rabbitstew

Had mine for about 18 months which is short for me. Normally I keep my cars for 3->4 years. Ive actually still got my Renault 5 GT Turbo which ive had for 15 years in my garage and ive had my R1 motorbike for over 11 years now! So I dont like parting with things unless I can help it. Unfortunately the zed was just killing me on running costs and wasnt practical for the long commutes I have. If it was just a weekend fun car I may well still have it!

iPhone satnav is ok as long as you got a 3G signal which to be fair is most places really... I know what you mean about leaving it to the experts, I would gladly remove every interior trim and wire in all sorts and I have, but I would pay someone to change my spark plugs Dont you get offline maps on the iphone? Removing the centre console on the zed is pretty easy, certainly with DIY realms!

There is an awful lot of different options here. You can set up a Last.fm account, then stream music by genre, and have new bands suggested to you - can stream it to any supported device, so an android tablet, iphone, a streamer box like the WD Live! unit etc.. You can use spotify to do something similar. I use Google Play Music. You can upload 20,000 songs for free, and buy more from the play store, then just stream it down to any pc or tablet or smart phone - just plug your phone into a dock and away you go. The above 3 also have the advantage you can be anywhere in the world and still get your music collection, although if your using it all the time whilst away from the home you can soon use up a lot of data. If you dont want to use up bandwidth for the sake of it, the other option I use is to get a cheap NAS box. Ive a D-link one, with 2 x 2tb hard drives in it. It sits under my stairs plugged into my router out of the way. I store all my media on it - so movies, photos, music, ebooks etc... Then I can access it from anywhere in my house / garden via my wifi. In the living room I stream it through my media HTPC using XBMC. Upstairs in the bedroom i used a little streaming box WD Live! which does the same. In the garage I stream it all to my Samsung Galaxy S3 which I plug into an old hifi and can listen to all my music whilst working out. Same in the garden - just plug the phone into a dock and instant music whilst having a BBQ. My home cinema amp actually has airplay on it, and DNLA so I can send any media from any of my portable devices directly to it, so I could just store all my media on my phone and use that to send it to devices - but its not quite as practical as the NAS / Google Play Music method.

im pretty sure i can handle the cost of running it :wink: im partners with a few other websites so i have about £4300 coming in every month and yeah im young i dont spend alot i use about 400 a month and im a medical student, so i wont be driving alot and party on weekends. insurance im sure i can take care off im just worried about the mods im "Legally" allowed to do, i want to eventually tune the car up, and drop a turbo in and lower it about 6 inches, i know im going to have problems with that latter on tho because police don't care how low the car is if its not factory they write a dam ticket for it (happened to my mate last weekend) and he only dropped his evo 3inches. My Budget for the car is £13,000 i dont want to go over it is it enough for a decent z ? Thats plenty. My minter 2007 313 Roadster was up for that price at a garage a few months back. The running costs of mine came to £1200+ a month. The biggest thing for me was depreciation which came to £600 a month and fuel which was about £450 a month for my miles. I wouldnt worry about mods just yet. If you get a 313 the engine is as highly tuned as Nissan could get it and without spending a lot of money you wont get much more power out of it. Also the 313HR engine is the strongest one for tuning, so if you want to turbo or supercharge later on you`ll have the right car to do it on.

Exige?!!! Im well jealous! £8k is a good budget for a zed and if you dont want something rare like a GT4 or 313Roadster then there should be a good selection to choose from! Good luck!

It can work really well. A mate of mine does this with a race prepared scooby wrx. They share all the running / repair costs and have loads of fun. Im in the midlands and would love to do something like this, but just havent got the spare time these days. Maybe when I retire! Track days are great fun. I used to supervise them at Rockingham Racetrack and we`d see all sorts of cars go around there. Everything from millionaires with Ferrari`s to people who had just bought a £100 MOT failure in order to thrash it around the track. The local "Budget" car rental place used to do a cracking trade with people hiring cars just to thrash around the track until they realised these cars were coming back with bald tyres....

omg!!!! thats shocking. My missus took her Nissan Juke back to Nissan for its first service a few weeks back and they have her some crappy old Fiesta as a courtesy car. Didnt even have any fuel in it. When I take my 123d in for its first service i`ll expect a nice courtesy car. Im not dropping a 25k car off and being given some crappy smart car to drive about in. I find body repair shops are the worst though for courtesy cars. They seem to get the cheapest car they possibly can. My missus was given some ancient Fiat Panda which must have had all of 2bhp when she had her 206 Gti in the repairshop a few years back.

How about an 8-track conversion?

