Mr & Mrs Moglet's cars [10,000 miles in the Tesla]

[Moglet]

or a Peugeot.

 

[Moglet]

I forgot to update the thread after getting the car back. They found that the ticking sound was indeed related to the exhaust system blowing and being generally full of holes and rust. We're getting the entire thing replaced with a stainless steel system designed to look like the stock system but with a bit more volume.

We haven't been able to work on the car much due to the weather recently, but we did make a start on some of the small rust patches that we could fix ourselves. In the process I discovered that the spare wheel well has already been cut out and replaced at some point:

and after checking beneath the sill plates it's all looking good there too:

The new brakes and pads have arrived so they will be fitted as soon as we can find somewhere dry to do the work. We've gone for Yellowstuff pads with grooved discs all round. Hopefuly we'll be able to work on it a bit more soon. 👍

 

[Moglet]

We've had an interesting week with the Supra. After getting a cover for it and making sure it's protected from the wind and rain we've been having lately we decided to take it to a local garage to get the brakes fitted since it was so cold out and I didn't fancy fumbling with wheels with numb hands. Here's all the goodies:

However on the morning we were due to take it in I found it had a flat tyre (thanks to the hedges nearby being cut and not cleared up) so tried to jack it up and swap the wheel for the spare. I made the mistake of using the standard scissor jack on the sills and then this happened:

So we had to wait until I could get a decent jack from a friend to swap the wheel and get it to the garage. The new discs and pads are now on the car and it finally actually brakes! The only trouble is that the power steering has started groaning and the fluid is suddenly quite low so I think we may have a leak, but that's the next job. We're also trying to source some aftermarket wheels that will fit the turbo with it's larger callipers.

 

[Moglet]

Some new wheels have arrived!

Fox FX004s wrapped in Yokohama BluEarth tyres, fairly cheap but they were the only ones in our price bracket that we could get to fit over the callipers!

Unfortunately I can't fit them as the car is currently back on the mainland getting a new full stainless steel exhaust system fitted, including new manifold and turbo pipe work. I'll post a video of it when we get it back since it'll probably sound a bit different 👍

 

[Moglet]

Vroom vroom

 

[Moglet]

New wheels are on:

Unfortunately on the first drive with the new wheels on the bonnet emblem came flying off and hit the windscreen at 60mph. There's no real damage to the windscreen but the emblem is long gone and replacements are expensive. Bleh. It's also pulling to the left slightly under braking which I'll have to investigate when I clean the ABS sensors.

 

[Moglet]

It's been a while since I posted anything here but a few things have changed. My CRV has been sold as we don't need 2 cars anymore, the Supra has been stored away until we have the time to work on it again and we've got a new daily driver; a Citroen C4 Cactus:

This was taken before they put the registration plates on and so far we've covered 500 miles in it. It's driving very well despite having a slow gearbox and a noisy engine, and people seem very interested in the airbumps. Over the 500 miles it's averaged 45mpg doing a mix of town and motorway driving which is better than our old Picanto, and performance is better than the Kia too. It's also very comfortable and my parents have a sudden interest in getting one after sitting in ours.

 

[homeforsummer]

One of the best interiors of any car on the market at the moment. Which engine have you got again?

The gearbox is something that takes learning. It acts similarly to that in the old smarts. Best way to drive it is in manual mode, and give a little lift of the throttle as you change gear, like you would in an actual manual. The shifts are a little quicker and smoother that way.

 

[Moglet]

I've managed to settle into the driving style required for it fairly well, and luckily on the island the traffic generally moves so slowly the gearbox is never jerky or awkward really. The only time it struggles is when pulling forwards uphill on our gravel driveway since it does nothing for ages then suddenly lurches towards the house!

The engine we have is the PureTech 82 Stop & Start since it's the only one that is offered with ETG. It's not the quickest thing in the world but it's more than fast enough for the driving we do and pulls surprisingly well in 5th on the motorway. It's certainly better than the Picanto's 4 speed!

 

[eiriksmil]

Oh my.. I love the Cactus.. It's possibly my next daily, that or a tuned, lowered Skoda Yeti.. Hey Moglet, can you check with the dealer sometime if they actually use C3 strut points? Loads of coilovers available for the 3, but none for the Cactus yet.. This car is a future classic and cult car IMO.

