I doubt the seats will if they have 12 years of piss stains on them

I've been doing 30k miles/yr in a Scirroco 2.0T TSI GT DSG, it's averaged 38mpg surprisingly but the thing is really annoying me with all the road noise and rattle now

 

If you'd bought something italian ... it would be lighter and faster by now

 

true
I'm just eying up a Forester STi to inject some winter interest

 

Funny things, squeaks & rattles.

You don't notice them in the 86 & S2000 (you can barely hear it if something drops off that!) but the Legend is so quiet, the tiniest squeak from the air vent or the passenger speaker area on some road surfaces is enough to drive one to distraction. Percussion does not work like it did on earlier, flimsier Hondas.

The loose hinge on the glovebox was an easy fix.

This rain stuff's funny; makes no appreciable difference to acceleration. Or handling, if you apply power when the steering starts to go tingly & light.

 

Well .. it died tonight. Electrically, coilpack / plug or leads or all of them - on the plus side, the ECU threw a nice code for my friendly garage who ( having worked on loads of these and Puntos) is confident i'll have it back tomorrow. We both agreed after 6 months sat doing SFA, 600 miles of commuting would throw one or two age related issues up

Fiat parts are cheap as chips, probably to do with lots of demand creating lots of supply

Both coil packs, 4 leads and 4 plugs inc labour to fit still comes to less than the price of one Coil pack from Honda.

edit: And that's it fixed. Coilpacks died Replaced with 2 new ones, set of leads and plugs and it's happy as.

edit2: 3 of the 12 bolts holding the fuel pump into the tank were missing, replaced those - pump is now properly sealed into tank = no more problems with the tank when it gets less than half full. WIth the coils, leads and plugs replaced .... it really has pepped up the engine and should mean better mpg too.

 

Missed that!

I bought an SWE1000 and fitted it under the seat and changed out the crap 4" dash speakers to something a little better - with the bass turned down and the sub turned up, you'd swear there was a much better system in there than there really is

Ended up changing both Lambda sensors, they were well out of range and fitted a new fuel filter - the old one was full of bits of fuel tank. I suspect ( good job they're cheap i.e. < 40 quid for a tank) that i'll end up fitting a new fuel tank eventually.

Combination of the above work and it's sipping fuel at a very acceptable rate and with a decent stereo fitted, it's almost a pleasant place to be.

 

Somewhere between pages one and two it changed from an economy transport thread to a rolling restoration project!

 

In fairness many of us clocked it would go this way as soon as 'Fiat' was mentioned

 

I quite like driving the thing, much to my annoyance - i'm just being careful to make sure whatever I do buy can be sold on if needed. My interest in the oily and mechanical bits only goes as far as keeping it reliable and safe. Realistically it's saved me getting a new soft top fitted, new winter tyres, more stone chips, 1500 miles a month etc and that's before you chuck in the fuel savings. It will always be worth £600 to someone as a run around

I can drive around in something cheap, i just can't drive around in something that looks like the owner couldn't give a toss about it. I can't fix the permanently faded paint but there's some cosmetic things that can be done that only cost a bit of time

Case in point are the fog lights ....





12 quid including postage from Poland and a couple of hours tinkering to get them to fit.

 

You can have faultlessly reliable with very expensive parts or less reliable throw away parts that are as cheap as chips - the stuff i've had to change i'd expect to change on any car of this age. Not like my S2000 hasn't eaten its way through replacement parts

edit: Fuel consumption seems pretty much fixed at between 55mpg and 60mpg which is pretty much double that of the S2000.