marzman

What are people’s thoughts on wheel and tyre insurance? Ford are offering me this for 3 years for £250. I can make something like up to 10 claims for wheel refurbishment and the same again for new tyres within that period if they’re damaged. Sounds like a good price, but I’m not sure if it’s worthwhile or not. In fairness though with the gloss black alloys and the style of the spokes I can see them being kerb magnets. What at would you guys do?

I've just listed this on eBay with a £999 start price. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/273099981215?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1558.l2649

Only just seen this. Yep i'll pop over, a visit is well over due!

Well... sorry to keep you all waiting. I wanted to get my ducks in a row before i posted again. The TT was due to be picked up tomorrow, but after 5 calls I finally got through to speak to Audi and cancel the order at the weekend. I spun a yarn about getting my maths wrong and not being able to afford it. They were disappointed, but accepting. I spent about 4 hours at the Ford dealership on Saturday and test drove a Mustang 5.0 V8 Auto. The roads were wet/cold, and the dealer spanked it around the industrial estate initially, getting it fully sideways a couple of times. Nice to see they know how to sell a car of this nature. Anyway, it was a dream to drive - much nicer than I was expecting, although I wasn't pushing on as it was pretty treacherous. Everything just felt sharp, responsive and on point. We spent quite a while trying to find a car with the spec I wanted. We got close, but not quite perfect. I wanted the Pro sound system and Sat Nav and Reverse parking sensors but the only cars with reverse sensors had the heated seats too which I didn't want (@ £500 and not very good). So I saved myself £25 per month and skipped the reverse sensors/heated seats. It's got a rear camera as standard anyway so its not the end of the world. Anyway on to the best bit - I've got the car on a 0% deal for 38 months. I've only put £1500 deposit in as the money is better off being in my account seeing as its interest free. I really beat them up on the price, so much so that they're actually losing £900 by selling this car to me! The facelift model comes out in July and they've got a surplus of pre-facelift cars which they're struggling to shift. If they dont sell them in time, the dealership has to buy them from Ford and then they'll make a massive loss on each car, so it's better for them to sell to me at a small loss now. Crazy, but i'm not complaining. So i've got a £1500 deposit, 38x monthly payments at £475, then a £18700 GFV payment at the end if I wish to keep it, which i'm sure I will be doing. 3 year old V8's today are still over £30k so if that trend continues i'm sure to have around £10k equity in the car hopefully. My car arrived at the dealership today so I went to take a look at it. I've chosen the Grabber Blue colour which is the lighter one on the left. I definitely made the right decision in my opinion. The car is ready to collect later this week, but I'm delaying it until the 19th March as that pushes my first payment out until May, which'll help as i'm selling my Range Rover privately. In terms of mods, Dan, I asked them and they said that modding is fine and to crack on! First order of business will be a roof wrap and stripes either in gloss black or gloss carbon fibre. Going to add a pinstripe to the outer edge of the stripes too, in one of red/orange/yellow I think. It'll need an exhaust at some point too I think, but i'll worry about that in a couple of months. Anyway, here's a few pics.

Despite being an RS, i'm not a hatchback guy... I've never liked them. I think out of the Audi range the TT is the most appealing. Good shout though about swapping to an alternative. One to consider for sure.

Cheers guys, Still been unable to get hold of the Audi dealer so you might be right - they could be avoiding my calls, either that or snowed in at home like the rest of the country. Dan - good point on the T&C's RE mods, i'll be sure to check it out.

Cheers guys. Jim - i'm with you, i've already been scoping out which mods i'll be doing. I feel like I did 6 or 7 years ago when I had my last zed. As i'll be buying on a PCP i think i'll need to be careful about what mods i do, making sure they're all reversible etc. I definitely be adding a gloss black roof wrap with black stripes (and maybe a red pinstripe).

Decisions decisions.... I've decided for the first time in my life to buy a new car. I've always owned cars that are 8-10 years old at the bottom of their depreciation curve, but i think the time's right in my life to get something new. I wanted an Audi TT simply because I love the Virtual Cockpit. I've visited the dealership several times this year and this weekend I settled on the model I wanted - a Nano Grey TT 2.0 TFSI Black Edition S-Tronic with Nav. The car came to a cool £39,600 with options - just under the all important £40k threshold for new car tax rules. I've signed on the dotted line and it will be available to pick up from the end of next week. I would have paid a deposit but their card machine wasnt working so they said they'd get in touch this week to sort everything. Here's what the car will look like: The thing is though, at no point did I feel excited by the car. I felt like I was settling for a convenient, half decent motor. I've never liked the TT previously, and they just dont seem particularly special. Things came to a head on Sunday night watching the new Top Gear, where they had a Mustang on. CRAP!!! How could I forget about the Mustang and buy a TT???? Fast forward 3 days and countless phone calls and I've settled on a 5.0 GT Coupe, probably in Grabber Blue. The options list is quite small anyway but im not having the premium sound system or heated seats in order to keep it under the £40k mark. Just waiting on a call back from the dealer tomorrow to confirm they can get me this car. I've tried to call Audi to back out of the deal but my sales man hasn't been in work since the weekend. Ford seem to think I can get out of it (I sent them the paperwork to see if they could advise) but i'm still nervous. I'll be pretty gutted if I get stuck with a TT. So fingers crossed that in the next couple of weeks i'll be driving a Mustang!

