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As above.
3.0DCi Grand Espace last seen 4th April, returned today, 2nd August after long, long dispute and then lengthy repair. Is this some sort of record?
The record will be set when it goes back in tomorrow 😉
who paid in the end?
I just bought a Kia Sedona.
Utterly fed up with french 5hiter family cars.
3 friends all have the big Kia and love it.
The Espace seems to be the worse.
Dear god, this must be the thread for people who've given up on life and are counting down to death.
Dear god, this must be the thread for people who've given up on life and are counting down to death.
...and yet you still decided to participate.
Pull up a chair, and let's all wait for the sweet release of death.
Look Daveyboywonder has been watching too many Top Gear repeats on Dave
Try getting you own patter no Clarksons.
I'm another Sedona fan, it's a big old barge but it can shift along when it wants too!
Shame about your Renault, what went wrong with it? Or is there a link to a previous thread available?
My Son in law borrowed mine the other day and it wouldn't start so they had to call the RAC out, (it was only a starter lead loose) but whilst they were standing there my daughter was belittling the old Kia and he turned around and told her he got called out to far less Kias breaking down than he did her Ford S-Max 😉 made me chuckle anyway!
Surely there are far more S Max on the road than Sedona's?
Ha, thanks for that Mastiles!
8)
I've had a Citroën, I know the pain of French motoring - 1 yr old car, needed engine rebuild and never worked properly.
Renault have eventually picked up 90% of the costs after a snotty letter to their MD
It all kicked off when the fuel pump developed a fault. Dealer wasn't confident in the diagnosis so suggested we start with the cheap repair (£2900). If that didn't work it would have to go back in for a new pump at £3900. Basically experimenting with my cash....
So hopefully resolved now with only minor financial pain.
it cost 3 grand for a fuel pump 😯
Nearly £4k for a fuel pump?!
Well the pump itself costs around £1200, it's the clean room fitting and having to replace every single other piece of the fuel system too that costs!
Since we took all the sulphur out of diesel fuel, there is far less lubrication than there used to be, plus they are using far far higher tolerances these days too.
Delphi fuel systems seem more prone to it failure than Bosch although I've known both go down.
This explains why Espaces can be had on EBay for pennies.
Courtesy car?
I've had bad experience with citroen and peugeot, which mean I'll never buy a French car again. Loaded with kit, pleasant to drive, but nightmare to live with. I'm currently with skoda and it's a world apart
Yeah I had a pug too (205, one of the early ones but it was quite new at the time) - the carb stopped working because a vacuum hose in the sunroof broke.
I kid you not.
Yup. Eye watering sums of money. The engine needs to come out which is >£1500 !!!!
Renault uk have come good on a settlement for work on a 2005 car at the end of the day. So car choice next time may be a conundrum.
Just hope I'm not back on here saying it's a crock again!
I was stung with an 807 pug.
I would not drive another peugeot even if it was given to me.
Long live the Kia.
To be fair to Renault i have a clio and its been a fab little car, close to 70mpg, 700mile to the tank and so cheap to run.
I think the french do very good small cars but anything bigger than Megan size forget it.
Just never use their dealers to fix anything.
anything bigger or equal to Megan size forget it.
Fixed.
Last car was a Megane. Fool that I was I kept it for 7 years. Eventually it died. Never Renault or French again.
Moral of the story, don't take your car to an incompetent dealer, which from experience seems to cover most Renault dealers!
Delphi and Bosch systems both have issues.
Delphi is more likely to give running problems, while Bosch is just likely to stop working.
If the pump packs in, dealers will cover their arse by saying the complete fuel system needs replaced, but I've done and seen plenty pumps done without changing anything else, and never seen any problems as a result of it.
engine out for a fuel pump?
£4k for a fuel pump?
Crikey!
Maybe the fuel pump has to have a special position to make it safer in a crash 🙄
They really need to make the people who design modern cars live with them for a year and fix anything that goes wrong themselves. That would get them designing cars better and easier to fix.
andyl - Member
engine out for a fuel pump?
If you have the v6 petrol its engine out for spark plugs or so i was told.
I also belive its engine out for the cam belt on it as well.
This is one of the reason why we ended up with a Volvo xc90 as a family car.
And this is why I will never buy a) French, or b) new.
