Rover
Posted by: Martin D on 07 April 2005
Gone tits up then, whilst the top few put millions into their own pensions, great.
Posted on: 08 April 2005 by Steve Toy
quote:A very impressive car and then you look at the price and it is a no brainer. No wonder taxi drivers seem to be buying them in large nos.
The Skoda Octavia is actually a pile of shite as a taxi (IME/HO)
I've driven an Octavia Elegance 1.9 TDi (110bhp) for the last three and a half years from brand new.
I loved it for the first six months but after then it started to go wrong and break down on the job.
Clutches, gearboxes, flywheels, water leaks, air conditioning, climate control unit, door handle cables snapping (this is a real pain in the arse), and the worst bit is the parts distribution - you wait two weeks for the ordered part and when it turns up it's the wrong one!
For a taxi I'd recommend either a Ford Focus, a Toyota Avensis, or even a VW Passat (the VW Group cars sourced from Germany itself do seem to be better made and have better parts availability.) The latest Mondeo is just too big and heavy for its running gear and suffers a lot of the same problems as the Octavia, although the parts do generally arrive within 24 hours.
The Fords aren't perhaps terribly reliable but the parts are cheap and available within 24 hours. The Toyota is just very reliable, and it's built only 30 miles up the road from here.
Posted on: 09 April 2005 by marvin the paranoid android
Landrover may be a sales success but from my personal experience (Range Rover) they are completely unreliable and corrode like nothing else on the market.
How many discoveries did they sell with a known fault in the gearbox? And how many are still out there waiting to fail - £1500 repair bill for the poor unfortunate who buys it close to 70 000 miles.
The purchase of BL by BAE also came out of our pension fund, something that we are now paying VERY dearly for. No doubt any rescue packages for the deprived area in question, sorry labour marginals, will no doubt be added to the tax/NI bill after the lies spread at the forthcoming election have successfully convinced joe public that the brown/blair combo (sounds like something from a transatlantic purveyor of inedible crap - is that a co-incidence?) is worth re-electing. To think that the next few years of power will be decided by Sun readers........
Furthermore, I started off with another of Birminghams famous brands - Lucas. Another victim of poor management and under investment. Now owned by Goodrich, and recovering slowly, but only because the Americans sacked ALL management. It was unbelievable how many managers there were, and how few technicians actually producing the fuel control units.
Present company Airbus is owned by Franco/German parent company EADS, and does it show. If you travel to North Wales on the A55, just past Chester look over your right shoulder where the biggest factory in Britain (brand spanking new facility) produces the biggest wings in the world. Investment shows in the final product, not just in machinery but in processes and people, after all we are supposed to be the biggest asset - is that why we get 'stripped' so often?
I only hope that in my personal case that the next 25 years is long enough for the cock ups in the 80's to be repaid into our pension fund, or all the cash I've put aside over the years will not be going very far, a very 'brown' future for me!
How many discoveries did they sell with a known fault in the gearbox? And how many are still out there waiting to fail - £1500 repair bill for the poor unfortunate who buys it close to 70 000 miles.
The purchase of BL by BAE also came out of our pension fund, something that we are now paying VERY dearly for. No doubt any rescue packages for the deprived area in question, sorry labour marginals, will no doubt be added to the tax/NI bill after the lies spread at the forthcoming election have successfully convinced joe public that the brown/blair combo (sounds like something from a transatlantic purveyor of inedible crap - is that a co-incidence?) is worth re-electing. To think that the next few years of power will be decided by Sun readers........
Furthermore, I started off with another of Birminghams famous brands - Lucas. Another victim of poor management and under investment. Now owned by Goodrich, and recovering slowly, but only because the Americans sacked ALL management. It was unbelievable how many managers there were, and how few technicians actually producing the fuel control units.
Present company Airbus is owned by Franco/German parent company EADS, and does it show. If you travel to North Wales on the A55, just past Chester look over your right shoulder where the biggest factory in Britain (brand spanking new facility) produces the biggest wings in the world. Investment shows in the final product, not just in machinery but in processes and people, after all we are supposed to be the biggest asset - is that why we get 'stripped' so often?
I only hope that in my personal case that the next 25 years is long enough for the cock ups in the 80's to be repaid into our pension fund, or all the cash I've put aside over the years will not be going very far, a very 'brown' future for me!