Car appreciation... the aesthetics, the engineering, etc

We've already got him down to £15k!

My potential buyer wants to pay 14, question is how close I can get him to what I’d like for the car.

send him a pic with fenella sitting on the bonnet in her bathers...

[don't tell her i said that]

Why not post it on here to hook any potential buyers*

*pic of fenella obvs

Meet in the middle at 15k and both go on your merry ways? Although I do find it hard to take any offers seriously unless given when viewing.

Or I could pose in my bathers to scare off any tyre kickers?

how you getting on with the sale of your panda dude?

oh @nefarious did you sort tyres for your e46? might be needing new rubber myself

Uncle has one, he loves it, I love it, stock exhaust sounds great (to me).

EDIT just realised he has the C63...

A dealer offered me enough cash and the promise of collecting it the next morning with a truck that I bit his hand off at the prospect of an easy sale. So it's gone 😥

Plus side is I really like the C-Max. As boring a car as it is, it's really easy to drive (my first auto), there's loaaaads of space (just waiting for the fittings to fit my bars from the Panda to the roof - oddly, the bars from the Panda are technically 10cm too long for the C-Max - then I'll have the roof box back on for dedicated muddy pushchair duties), and I'm enjoying the additional grunt whilst at the same time not scared that it will launch me into a bus stop. Feels like a proper dad wagon. Much easier to get mini_com in and out of her contraption too.

The rear seats do this cool thing where the middle folds up and out of the way and the two side seats slide backwards and inwards, making it a very roomy 4 seater, should the need arise.

sweet. it was your comment about tyre kickers that made me wonder if the ebay idea is just too full of them to make worthwhile. i rarely see a car on there where the seller hasn't included a note about timewasters.

hope dealer will sort the panda and get it back on the road. sounds right.

as for the C-Max am glad to hear it is ticking the boxes. i have different boxes. but love that you can reuse the roof box rack and those rear seats sound well thought through too.

sounds like the smiles per mile should be up there

Even if it extends the life of other Pandas, I'm happy. The stereo is worth about half of what he paid alone, I just couldn't be arsed parting it out and listing separately.

There were a lot of annoying questions and shitty offers/demands, but it was easy enough to ignore the dickheads.

"Can you take 1000 photos of the interior?" - fuck off mate, it's cheap.

Almost did, realised I was looking at the wrong size. Then realised the actual size tyres I needed are more expensive and gave up.

I think I was gonna go with Avon ZV7’s in the end. Supposed to be alright, but not quite in the premium end of the market.

ah cheers dude. guess you don't need them just yet. got MOT in Dec and to my eyes mine are looking a little needy.

I won't be going premium end as my old E46 is a banger compared to yours. but will see if I need to sort. will check out the Avon ZV7s in among others.

Has anyone owned a car for a long time but only recently discovered a new feature?

Just realised I can put the key into the rear middle belt socket, this makes it disconnect and neatly retract into the roof. Very satisfying.

We had an A4 and it took us about 2 years before we discovered that the top boot liner had two sprung t-shaped pieces of plastic. These pieces of plastic were designed to flip down so you could hook your carrier bags over them to hold them upright. This meant that your weekly shop did not fall over as you drove home. A genius feature we completely overlooked and only discovered after an embarassingly long time.

That feature did not make it into next gen A4 we replaced it with. After a brand loyalty that stretches back 5 consecutive cars, this very well may be our last Audi.

Our Volvo 240 had something similar - a bungee cord I looped from one seatbelt fixture through all the bag handles to the other seatbelt fixture. So you could slide round the roundabout on the way out of sainos without a worry.

My old A6 had mesh pockets on the back of the seats. It had covered cubby holes in the boot. It had CD player in the boot too. It had drawers under the front seats too. New A6 has none of these and it pisses me off!

My Yaris has an exciting futuristic VFD digital dash that dims itself when you turn the headlights on, which is not so great if you're just putting them on cos it's a bit gloomy or foggy or you're pretending you live in Sweden and/or that you have a nice modern car with DRLs.

I was seriously considering getting the soldering iron out, but then completely accidentally discovered you can hit the Mode button (which normally just toggles km/h and mph, so you'd never touch) to switch back to full brightness.

These pieces of plastic were designed to flip down so you could hook your carrier bags

Funny you say that, that was the last thing I discovered on the Outback

I know! Why is it an easter egg! It should be much higher up in the feature list and even be in the TV ads.

Ooft, good tekkers.

Under floor storage in the rear footwell. Hidden away so well that I can only assume they were designed for drugs. Can’t really see the vw touran as the vehicle of choice for a successful drug dealer 🤔

Tbh, I’m coming round to acknowledging that it’s just a daily and trying to not be too precious about it. Don’t want to just throw cash at it. A 2L diesel estate is never gonna be a racer. But I do really like it, and not being too precious about it will probably aid my enjoyment!

If I magically came into shitloads of cash I’d definitely put some daft bits on it tho.

On my first car, a Vauxhall corsa which I loved dearly. “Follow me home” lights. Flashing the headlights after removing the key and opening the door puts the full beam lights on for 30 seconds so you can see where you’re walking. Discovered by accident
Also holding the lock/unlock buttons on the key closes/opens the front windows.