puntofan01 said:

Got to ask though, how many mpg does he ACTUALLY get out of the merc? Given how farcical the official mpg and emissions figures are these days.

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Given that the German’s aren’t too accurate with their mathematics concerning emissions and what have you I wouldn’t buy any of those figures ;-)

SB1500 said:

Given that the German’s aren’t too accurate with their mathematics concerning emissions and what have you I wouldn’t buy any of those figures ;-)

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Probably about as accurate as Fiat has been in recent years which is "not even vaguely" accurate.

You can look here https://www.honestjohn.co.uk/realmpg/fiat

Where people have reported their own MPG results and the site calculates the accuracy of the official figures based on what real owners are reporting. The 500 gets only 72% accurate the grande only 90% accurate the panda only 92%, however it's worth noting for small cars the grande and panda, their fuel economy figures where not great to start with and they still over estimated them
Remember Fiat are in trouble over their emissions claims as well ?

There hasn't been a significant increase in economy until about 7-8 years ago when manufacturers started taking things a lot more seriously as everyone went out and bought diesels instead of their more thirsty petrol counterparts.

And the MPG claims for the Twinair are woefully inaccurate.

Come on now, I am inclined to be biased towards Fiat guys. No secret there ;-)

AndyRKett said:

Where people have reported their own MPG results and the site calculates the accuracy of the official figures based on what real owners are reporting. The 500 gets only 72% accurate the grande only 90% accurate the panda only 92%, however it's worth noting for small cars the grande and panda, their fuel economy figures where not great to start with and they still over estimated them
Remember Fiat are in trouble over their emissions claims as well ?

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To be fair though, the Grande and Panda economy was seen as pretty good when they were designed.

puntofan01 said:

To be fair though, the Grande and Panda economy was seen as pretty good when they were designed.

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If you wear rose tinted glasses, absolutely, take those glasses off and you see the figures from other manufacturers.... like the Corsa D which got largely better figures than the grande... for example.

A very quick look at mk3 corsas, and there's no massive difference in mpg.

AndyRKett said:

Probably about as accurate as Fiat has been in recent years which is "not even vaguely" accurate.

You can look here https://www.honestjohn.co.uk/realmpg/fiat

Where people have reported their own MPG results and the site calculates the accuracy of the official figures based on what real owners are reporting. The 500 gets only 72% accurate the grande only 90% accurate the panda only 92%, however it's worth noting for small cars the grande and panda, their fuel economy figures where not great to start with and they still over estimated them
Remember Fiat are in trouble over their emissions claims as well ?

There hasn't been a significant increase in economy until about 7-8 years ago when manufacturers started taking things a lot more seriously as everyone went out and bought diesels instead of their more thirsty petrol counterparts.

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Fiat is around the industry average. This suggests they don't lie significantly more or, indeed, significantly less than anyone else.

what about the huge environmental impact of manufacturing a new car ?
No government appears willing to address this issue at present, huge economic pressures appear to trump the environment.
We need to be thinking much further ahead in all areas.
I don't have children but try not live my life building up debts , financial or environmental or otherwise , for younger people to have to try and deal with later.
Younger people are really getting a raw deal , successive governments living beyond the country's means, borrowing more and more without having a plan to pay off the ever mounting debt.

You beat me to it, lol! I had been thinking along those lines meself. The manufacturer scrappage schemes are even more evironmental bad news: by all means, recycle a car when it dies, but to scrap it when it's still perfectly good, just old, is unnecessary environmental damage.

The environmental impact of making new cars has come down significantly as cars built in the last 20 years are designed to use materials and be easier to recycle.

That said there is still a significant impact of building new cars, however the more expensive a car is for example a big Range Rover or similar the less likely it is to get scrapped, in fact the majority of landrovers ever made are still in regular use around the world. They still carry a great deal of use and value, where as a cheaply built car tends to have a finite longevity, for example mk2 puntos are now beginning to disappear changing hands for ~£500 which means one big MOT bill will see them in the scrap yard. This morning I followed a scrap lorry with a grande punto (08 plate) lashed to the back with no wheels and a thick coat of Alge in place of blue paint. Not obviously accident damaged but obviously not put on the truck delicately and surrounded and stuffed with bike frames and washing machine parts.
You wouldn't expect the same fate to befall a 08 registered Mercedes, BMW or Land Rover, too much value in those cars for a scrap Man to haul away the carcas like this.

