• Not really true. The chassis on certain ages of cars do tend to rust if not treated and looked after on a regular basis but the body on frame construction means that the repairs are reasonably easy and the cost is low enough that it doesn't write off cars.

    The powdercoat issue was only a real problem on cars built on the mid-latter part of the 90's.

    Barry Hart of Hartech (main rebuilder of the M96/M97/MA1 engines for the water cooled 911's) was telling a group from 911UK that Hartech used to buy engines from breakers, and also had a lot of people bringing them engines from cars that they'd bought from breakers to fit to their cars. What made them remarkable? A very high number of the supposedly good condition engines from cars that had been written off due to a prang were in fact buggered.

    The suggestion was that someone identifying a requirement for a £13,000 rebuild on a £14,000 car would deliberately crash the car to get £14,000 back instead of spending the £13,000 and ending up with a car that was still worth £14,000.

    How much would it cost to remove the rusty frame from a Cerbera and replace it with a new one, and would you get that spend back when you sold the car?

  • I'm not sure on the current cost of a Cerbera chassis but the chassis for a Griffith/Chimera is around £3,500+vat and an outrigger kit (the outriggers of the chassis being the usual part to be effected) is £600+vat.

    There are currently 20 Cerbera's listed on Pistonheads with the cheapest (an early 96 car - the first year of build) up at £19.5k. 10 years ago, when I was selling them, you probably could have bought the same car for sub 10K. As time goes on, they have risen in value as numbers have declined and the people that own them and love them are actually spending the money to keep them on the road.

    You've got to really want one though. There are a lot of other exciting options out there (V8 Vantage/991/F-Type R etc) that are a lot more modern for similar money now so it's definitely a hard market to sell in. I'd still have one in a heartbeat though and rue not buying one when I had the chance.

  • So call it £10,000 to re-chassis, lose 10k from selling it with a rusty chassis, or £20 k from your agreed value insurance if you prang it?

    Seems like crashing it makes the most sense financially.

  • Thought that the problem was that TVR didn't have any driver aid electronics to save them.

    I know of two that had visits to the scenery when lent to people and those people ran out of talent.

About