@Mol, honestly I didn't personally enjoy the testdrives I did in the gen 1 and gen 2 SLK but from what you described it could suit you really well. TBH even if you're not into power, the smaller engines just felt <wrong>, it wants to be an effortless cruiser and the little supercharged engine sounds lovely but it's always working, never cruising. Felt like 2 cars having an argument. If memory serves one of the ones I drove was the lowest power V6 in a gen 2 and that felt absolutely in keeping, not exciting but fine. A bit expensive to run, I think? Just swinging it through corners without hurrying was when it was best and it was properly good at that.
Meanwhile, the NC is actually a perfectly sensible car but the build quality just wasn't great even when they were new, they can be creaky and noisy inside and have next to no soundproofing and lots of not very well attached plastic. Soft top doesn't always age well and at best tends to be a little damp, very glad I have the PRHT even though it adds weight and complexity and rusty bootlids.
But also once they wear out suspension parts they often either get cheap polybushings (because oem rubber bushings aren't available, you have to replace whole arms) or more likely just ignored. And sorting it can be pretty involved. (mine needed actual warfare to get all the suspension apart even enough to do an alignment, and some of the bushings basically no longer existed, the car inexplicably still drove OK despite that but it groaned and shook and clanked and slammed. I think they were all original after 100000 miles and that showed both in condision and seized-in bolts and such. Once they're a few years old these just tend not to be babied and it really adds up by owner number 7. There are great examples out there and they start at 10 times what this one's for sale for and don't come with dents etc.
So literally none of the ones I test drove said "good cruiser", they all said "ratty weekend toy for ragging around and enjoying a bit of rawness". You can improve all that but only to a point. The 2 litre is fat enough to cruise around in OK, the 1.8 felt a bit empty to me and not in a nice way, it's fine when you really drive it but it <needs> to rev, the 2 litre likes to rev but doesn't absolutely have to. (compared to, say, the 1.6 in the NA which makes like 19 horsepower or something but it just suits the car completely, the 1.8 in the bigger fatter NC for me does not, it feels unsurprisingly like it belongs in a fiesta).
As far as this exact NC you're looking at, "the rust is fixed" could be good news or terrible news and tbh it's just going to be really hard to know because either way it's likely to have a load of underseal on, whether it's "repaired" or "bodged" or "just covered up". The great advantage mine had was that it wasn't in great condition but it was unmolested, I could see everything that was wrong with it. Don't rely on a mirror, they're quite convoluted underneath, get it jacked up, the seller won't mind if they're genuine and if they do mind I would simply not even go and see it
If it's had a proper and thorough job done then it could be a fantastic bargain but tbf I doubt it, it'd be a lot of money to fix everything that was mentioned to a good standard and nothing about the ad says "I've spent a lot of money on this", tbh the seller just gives me terrible vibes. "Practically no rust. The underside is structurally perfect" just doesn't vibe with either "it has rust but it's not problematic yet" like the mots suggest or "it had rust but it's all been properly fixed" as they're saying. If I'd spent a grand or two on welding and rust treatment I'd bloody well say so. (and if I'd done it myself I'd put an engine in it, nobody who can fix that rust themselves would shy from that). Best case would be pictures of before/after and work in progress, a good rust repairer will often do that. Or receipts, lots of receipts.
Rear of sills and wheel wells in general is the obvious one but tbh at this age will often have already been fixed at least once and honestly I wouldn't hold it against it if it had. The rears have a carpet-style liner which can hold water, as well as rust flashspots on every bolt and of course around the edge of the arch. Front can go too. Repairs should be fairly obvious unless they're absolutely drowned in underseal. They have full length plastic sill covers but you can see the seam and jacking points. Examine subframes, they're large and full of spots to fill with water or dirt. Don't worry about the braces and stuff except as indicators, but do check the bit that the central X-brace bolts to, it's really thin and also easy to ground out so it gets damaged. Tap it all over nonharmfully like you're looking for a secret door, and listen for differences, you can often hear or feel a difference between underseal-over-crap and underseal-over-steel.
Check boot floor right out to the edges (ie behind the wheels,visible from underneath), partly because this gets bad but also because people tell themselves it's "nonstructural" and it doesn't hit the MOT specifics for mounting points. Mine had no outright holes but it had sheets of rust like a shipwreck that just showered off it, the remaining metal is probably about a micron thick. Check for water in footwells and boot, it's not a problem to fix but it speaks volumes about the owner if the easy fixes haven't been done and of course it worsens rust.