Yeah I know what you mean. No major problems yet on my part but the customer service on the desk leaves a little to be desired it has to be said. Fingers crossed... Well when I dropped my 350z off, it was the receptionist who drove the car around the back to the workshop. I dont even let my missus drive my car and here was some 18 year old bird trying to find reverse on my car. That and their mechanic revving the hell out of my car in the workshop in front of his mates, not realising I was watching didnt create a good impression. Nor did them taking over an hour to do what was a 10 minute job. Then when it came to sales, I spent about 20mins wandering about their showroom without any salesman being available The only guy there had just started and didnt know anything - so I left my number for them to call me when available to discuss buying a brand new Quashqai or Juke. No called back. I called them and left several messages... still no call back. Then about 4 days later I manage to get through to a salesman who said they didnt have any available for me to drive but would call me in a couple of days to sort it out. Still no call back... so they missed out on a new sale.

Think id give that back and go for the micra instead...

Well it was on my daily driver, and after just a few months of winter use the shocks adjusters were impossible to move. All the dirt, muck, rain, salt. If it was just a weekend garaged car which never gets wet then I guess you`d be fine!

If i remember rightly my 313 didnt hit peak power until 6800rpm and with a redline of 7500 you can set the shift light at 7000 and change up then if your on a mission. Really depends on the situation. If your sitting behind a car at 50mph then id probably drop it to 3rd to over take. If I was approaching a car which was doing 50mph and I was travelling at 60 or 70 then id just leave it in which ever gear I was in which would be 6th if im not in a rush or 4th if i was still accelerating. For windy backroads, id seldom get out of 4th if i was pushing it, dropping it into 5th / 6th when cruising. But then im not one to want to travel at break neck speeds - preferring the handling & acceleration. Likewise, the 350z can happily poodle at 40mph in 6th before you need to change down.

Ive fitted all sorts of suspension to cars in the past and the only reason ive ever gone for coil overs is because i want to dial in the exact drop I want, rather than go with a set -40mm or -50mm or whatever the alternative kits have got. If you want to keep a stock height, then I wouldnt have said coil overs would be my first option. I did make the mistake once of assuming with coil overs I could keep the height standard then drop it at will by adjusting for tracks etc.. before I found out that the adjusters get so filled with dirt, mud and gunk that once you have set them up, the chances of being able to readjust the ride height months later is very slim.

Massive silencers there & not stainless, god knows how much that must weigh!

Welcome, ive been to Estonia once!

Checkout the insurance before you buy. Im 40, with 20 years NCB and still got quoted £1200 when I bought my zed. My previous car was a Golf GTI which was costing me £250, so it was nearly 5 times the price.

Good luck with Marshall Nissan in Cambridge, i didnt have a good experience at all with last year when I took my 350z in for some work, nor when I went back to try and arrange a test drive in a brand spanking new Nissan Juke. Probably one of the worst dealerships ive been in. Best courtesy car I had was a brand new 370z Roadster from Nissan Birmingham when I took my car there for some work. They litterally took the price out of the window and gave me the keys to it. Had every optoin ticked including paddle shift. Had it for 2 days whilst they worked on my car.

Wheres the cake?! happy birthday!

Having had a new boiler fitted last year id certainly shop around. I found the prices and estimates varied wildly. Most expensive we had quoted was £4000, cheapest was £2500. Although this was to remove an old boiler, move pipework and supply & fit boiler in a new location. In the end a mate who was corgi registered did it all for £1200. That incl a new boiler which cost £600 alone. One bloke reckoned it was a good weeks work, however my mate actually did it in 3 days on his own.

On the other hand, surely using that logic a noiser exhaust would make the car LESS likely to be stolen as thieves would alert the entire neighbourhood as soon as they started your car up. I know my K1 used to make a hell of a racket.

Thats give away price!

It certainly was a good drive in to work. My normal A14 journey which can take 1hr to do 18 miles, I managed the full 42mile journey in about 40 minutes! Got into work in record time! Also, carpark at work is empty. Theres just 4 cars and 1 of them is mine! Talk about a bunch of slackers!!!

But doesnt mean they will be cheaper than elsewhere in my experience. But each persons situation is different and they may be cheaper for some.

I seriously considered one earlier in the year as they were cheaper than the 123d I ended up buying instead. I have to say the 4 door version looks a bit too plain, but the 3 door really does look nice in my opinion. A guy up the road from me has one with an aftermarket exhaust on it and it sounds incredible. Id expect running costs to be slightly more than the zed, but looking at the 2nd hand prices over the last few years they do seem to depreciate quite a lot - no more than the zed and other big engined cars.

Pieminister "pietanic fish pie" - look out for the review! No way, that sounds like heaven!!!