Father Ted for me.

Bump. This is still available. Good time to buy a new track car ready for the upcoming season. Open to offers.

Excellent work. Keep the updates coming.

It's looking amazing mate. Home stretch now...!

This has made my day, this is awesome!

Brilliant, good info thanks mate.

I may have found it. Range Rover Velar D300. 6.1 0-60 and 44mpg.

Ridiculous. I've done some reading and watched some videos about Elon Musk fairly recently, and I see his projects as a really refreshing benevolent approach that nobody else on the planet is doing. All of his projects have a 'for the good of humanity' purpose, but they're just a little more outside the box than what the everyman thinks of. Yes there are problems with pollution and waste, but governments and other companies are already looking at those. This guy wants to do things that nobody else is doing and push boundaries that humans thought were inconceivable. A quick quote from a website regarding his ambitions for SpaceX: Then looking at his Tesla proejcts, the R&D achieved in this field is creating opportunities in other areas which havent been particularly well publicised, such as the deployment of a huge battery/solar farm in South Australia last quarter. Paraphrasing the solution, it basically allowed reliable, robust, clean power in a very unreliable and difficult to power region that suffered from outages/power shortages. My understanding was that he provided this solution FREE as a proof of concept and now has got other countries queuing up to get on board! The above may be factually innaccurate as i heard it on a podcast, but you can read more about it here: https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/1/16723186/elon-musk-battery-launched-south-australia And obviously to continue with this benevolence he needs to make serious money, so great - i hope he continues to make billions so we can see even more innovation.

Sounds amazing... i'll check out your tips, thanks.

For me, Elon is the greatest human being on the planet. He's definitely an alien in a skin suit a la Men in Black.

This is awesome Col, thank you so much. There are a few good suggestions on here that weren't on my list. My plan was to split my 2 weeks kind of 35% Tokyo 65% Kyoto and surrounding areas, but a friend of my wife's told her today that we should stay in Tokyo the whole time and just day-trip Kyoto, Nara etc as there's not that much to do/see there. Would you agree with this? Good tip for excuse me too - i'll brush up on that.

Welcome back. Did you have a friend who badly crashed their scooby at a track day...? I always remember that post from years ago and think it was yours IIRC. M13KYF hasn't been around properly for a couple of years or so. Still has his car as far as i know, but he relocated across the country and then went quiet. Sarnie pops in from time to time.

My wife and I are off to Japan in April for a couple of weeks, hopefully catching the cherry blossoms while we're there. We'll be spending about 5 days in Tokyo and then the rest of the time in Kyoto and surrounding areas, with a potential trip to Hiroshima. I've not nailed down the itinerary yet but got a good idea of the usual tourist things to do - but does anyone have any nuggets of info or experience that might be useful? Does anyone know of any regular static car meets that take place, or is there a specific area of Tokyo for this for example? I'd quite like to see that one evening...

Basically a C-Class petronas edition would do for me, but they dont seem to do one.

Thanks, but it's not for me. I've never fancied a hatchback. I really like the C250 saloon though. I'd been modding one in my mind last summer... I wanted one in silver, and I was going to put some turquoise accents on it, like the Merc F1 team. Then to finish it off I wanted some of those Pirelli colour edition tyres. I was strongly considering the estate version too as it looks just like the medical car that follows the F1 cars round. Not very aspirational to copy a medical car though...

Tax band - i'm paying about £550 for my RRS at the moment and it just annoys me. It's just money in the bin and is comparable to having a worse MPG. I'd never really taken any notice of it until i bought an RX8 track car last year which again is £550 tax. I only tax/insure it for the months that i've got a track day, and its just dead money. In terms of practicality, by definition of an all rounder you're right... I clearly want something that doesn't exist. I want a sexy tardis.

Okay, more rules, but in my order of priority. Meeting all of these would be my perfect car. Must look stunning, in the 350z, 911, Mercedes AMG GT mould Must be quick, but not stupid quick. I don't want a car that I can only use 30% power on the road legally. Must achieve 35+ MPG, and be automatic Preferably a low tax band - I cant stand throwing money away on road tax Would like a usable boot space for Ikea trips/tip runs. Folding rear seats is preferable. Do any 2+2's do this? Must be Sub £40k, but the cheaper the better, new or used, max 10 years old. Petrol or Diesel is fine Having written this, the versatility/boot space is the least important, and also probably the cheapest/easiest to satisfy as I just need to make sure my wife's car ticks this box.