buying a new car advice

[nevermind12]

currently, I have a 1.4 engined car which I can get away with putting £15 on petrol for going to work everyday and 30+ mile weekend trips. I'm in the market for a new engine and since I have a family of 4, also wanting a bit more power what engine size should I jump up too? Would 2.0 be too much fo a bigger difference? how much extra would I paying on fuel? I do about 90-100 miles a week.

[Mexman]

9.80p

[oakdale]

Mexman said:

9.80p

I'd say £10.71.

[No ideas for a name]

nevermind12 said:

currently, I have a 1.4 engined car

1.4 engines is a strange number.
I would go for having 1.0 engine, probably located in the front,
or 2.0 engines, one driving the front wheels, the other driving the rears.

[HM-2]

nevermind12 said:

I'm in the market for a new engine

Are you intending to purchase it on its own, or with a different car attached?

[Sebring440]

HM-2 said:

nevermind12 said:

I'm in the market for a new engine

Are you intending to purchase it on its own, or with a different car attached?

The OP said quite clearly he's in the market for a new engine, so it must be going in his present car.

[Pothole]

nevermind12 said:

currently, I have a 1.4 engined car which I can get away with putting £15 on petrol for going to work everyday and 30+ mile weekend trips. I'm in the market for a new engine and since I have a family of 4, also wanting a bit more power what engine size should I jump up too? Would 2.0 be too much fo a bigger difference? how much extra would I paying on fuel? I do about 90-100 miles a week.

Perhaps a good place to start would be looking up your current vehicle's MPG figures. Autotrader has a MPG filter you can apply to searches. Have a look at a few vehicles which meet your current car's figure and have the other features you require. I think there may also be a filter for BHP - do the same with this one. Bear in mind petrol prices are low at the moment.

[RobM77]

Engine size on its own means very little. For years the fastest production car from 0-100-0 was a 1.8. This is particularly true now, because cars often use turbos to get more power out of a smaller capacity. My advice would be forget about the oily bits and work out what you want as an end result: performance, economy, reliability, space etc. Buy a car based on that.

[jwilco]

As above, engine size is not that indicative of performance. Some manufacturers will do a 2 litre turbo petrol with 120hp, another might do a 1 litre turbo petrol with 150hp. Then you probably want to throw torque, car weight and gearbox into the mix as well.

You can likely narrow down cars based on some stats from the manufacturer, such as 0-60 times or MPG and then go and test drive some to see if it feels a substantial improvement on your current car.

[RobM77]

Yes, I should add that even if you do look at engine power (which is only loosely correlated to engine size) weight is worth just as much. Simplistically speaking, an 800kg car with 100bhp will have similar straight line performance to a 1600kg car with 200bhp, because they have the same power to weight ratio. I say simplistically, because it's really torque that matters, and that's multiplied out through gearing, diff and wheel size etc, but yes, simplistically speaking, power to weight is a good guide. This is Newton's second law.

[RazerSauber]

This is where I recommend my friends to go to Auto Trader, click advanced search and put in the specifics they want such as body type, seats, doors, gearbox, MPG, tax bracket etc then pick something from there. Save going through each and every manufacturer and finding something you don't like about each one and losing interest. As far as engine size goes, we got a family of 4 and our associated stuff into a 1.3 Mk3 Escort and went to Cornwall and all the way around it as well as taking several day/weekend trips to Wales in a Mk1 Fiesta 1.1 (iirc) so engine size doesn't mean a great deal.