633CSI 1980 VALUATION

I bought mine because I'd been renting them from
my local Ford dealer for 2-3 years and at £120 a
month it worked out cheaper to buy one on the drip
and put it down as a motoring expense.
For doing 2-300 miles a day it was ideal - didn't need
to rent anything bigger TBH and the Fiesta felt like a
dog slow turd in comparison - must be quite a lot
heavier. All I did with mine was to replace the
standard crap radio with 5000 Series CD player from
the Ka3.
Mine didn't have PAS btw but for whatever reason
had the taller FD of the PAS model (3.58:1).

I've had 2 Ka's (non v-tec) and they are brilliant. Engine is torquey so you can ease into 5th at just over 30, 3rd is very flexible for around town stuff. MPG is 43 - 48. They buzz along at 90MPH no probs and no dreaded BM steering wheel shimmy. Seats are OK for about 250 mile journey in a day. Put the back seats down and you have an amazing amount of space for such a small body. Because the wheels are at each corner, roadholding is just great. Had a/c on both BTW which is a nice feature. 10K mile or 12 month service interval and neither car burnt oil.

The Ka is a great car and does what it says on the tin.

AndyS wrote: Vauxhalls are crap. The Astra is better than a Focus???? Don't make me laugh!

The new Astra is supposed to be very good although I've never driven one. The old model however wasn't a patch on the mk1 focus. My dad has one and I really can't understand why he got it over a Focus.

All cars are bult to a price, well almost all.

Brucey wrote: -anyone would think all our 6ers work perfectly,

LMFAO

Sharkfan

Also: I knew somebody who used to work in Dagenham for Ford, and he told me that Ford scrapped the interior carpet colour choice on the MK 3 Fiesta from 3 to 1 to net a saving of 7p per car. make of that what you will. Whether they have the same attitude now I don’t know.

The incredibly built Focus C-max IMHO is not that incredibly built.

I found a Mk3 Escort 1.3 on ebay for sale with an opening bid of £300 so maybe I have to admit defeat here. Consider my hat eaten.

I still hold out that Ford cuts more corners with what it offers customers than most other manufacturers. The new Fungus is outclassed by the latest Astra IMO. (GM has got it's act together all of a sudden, except for with Saab which remains in the wilderness ).

Let's just state that I am not a fan of the blue oval.

I was driving a 1.8 Ford Fungus when a certain Scania pilot decided that it needed 12" removing from the wheelbase.

Was an okay car - as you say not as nice to drive as my (at the time) 316 but the episode did put me off it a bit!!

The mrs' first car was a 1.2 clio (mk1) that was a much more technologically advanced car than the '99 fiesta 1.3pushrod that replaced it.

Sorry but that 1.3 engine is a complete dead weight - I'll never forget hitting the rev limiter whilst overtaking on a country road in it and thinking I was going to die. No rev counter didnt help! I mean where is the rev limiter on that ghastly thing? 4500?!

The Ka is a lovely piece of automotive _design_ but, as with alot of ford product it's a terrible piece of engineering!

The Ka is only competetive to 1st car buyers, none of whom know (or care) very much about the technology they are buying. They want reliable, basic transport that does not cost very much.

However I do think that Ford take the mickey with some of their product - the fiesta's passenger vanity mirror was a rectangular piece of plane glass mirror just stuck to the sun visor! No moulding, nothing, just sharp edges! Talk about engineering down to a price.

And that 1.3 pushrod engine also powered my first car - an ancient 1.3 mk3 escort. Truly horrible! Used a litre of oil every 100 miles with 100k on the clock.

No recent ford product will get the classic status older stuff has - like Escort Mexicos, Mk1 Granadas etc as they are too ordinary. Seriously, if there's ever a following for the non performance Mk3 Escort then I'll be amazed. (racing puma notwithstanding - volume counts for something here)

Talking of the classic cars of the middle aged men of the future (I hope I'm still one of those at 28) make mine a Merc 300sel 6.3!!



Edited by fozzymandeus

Peter - I aggree with your comments about Fords 100%; they have improved hugely over the last 10 years. My first car was a Vauxhall Cavalier Mark 2 1.6 - I thought it was gastly, and It never ran properly on anything except 4 star. It pinked all the time, and it used almost as much fuel as the 635.

I remember in 1985 my father bought the Cavalier Mk2, while at the same time his father bought a Mk 2 golf 1.6 auto, and a Honda Accord 2.0 12V EXI auto.

The Golf was about 10 years in front of the Vauxhall, while the Honda was another 10 again. We still have the Golf, it has done about 180K.

The problem with Ford and Vauxhall (and this still applies today really) is that they spend a fortune initially, but then don't spend any more developing the model, they just replace it with another car that cost a fortune to develop about 7 years later. Take the last generation Omega, that cost about 700 million to develop, and was never significantly updated, and it suffered terribly against its competitors. Now look at the Ka - thats a bastaard creation of a biscuit tin, I don't care what anybody says!

I have to say that I would not buy a Vauxhall - what's the point when I can buy Japanese for about the same money?

The same pretty much goes for Ford, although I beleive that they are considerably better than Vauxhall, especially the turbo diesels. I would buy a Focus or Mondeo - but they are still too common for me, I like something a bit more original and individual.

I used to know a chap with a Mercedes W123 5 cylinder 3.0 diesel, that did 490,000 miles mainly in London traffic. All the mechanicals were original, except for the auto transmission (which was rebuilt once). Ok so the rear diff was a bit loud - but it still managed to go 100 Mph and return about 35 Mpg on the combined cycle.

The car was eventually knicked and never seen again.

I am not sure that engines longevity has changed all that much, if anything a Merc does less now than it used to, so do VW engines and most of the non-Japanese lumps.

I think that the Japanese have come first in the build quality race - Ok so 20 years ago when the metal protection processes were not great they rusted, but now the boddies are fine, and the engines last and last, probably better than anything else on the road. 

It was not uncommon to see a Nissan Bluebird with 250-300K, and you can easily find Honda Accords, Mazda 626's and Toyota Carinas/ Previas with 200K still going strong.

This is why Toyota are the largest car company in the world, and produce about 6 million cars annually.

I had a Polo as a rental car 2 years ago fitted with a 1.2 3 cylinder engine, you had to thrash it to keep up with traffic, I couldnt see that lasting 200K, although this was probably the worst engine to come out of Germany these days (or wherever they make Polo's now - Probably Hungary or Bulgaria or somewhere like that in Eastern Europe).

I aggree that repairs are what kills old cars, or even fairly new ones these days. There are a lot of cars that get scrapped just because the auto boxes fail, and are uneconomical to repair even when 5-6 years old nowadays.

If you speak to anyone who knows their automatic transmissions, they will tell you that a Lexus has the best box in the world, and there's Toyota again!

I must confess that I do not really know how the big german engines compare with what was made in the 80's, such as the modern BMW and Merc turbo diesels, and 6 and V8 petrols. I have heard a lot of negative views though.