So in short, building thousands of small cheap throwaway cars isn't good for the environment either, in this respect Fiat sits happily along side the likes of Peugeot, Kia, Hyundai and Vauxhall, producing thousands of cheap cars built cheaply not expecting them to last very long

That's not so much to do with the cars themselves though, more the attitudes of the throw away society we have in this country.

Think of how much energy and oil is used to manufacture a new car.
The metals need to be produced from their ores for a start (re-smelting scrap metal helps but currently not enough and still requires power )

I think some cars are scrapped because they not "shiny enough anymore" for the throw away society.

Following USA is not always a good idea.

Actually, I’d say it’s more like this.

My 12 year old Panda will continue to be used as long as it doesn’t cost say £400 in one go to fix. And I’ll use it until either the engine blows up or the bodywork crumbles. Easily could last 15-16 years. Same with any Fiat or similar ‘low cost car’

Whereas.. take your Audi from 2010... those will be scrapped much earlier because they’ve got idiotic engineering in them that means if you’re not loaded you’ll never be able to afford to buy the extortionately priced parts available at the dealer only. Therefore it’ll go to scrap because the people with the money to fix it aren’t interested and the poor buggers like me etc who are spending over the odds to buy and run the thing can’t afford to fix them.

And for the record I see a lot of 90s Punto’s - rough as they are now - I’ve not seen one with the extent of bubbled rust under the paintwork as I have BMWs from the same era. And I’m sure the Punto’s might still be on their original water pumps too ;-)

Main point being these cheaper cars are easy to fix and people like myself with not much cash will in reality shed out to fix them - who cares if I spend £500 on a car that’s only worth £500? That’s market value. Whereas a look at my car and you’ll see it’s in pretty good shape for its age, runs like a clock and most importantly is 100% owned by me. Why would I sell it and buy any other sub £1000 used car that could have way more serious problems?

I have seen quite a few "prestige" cars scrapped at under 10 years old. One was an Audi with a transmission problem with the parts bill of nearly £7000 + labour to fix. Otherwise it was almost like new.
Same sort of deal with a BMW X5. Admittedly they were subsequently broken for parts, but it is a lot of car to scrap for a single fault. And by the look of the "spares and repairs" section of a well-known online auction site, these are not particularly unusual.
Also had a colleague with a 5 year old Jaguar XF who was very relieved his extended warranty covered the repair of a failed gearbox that added up to over £10k. No possibility of remanufactured or second hand parts, apparently.

So, not entirely sure if expensive, complex, fairly rare cars with effectively only one source of parts are a more ecologically sound proposition than cheap, simple plentiful cars with parts shared amongst a range of models/manufacturers.

Without listening to opinions of what people say they have or haven't seen, feel free to do this

Auto trader app, set the maximum age of the car to "up to the year 2000"

So it will only show cars for sale that are older than 17 years.
Citroen 31
Daewoo 8
Kia. 1
Peugeot 115
Rover 115
Fiat 51

Then
Mercedes 449
BMW 454
Jaguar 213
Land Rover 296


The middle of the road cars
Volkswagen 412
Toyota 290
Vauxhall 182
Ford 341
Honda 178

So expensive brands have a lot more cars still being sold as running cars on autotrader, than both the cheap brands and in most cases the middle of the road brands, bearing in mind that the likes of jaguar, Mercedes, Land Rover sell only a small percentage of the cars registered each year compared to the likes of Fiat, Ford, Peugeot, citron and Vauxhall, the results as a percentage would show a massive difference between more expensive cars kept running and cheaper cars.

There is a huge amount of aftermarket support for German car brands which means many parts can be obtained long after the manufacturers stop making them and what cars do get scrapped shore up the used parts market.

