New car - TDI JTD or petrol...

[OctaneV8]

I'm painfully looking for a new daily car...

and coming to accept it will not exhibit the symphonious orchestra of a straight six or v-eight engine that now may be consigned to weekends only.

Looking for advice on where to get information about the following cars. Has anyone owned:

Alfa 156 1.9 Jtd (facelift 2003 onwards)
Ibiza/Polo tdi (polo mk6)

Will do 5000 miles a year... currently averaging 23mpg; I quite like the idea of reducing expenditure on fuel.


I have always found the forums useful for picking up tips on what to look out for when viewing/buying a car.

Found a 156 forum.

Managed to find a lupo forum a few years ago - is there a dedicated Polo or Ibiza tdi forum?

Edit- just found club polo

[chrisispringles]

Doing that few miles a more efficient car is going to save you very little. If you buy something that will average 50mpg then you would be saving a maximum of £650 a year. The cost to change and increased potential for bills involved in moving to a diesel could very easily leave you out of pocket compared to carrying on with your current car. Just something to consider.

[daemon]

chrisispringles said:

Doing that few miles a more efficient car is going to save you very little. If you buy something that will average 50mpg then you would be saving a maximum of £650 a year. The cost to change and increased potential for bills involved in moving to a diesel could very easily leave you out of pocket compared to carrying on with your current car. Just something to consider.

+1

One diesel related bill and you're going to wipe out any saving.

[roadend1981]

Diesel all the way. People go on about big bills with diesels, think its just because they bum petrol cars,as we have less problem with diesel cars than petrol.

[ZeeTacoe]

daemon said:

chrisispringles said:

Doing that few miles a more efficient car is going to save you very little. If you buy something that will average 50mpg then you would be saving a maximum of £650 a year. The cost to change and increased potential for bills involved in moving to a diesel could very easily leave you out of pocket compared to carrying on with your current car. Just something to consider.

+1

One diesel related bill and you're going to wipe out any saving.

I always find it amusing that people won't do this calculation before asking the forum how does I saves teh moneh.

[fangio]

Had a JTD, now have VAG Tdi. I've also had Peugeot Hdis and in my humble opinion the JTD was the best by far! (Waits to be shot down!)

[daemon]

roadend1981 said:

Diesel all the way. People go on about big bills with diesels, think its just because they bum petrol cars,as we have less problem with diesel cars than petrol.

I'm a motor trader and pretty much the ONLY cars we have issues with are diesels.

[Steve H]

Yep, modern diesels are far more complicated that the ones that earned the old "reliable" reputation and if they do fail four figure bills are not unusual.

Wouldn't a modern petrol engined Polo (or similar) do better than 40mpg?

[Baryonyx]

I wouldn't suffer a diesel if I were only doing 5000 miles a year. At that sort of mileage you'll probably see few trips where the diesel engine gets properly warmed through if you're using it day to day.

[edo]

an older alfa diesel for 5k miles a year? Wrong on so many levels.

[jbi]

Petrol all the way.

Diesel is just a headache both to drive (too much cog swapping), and also when they break (which they will) your cost savings are gone.

[GenePoolReject13]

I shall echo what others have said. Doing 5000 miles a year is pointless. The problem with modern diesels is that if they are not warmed up properly they can develop faults that can be expensive to rectify. If you where doing 12-15000 miles a year then you would be ok and the engine would be a darn sight healthier.

I'd recomend finding a petrol engined car thats both fun to drive and relativly economical. Your attitude may need to change for you to be happy. You can have as much fun ragging a small engined, small car on britains roads today as you can anything else and when not hooning have a reasonably frugal car.

[edo]

jbi said:

Diesel is just a headache both to drive (too much cog swapping)

Sorry, but that is just nonsense.

[jbi]

edo said:

jbi said:

Diesel is just a headache both to drive (too much cog swapping)

Sorry, but that is just nonsense.

As the owner of a diesel land rover, and former driver of an MG ZT TD4 I assure you it is not.

The only reason I keep my land rover diesel is simply due to the ability to run veg oil and the fact I use it for towing.

Otherwise petrol all the way.

[Leptons]

With that sort of mileage you want a small ish petrol engine. Most modern 1.6's should deliver 35mpg +

By the time you have bought your diesel and paid an extra 9p a litre or whatever it is you would probably be out of pocket!

[kambites]

Petrol. They're generally enough cheaper to buy for the same age and mileage that it'd take you some time to pay back the difference, and in my (limited) experience diesels are more expensive to run in other ways.

Unless of course you prefer driving diesels (some people do).

[edward1]

Just swapped my 156 JTD16v estate (54 plate). As diesels go I found the JTD to be more refined than VAG units of the same era although a little less economical. On the reliability front I had no engine issues in the 4 years I had mine ending with 160k on it. However for 5k a year I would avoid the potential for problems and stick with a petrol. At that mileage I would expect potential EGR issues which ever oil burner. You will also have the potential for a clutch and then the associated DMF. At the 156 age you avoid DPF's though!

Stick with petrol. Even after 4 relatively trouble free years and an average of 42-46mpg when I came to change for a newer car (with bigger load area) I have gone back to petrol. mainly to avoid the DPF issues.

[fangio]

My '05 A3 2.0l Tdi has no dpf....

[VolvoT5]

A diesel car will cost more to buy than a petrol and diesel itself is more expensive than petrol. In order to get the crazy mpg figures they need to be warmed up properly (mine does 35ish around town, only approaching 50mpg on the motorway, and it only gets warm after 7-8 miles of driving) plus there are issues like injectors, turbos, DMF and so on.

Can't see 5k miles per year is enough to balance out those additional costs. I'm doing maybe 12k a year and I wish I had gone petrol, the savings are marginal and I'm just waiting for something big to go wrong.

[300bhp/ton]

jbi said:

edo said:

jbi said:

Diesel is just a headache both to drive (too much cog swapping)

Sorry, but that is just nonsense.

As the owner of a diesel land rover, and former driver of an MG ZT TD4 I assure you it is not.

The only reason I keep my land rover diesel is simply due to the ability to run veg oil and the fact I use it for towing.

Otherwise petrol all the way.

Also as a diesel Landy owner I don't agree, well ok they are noisy, but you don't change any more often in them than you do a V8 Landy (of which I was driving one yesterday).