Mk2 Golf GTi 8v on 199,600 or something like that. Change the oil every 5,000 miles, never thrash it from cold, replace parts as they wear out or break, usually with something slightly better.
I hate it that we’re facing a sustainability crisis, yet people seem fixated on newer, lower mileage cars. The absolute nadir of that particular lunacy was the scrappage scheme back in 2009 which wrote off thousands of perfectly good cars to keep big business happy.
Ditto the dedication of insurance companies to writing off perfectly sound vehicles as ‘not economically repairable’ on the grounds relatively minor damage rather than repairing things using common sense and pattern and reconditioned parts.
Our T5 has just been written off because of potential damage to the gearbox from a glancing frontal collision, which may or may not have caused internal problems with the box. In the real world that wouldn’t be a huge issue as you can source a recon box for a T5 for £1k or so, but in insurance world, it means there might be the need for a brand new VW replacement box at somewhere north of £6k or whatever.
And Catch 22 is that there’s no way of telling until repairs have been started. Which they won’t do because it ‘might’ need a new gearbox, which would make it ‘beyond economic repair’ because they’d insist on using a brand new gearbox even though a quality reconditioned box would be fine.
The whole thing’s a racket. As a society we should be buying less stuff and using the products we own for longer rather than getting sucked in to an endless cycle of consumerism.