Cheaper cars tend to be in such abundance that it makes new parts cheap it's not worth breaking the cars for parts. By the time the after market parts manufacturers give up support the ones in scrapyards are long gone making simple repairs uneconomical. I don't need to get into an argument over people's perceptions, this exercise shows that cheap cars don't stick around to be sold on, while more prestigious brands do.

That’s because all the 17+ year old Fiats are still in service and their owners are too attached to sell them ;-)

To be honest you’ll never see my Panda on AutoTrader because I’ll be keeping it til the day where it’s so worthless and old I take it to actually be shredded into metal shards. But it’ll still be a hopefully 17+ year old working Fiat, just never a part of AutoTrader based statistics

AndyRKett said:

I don't need to get into an argument over people's perceptions, this exercise shows that cheap cars don't stick around to be sold on, while more prestigious brands do.

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No argument from me, in the age range chosen you are almost certainly correct. Pre-2000-ish expensive cars have tended to survive better than cheap ones as they are still fundamentally basic engineering, albeit with some fairly rudimentary electronics added on top (much of which can actually be repaired with a soldering iron and a multimeter, or at worst an oscilloscope, especially if there is a worthwhile owner's club).

As the electonics get more integrated, and the mechanicals become more complex (think DSG, electronically controlled differentials, ECUs comprising multiple bespoke ASICs etc.) the possibilities for economic repair diminish, and survival seems to be favouring the simpler, more plentiful examples, especially where the electronics are less integrated.

Conversely, the parts which can usefully be re-used from a complex car with deeply integrated electronics seem to be reducing in line with the number of mechanics who are willing to work on them, as swapping mechanical parts often needs to be combined with some element of control unit reprogramming.

This is not a fixed rule, more an observation related to running, operating and monitoring a fairly wide range of vehicles.

As a trivial example of the effect, consider Fiat's Dualogic gearbox actuator. It is actually a simple device, but confounds many who fall foul of a problematic one because it is mechanical, hydraulic and electronic. So, even though it is fitted to a fair number of vehicles, there are only a few places who can actually fix them (as opposed to places who can fit a whole new unit, as long as they are available), thereby often causing the scrapping of an otherwise fully working car. (Ended up being simpler to learn how they work and get the spanners (and computer) out myself)

Going slightly off-topic, I have also struggled in finding independents who will work on DSGs, even for fairly high value cars, so any recommendations in Eastern England gratefully received. I have a Ford DSG which can only select reverse and it is baffling me...

Maybe we should all be driving Ferraris then - they hold their value well. Some of them even go up in price, so I've heard...

AndyRKett said:

Without listening to opinions of what people say they have or haven't seen, feel free to do this

Auto trader app, set the maximum age of the car to "up to the year 2000"

So it will only show cars for sale that are older than 17 years.
Citroen 31
Daewoo 8
Kia. 1
Peugeot 115
Rover 115
Fiat 51

Then
Mercedes 449
BMW 454
Jaguar 213
Land Rover 296


The middle of the road cars
Volkswagen 412
Toyota 290
Vauxhall 182
Ford 341
Honda 178

So expensive brands have a lot more cars still being sold as running cars on autotrader, than both the cheap brands and in most cases the middle of the road brands, bearing in mind that the likes of jaguar, Mercedes, Land Rover sell only a small percentage of the cars registered each year compared to the likes of Fiat, Ford, Peugeot, citron and Vauxhall, the results as a percentage would show a massive difference between more expensive cars kept running and cheaper cars.

There is a huge amount of aftermarket support for German car brands which means many parts can be obtained long after the manufacturers stop making them and what cars do get scrapped shore up the used parts market.

Cheaper cars tend to be in such abundance that it makes new parts cheap it's not worth breaking the cars for parts. By the time the after market parts manufacturers give up support the ones in scrapyards are long gone making simple repairs uneconomical. I don't need to get into an argument over people's perceptions, this exercise shows that cheap cars don't stick around to be sold on, while more prestigious brands do.

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Interesting stats - how does this compare to number of cars sold? From a market share point of view Fiat is relatively small in the UK compared to a lot of those brands - even the prestige marques.