 

[Clark]

It was a shame I only saw the Catcus last week and didn't get to meet you!

 

[Moglet]

Oh my.. I love the Cactus.. It's possibly my next daily, that or a tuned, lowered Skoda Yeti.. Hey Moglet, can you check with the dealer sometime if they actually use C3 strut points? Loads of coilovers available for the 3, but none for the Cactus yet.. This car is a future classic and cult car IMO.

I could ask but it'll be a little while yet before we need to take the car back to them.

It was a shame I only saw the Catcus last week and didn't get to meet you!

Ah well I'm sure we will cross paths again at some point, at least you saw the car. My Yaris is still on the island somewhere, too.

The Cactus is still running very well, average MPG has risen to 46.6 after a bit more driving around town. 👍

 

[Moglet]

It's been a while since I updated this! The Cactus is still running well but the gearbox is the bane of my existence. It's an absolute nightmare in multi-story car parks as the car changes into 2nd as you accelerate uphill before realising you need to change down to 1st to make it up. It then changes to 1st but takes so long to do it you literally lose ALL of your momentum and come to a complete halt. The gear is then changed and because you're accelerating trying to continue upwards the car lurches forwards violently. It's averaging 46mpg though which we're more than happy with.

The Supra is, sadly, no longer ours. It was garaged for about a year and after getting it collected by a local garage my friend uses it was discovered that it needed a LOT of welding on the rear subframe and had a misfire issue, not to mention dodgy brake sensors and electrical issues. We decided it would cost too much to save it and sold it on to the mechanic (he used to own one and had a manual 'box ready to go in!) after removing the wheels and entire exhaust system to sell separately. It may sound dodgy but the guys at the garage have worked on several friends' cars (and very nice cars with heavy performance mods too!) for years and they are known across the Isle of Wight as being a decent, honest business so I've got a fair bit of trust in them. He also showed us underneath the car and it was going properly rotten!

However this isn't the end of exciting cars for us as we've moved house and now have a garage to store something in. It has to be shorter and no wider than the Cactus but besides that anything goes. Stay tuned!

 

[Moglet]

Wow, it's been over a year since this was updated! Our time with the C4 Cactus is almost at an end, after 3 years of mixed ownership. It started out well but over time both my wife and I have grown tired of using it and because of this we've left it to get dirty and generally a bit grotty. To sum up the 3 year ownership experience:

Positives

• It's averaged 46mpg over it's lifetime with a combination of small B-roads and larger A-roads on our commute
• It's pretty practical
• I still think it looks cool
• The Airbumps have been very useful in avoiding car park dents

Negatives

• The gearbox has made me want to drive it into the sea
• The rear view camera keeps glitching out
• The check engine light keeps illuminating at random, then turning off again
• You may as well not bother with the auto wipers at all
• The touch screen is next to useless 99% of the time (record number of presses to turn the Stop/Start function off now stands at 9)
• The sat nav is slow and often just completely wrong
• The DAB radio sometimes cuts out at random until you turn the car off and on again
• We drove to work one morning with no heating because the car decided it wanted to only be cold inside (seriously, my hands and feet went numb)
• It's so underpowered it makes overtaking genuinely terrifying
• The alloys have picked up crazy swirling from just basic washing with a soft mitt
• A whistle has developed at about 70mph

Basically I'll be glad to see the back of it now. Citroen decided to replace the Cactus with a new model that gets rid of the Airbumps too, so we're definitely not having another regardless of how good the new auto gearbox is. We've already ordered our replacement anyway. We've gone for a 1.0 TSI (115bhp model) 7 speed DSG Seat Arona except in black with a grey roof and in Xcellence Lux spec to get all the gadgets!

 

[Moglet]

We have an unexpected new arrival in the family! A colleague of mine was selling his 2002 Ford Focus 2.0 Ghia for £295 and as I'm going to be needing a car of my own for at least the summer I figured I'd take it for a drive. After taking a good look around it and driving it I decided I had to have it. The condition is very good for a 16 year old car!

I brought it home today and it hasn't missed a beat so far. The amount of history it has is crazy, it even has the original hire purchase agreement and Supaguard kit.

Here's some photos:

 

[Robin]

Wow that's organised! All that work and only a couple of hundred in the end.