But these aren't "the places they rust", these are "the places to prioritise", the entire underside rusts which is why "it's all been fixed" is so dubious. There are MOT fixes, there are bodges and there are full repairs, and you are in a casino.
But just on vibes, no. Everything says this is not an owner that does everything right and will tell you what sounds good, it doesn't make it a bad buy but it's probably not what you say you want.
There’s no way I’d lower a car
Why are you looking at buying a lowered car that has been messed around with then?
Mk3 Mr2s are less rusty than MX5s in general if you want other cheap fun options.
Also there's that whole "NC1 is an MX5 on stilts" thing, they are just very tall for what they are and a moderate lowering is totally reasonable considering that later cars were lower from the factory. According to urban legend they added extra ride height at the last minute for safety testing reasons, no idea if that's true or not.
It would be a very strange decision to spend £ks fixing the rust and then shop the car for bottom dollar rather than spending a few hundred swapping the broken engine. I would not trust what the seller is saying, personally
People do run out of money or love or realise they're in a sunk cost fallacy. But even then, if that happened to you, your ad would say "I just spent X fixing the rust"
The small amount of evidence suggests that the owner isn't particularly mechanically aware - they seem to be selling because the engine sounds knackered and they don't know what to do about it. There's none of the usual "it's probably X which is cheap to fix but it might be Y, I'd fix it but I don't have time/have another project" that you get when people want to demonstrate their awareness.
Why are you looking at buying a lowered car that has been messed around with then?
It's a blue MX-5 as per my wife's dream car spec and it's very cheap and local. And if it is indeed the case that the nasty noise has frightened the owner into a sale I could use that to my advantage. Sounds a bit like they've bought it from someone else who did stuff to it.
The biggest red flag for me now is that they have only replied twice in 2 days. Do you want to sell it or not?
The biggest red flag for me now is that they have only replied twice in 2 days. Do you want to sell it or not?
The whole thing is a giant red flag but you sound like you've already decided to buy it.
No, I'm not buying it.
The car itself was only £600 don't forget. It was never going to be a long term daily driver. You don't spend that little and expect not to have problems - not these days anyway.
Bad comms can work out as a good thing... Bottom line is for this sort of transaction to work out you're basically hoping that it's a half decent car but being sold very badly. Almost by definition for that to work out well you're hoping to be dealing with a crap, tired out or disinterested seller rather than a dishonest one. It IS a red flag but you are in red flag waters and it's a less bad red flag than others.
At the end of the day this one is selling for not much above scrap value so there's a hard limit on how badly wrong it can go- as long as you don't get trapped in a sunk cost fallacy. You could literally frame it as a ~£400 gamble, just be realistic about the odds. If by luck it turns out the rust repairs have been even adequately done and it doesn't imminently need more and there's no other costly nightmare like a bad roof, then you could win way more than the biggest loss you can possibly make. On the flipside if it's bad it has nothing recommending it even as a breaker so realistically you'd be scrapping it (and while you could extract some value from it, I don't think you'd want to)
But honestly I'm not even sure that a good NC would be the car you're actually looking for, and even if this car is at the top end of how good I think it could possibly be, I'm not sure you're the right buyer.
But honestly I’m not even sure that a good NC would be the car you’re actually looking for
What would you suggest?
I've already decided not to get a car anyway. But there have been no comms since I offered to come up and look under it The SLk in Troon looked really nice still though.. but.. no.. must not...
Honestly, not really sure- we want different things basically, I know the NC does what I want well but I didn't spend a lot of time on cars that don't do what I want, you know?
SLK is about the only thing I testdrove that falls into what you're describing but that's not enough to count as a recommendation and you'd probably want to spend more to get anything but the dregs. MR2 is a better made car and also generally less abused/has a higher class of owner so a cheap one is probably a safer bet, MGF or TF can be every bit as shit as a bad NC and does a bunch of things worse but they are basically cheaper and in less demand so you get more car for your money. Like, a £1000 MGF is generally going to be better than a £1000 MX5
Is RWD important? That ruled out a ton of otherwise nice cars for me but I'm not sure it makes a difference for you?
I'll backtrack a wee bit, on consideration it's not that the NC couldn't work for you, it's that you'd want a good one and they are a lot more expensive.