I have an 04 scenic that has had some minor issues over the years but runs ok. The internal design is spot on if you have kids, shame the engine/electrics are pants.
why not new? If you get something with a long (5+ years) warranty and change car at the end it's probably the 'safest' way of doing it? Would cover stuff like the OP's problem.
Sorry, but that's a staggeringly naive way of spending your cash, wwaswas. Not new because although the 5-year warranty might cover £3900 for a new fuel pump, I'm pretty sure I'll have lost at least 3 times that when I come to trade in.
Buy a £6k second hand car (and £6k gets you A LOT of car on the 2nd hand German/Jap market), pay 2nd hand prices for parts and repairs, don't bother about dealer servicing, when you fancy a change sell it for £5k and get something else.
French cars? Had a Citroen Berlingo Multispace 5 years from new nothing ever went wrong (except for me crashing it!!) and we didn't treat it well. Still being driven locally by new owner. Having said that it was the base version with nothing much to go wrong.
I did have one good French car - a Renault Clio RSi. As above - others have found the Clio to be good.
I was disappointed to see that one go.
Several of my colleagues went through a phase of buying French cars a few years back - all of their cars were crap, including the Laguna which had catastrophic engine failure after a year (entirely new engine required), Berlingo which spent almost a year in the dealership waiting for a new dashboard, and an Espace which effectively consumed my friend's salary each month with a laundry list of repairs. My espace driving buddy had also bought his wife a 2nd hand Clio, which was the only one out of the lot which didn't have any major issues.
The thing that baffles me is that people keep buying French cars, despite them having a long-term, consistently bad reputation for reliability and high service costs.
Why do people still buy French cars? They are all, without exception, steaming piles of turd. If you want something cheap and anodyne get something Korean or a Skoda, no?
Oh dear nearly about to push button on Citroen Grand Picasso, *ponders alternatives*
Bimbler are you mad?
Bimbler are you mad?
+1
Really - buy something else, anything else, just don't buy a French car!
£4k for a fuel pump?
You could buy a mountain bike for that..... 🙂
ditch_jockey - Member
Bimbler are you mad?
+1Really - buy something else, anything else, just don't buy a French car!
Unless, of course, it is bought assuming it WILL go wrong - ie, spend £X on it rather than £Y on a 'better' car and use £Z left over to cover the repairs if needed.
ahem, ahem
Which? 2011 Car Survey - Most reliable new cars (0 - 3 years old)
Model Category Ranking / Total models in category
Scénic MPV 2 / 23
Mégane Medium 3 / 24
Modus MPV 7 / 23
Clio Supermini 7 / 38
You've got to love a manufacturer that picks up 90% of the cost of a problem on a 7 year old car - bet if it had been a VW Sharan (paragon of reliability that it isn't) then VW would have jsut laughed! BTW probably the same Bosch injection kit too...
marsdenman - Member
£4k for a fuel pump?You could buy a mountain bike for that.....
£4k on a mountain bike? You could buy a perfectly reliable second hand German car for that.
Ask dave_b on here about his "perfectly reliable German car". I've had 5 French cars over the years. All were great. Worst choice I ever made was a new-style Honda Civic. Reliability was patchy at best but the number of ongoing - and never resolved - minor problems was shocking.
marsdenman - Member
£4k for a fuel pump?
You could buy a mountain bike for that.....
£4k on a mountain bike? You could buy a perfectly reliable second hand German car for that.
Joking apart - surely for £4k it would be quicker / simpler all around to just drop a new engine in?
= one happy (ok, slightly happier customer) relating tales of 'good customer service' and they send the broken lump back to base for a leisurely repair (which is what I guess they did - can't see too may clean rooms being installed in dealerships...)
Actually yep - in balance i've had 2 Peugot's
405 TD which I ran till it died.
205 Petrol which also ran till it was sold for next to nowt as the MOT repair quote was £600 on a car worth about £1k. It was only a 1.4 petrol with circa 160k miles on it.
I certainly won't be in a rush to purchase a VW after someone I knew who's engine blew up in his Golf after not that many miles (under 80k I think). He had the car properly and regularly serviced and pampered it beyond what is normal for a healthy person. VW gave him zero help at all towards a new or reconditioned engine.