 

[eiriksmil]

That looks super clean. I know UK used car prices are generally low but that was a steal lol.

I remember when the facelift came out, moving the indicators inside the headlight housing made the Focus much more modern and elegant. Especially in ST guise.

 

[Moglet]

Wow that's organised! All that work and only a couple of hundred in the end.

Yeah, the previous owner was my boss for a while so I know how organised he is. I don't think there's a single bit of paperwork missing.

That looks super clean. I know UK used car prices are generally low but that was a steal lol.

I remember when the facelift came out, moving the indicators inside the headlight housing made the Focus much more modern and elegant. Especially in ST guise.

I actually hadn't realised they did that during the facelift until you mentioned it. Now I can't look at the mk1 pre-facelift without my attention being immediately drawn to the indicators!

 

[Moglet]

We've already ordered our replacement anyway. We've gone for a 1.0 TSI (115bhp model) 7 speed DSG Seat Arona except in black with a grey roof and in Xcellence Lux spec to get all the gadgets!

Well this turned out to be quite a journey. We placed the order for the Arona on March 5th and were due to collect it on May 8th. On May 7th we rang the garage to figure out when to collect it as we hadn't heard anything only to find out that it had been delayed and we didn't even have a build date yet. Luckily we were able to extend the lease on the Cactus until July 17th which we thought would be long enough for the new car to arrive. Boy were we wrong.

Seat told us on May 7th that they would ring back within 2 weeks to give us more information but they didn't, we had to ring them again. This time they told us there would be a further delay and that we should contact Customer Services to try and figure out what was going on with the order. We did, and they got back to us after some back and forth; turns out our car would be delayed until the end of the year and even then there was no definitive date for collection.

We've since cancelled the order as Seat have really let us down. I can't even begin to describe how much of a pain in the arse this process has been, and it's put me off the brand for life. Yesterday we placed an order for something different and it's in stock so should be with us before July 17th meaning we won't be left without a car.

We've decided to go with a Hyundai Ioniq Premium hybrid in black:

While we were initially sold on the Mazda CX-3 the Hyundai seems like a better fit for our daily commute where we spend a lot of time in low speed traffic, and the hybrid system felt perfect for this on the test drive.

 

[Clark]

I used to turn my nose up at hybrids but my opinion has been changed now

Does this have an EV mode? And if it does what’s the range?

 

[Moglet]

I used to turn my nose up at hybrids but my opinion has been changed now

Does this have an EV mode? And if it does what’s the range?

It doesn't have a pure EV mode, no. It can apparently run on pure electric up to about 40mph but in our test drive the petrol engine kicked in fairly early even when just driving about in the car park, and when out on the road it was running on petrol in 30mph traffic until we started to really slow down. There is a PHEV Ioniq but it's not available on the Motability scheme. The hybrid gets a realistic MPG of 60-65mpg though so that's good enough for us.

 

[Clark]

I guess I didn’t mean a pure EV mode but you’ve answered my question anyway, that like my car you can run up to about 45 mph on just electric. On eco pro mode my car has a more travel in the throttle pedal and you can get up to 30 mph quite easily by just watching the gauge and not putting your foot down to hard.

 

[Moglet]

It will be interesting to see how it handles our commute in terms of running on electric, it's mostly 60mph roads but inbetween we always get stuck in slow moving traffic so in theory it'll give us the best of both worlds. There are also a lot of junctions so the regenerative braking should build up some energy from time to time. It's a shame they didn't have the full EV on Motability though, we've now got plenty of charging spots at work and as far as I can tell they're either free or super cheap to use.

EDIT: The black one we were "very likely to be able to get" isn't available, so it's on to the next choice; dark metallic grey (which we also really liked so that's not too bad)

 

[Moglet]

We picked up the Ioniq yesterday:

So far it's been fantastic, the only fault I can point out is that the rear boot spoiler thing blocks your rear vision quite a bit.

