he did until the Workshop Manager saw me standing there watching them and promptly shat his pants.