It's going to cost a fortune to repair my car - what to do?
How's this for an early Xmas present? I've just picked up my 2008 Ford Mondeo 1.8 TDCi from my dealer where it was in for its annual service. As usual they were giving me a report on how the service went and unfortunately they had to advise me that I'm going to need a lot of work done to my car, which I wasn't expecting.
Because of rust, repairs have to be made to the fuel tank, exhaust system (including a new catalytic convertor), the timing belt and a few other bits and pieces. All in all it's going to cost me over €3k. I've been with this dealer for a while and any work on the car was always done through them, so I trust them when they say the work is urgent. As the car has 193,000km on the clock I was expecting the timing belt to need replacing in the near future, but the other repairs have floored me. The car has always been dealer serviced. I had been planning on changing the car later this year, but now I'm not sure what to do. I could repair the car, but that will push back my plans to change the car and I'm taking the risk that nothing else would go wrong, while my car would continue to lose value.
Alternatively I could bring forward my plans to change, and hope the €3k in repairs that would have to be discounted against the trade in value by the dealer would still leave me in a position to do a deal. Any advice you could give would be appreciated.
Just to give you a good laugh, the weekend before I got the car serviced, my wife had ordered a new MINI Countryman to replace her Ford C-Max. We can't back out of that deal now. Had I gotten the service a week earlier, we could at least have postponed changing her car to replace mine! Timing is everything, I suppose...
Martin Moroney (Dublin)Dec 2014 Filed under: choosing used car
Expert answer
Hi Martin,
There's little else worse than getting unexpectedly bad car repair news, and we all know how it feels. Now, as you point out, you have, essentially, two options here. One is to trade in the car without the work done and get something new. Now, that's a very tempting option and one that would at least put you back under a warranty and give you reasonably predictable monthly repayments etc, all of which is good news.
The thing is though that your Mondeo is only six years old and to my mind there should be an awful lot more left in it. I would be tempted, especially as you've also just upgraded your wife's car, to take the €3k on the chin and keep yours going for a while yet. You're at a point in its life where the value isn't going to sink all that much more anyway, so keeping it an extra year or 18 months isn't going to have an enormous impact - with the age and mileage already on it, it's going to be at the lower end of the value scale anyway.
One thing worth considering: rust doesn't happen overnight. If, as you say, this car has always been serviced to schedule with the same dealer, ask them why the problem wasn't flagged up sooner. You may be able to use that as a bit of a stick to beat the price down a touch.
Let us know how you get on
Neil Briscoe - Complete Car Adviser@neilmbriscoe