 

[Moglet]

Ioniq

We're now over 500 miles in and I'm finding it an absolute joy to drive. The memory seats means no more messing about with seating positions each time I get in after my wife has driven it, and the ventilated seats paired with dual zone climate control made short work of the recent heatwave. The rear cross-traffic feature means reversing out of parking spaces at the local supermarket is no longer worrying, and the blind spot detection is nice but really doesn't like me doing zoomy city driving

The engine can sometimes feel a little underpowered when going uphill but this is likely because you have to really push it to get the gearbox to kick back down, once you're in the right gear the electric motor joins in with the fun and this makes overtaking a breeze. One of my favourite features is being able to use the paddle shifters to activate Sport Mode (a flick of the left paddle) to make an overtake and then have the car automatically switch back into Eco Mode once you're done. Little touches like that litter the whole car, it feels as though they've actually thought about the use cases for the software. Regardless of all the fun that can be had while overtaking we're still averaging 68.5mpg.

Downsides? Well the reversing camera isn't great and the parking sensors are a bit over-sensitive but I can certainly live with that. There is a small amount of jerkiness when switching between pure EV and ICE (or to hybrid) but otherwise the gearbox is nice and smooth. Those are about the only downsides I can think of! Side note: The max pure EV speed of 65mph isn't strictly true in the right conditions

Focus

The Focus hasn't been used much recently due to having what I think is warped brake discs but it had to go in for an MOT on Friday. It passed with an advisory on the front tyre tread depth which surprised me, so that's good news. Not so good news is that the windscreen wipers got a bit tangled up when they were used in heavy wind and rain the other day, bending the ends out of shape. New blades should fix it as the arms and motor seem fine. The next step is to give it a decent deep clean and to replace all of the discs and pads with parts that aren't from a bargain bin. After that there are some minor mods that can be done to the airbox resonator to make it sound a bit better (while avoiding intake issues or heat soak) so I'll be giving those a go since they're reversible. I'd also like to respray the grille in gloss black or body colour, replace the rear number plate and badges, and potentially swap the chrome boot handle out for a body coloured one. The less chrome the better.

 

[Moglet]

An update, even if just for my own sake

Ioniq

We've almost had the Hyundai for 6 months now and while the winter has caused the average MPG to plummet to 61 (I blame my wife having her heated seat on for the entirety of every journey) it still feels as solid as the day we got it and besides the auto dimming rear view mirror being absolute arse no other problems have appeared. It's still a breeze to drive and suits our needs almost perfectly.

Focus

The Focus is coming up to 1 year as my car and I've still only spent £90 on a new battery and £24 on new front wipers. I've removed the airbox resonator but have covered up the hole left behind (before the filter!) so it sounds a lot better but doesn't suffer from heat issues and the brakes are no longer juddering like they used to which makes it nicer to drive. I'd still like to replace them at some point along with the rear wheel bearings which are starting to get noisy. Everything else is still working as expected with no problems to report!

 

[Moglet]

'Nother update

Ioniq
No complaints at all, MPG has gone back up to 64 now that the temperature has increased and it remains a really nice car to use for commuting.

Focus
It just passed it's 2nd MOT since I took over ownership; there was an advisory on the rear offside brake disc being worn or pitted but I was aware of that. I recently replaced the exhaust from the mid box back and the offside front shock but these are still the only replacement items besides the battery and consumables. The only thing that needs attention at the minute is the air conditioning which likely just needs a service.

EDIT: The A/C definitely needs attention, it's now blowing air that is only ever so slightly colder than it is outside

 

[Moglet]

Thanks to the government benefits assessments being carried out in the UK we're going to be losing the Ioniq soon which is no real loss as my wife now works out of the country for most of the time. The initial plan was to use the refund we would get as a deposit for something else, however fate had other plans.

The clutch (potentially the slave cylinder) went on the Focus last week and in order to avoid having a nightmare on public transport to get into work next week (4 different buses and 2 hours, really?) I decided to replace it as quickly as possible.

I'll be 34 on Wednesday so I've decided to be sensible for a bit before the mid-life crisis hits. I pick up a 2010 2.0 diesel Toyota Avensis on Monday. It's done 56,000 miles and, as you'd expect from a Toyota, everything is working perfectly. Even the leather seats are in pretty good condition.

 

[Clark]

The Estate one of those is something we may consider for my other half’s next car

 

[Moglet]

The Estate one of those is something we may consider for my other half’s next car

It's not something I even considered when originally looking but I'm glad I did in the end, especially as it appears to have a lot of optional extras fitted. I doubt I'll ever use the sat nav but its nice to have a reversing camera, full leather interior and heated seats