Nice surprise, nasty surprise

Isn’t it funny how just when you think things are going so well, life always then lobs you down a curved ball. First the nice surprise. My old Vauxhall/Opel Astra estate is now over 14 years old and I didn’t pay much for it when I bought it over three and a half years ago. Since then I’ve used it and abused it. I’ve spent almost nothing on parts – just a set of front tyres, windscreen wipers, stuff like that – very little on maintenance except for items like oil, and absolutely nothing on any other form of servicing. Yet it has rewarded me by being what I think must be the most reliable vehicle that I’ve ever owned.

I drove it quite extensively in the UK and since coming to France I’ve put many thousands of miles on it, including twice returning to the UK, involving a lot of high speed motorway driving, plus journeys all over the place in search of materials for the house, furniture and just visiting friends. And still the old girl hasn’t let me down. Except for a few weeks ago that is, when the alternator drive belt snapped over in the Gironde when I had a chest of drawers and a bedside cabinet on board, another chest of drawers in my trailer and a wardrobe on the roof.

And I suppose that’s what started me thinking, really. Well not exactly ‘started’ because I’d already been thinking that I would soon have to consider getting hold of a replacement vehicle. One or two things have started to go wrong – the air conditioning has never worked properly since I’ve had it, but recently the heater blower also stopped working, which made driving last winter rather unenjoyable and tricky at times when I couldn’t de-mist the windscreen properly. And little electronic warning indicators keep appearing on the dash display every now and again – I have no idea what they’re for but I bet they mean that a fairly large bill for something or other is just around the corner, they generally do. And that’s not all – I lost the rear exhaust box when it was clobbered by the road works in Plazac at the end of last year, it’s approaching the mileage when its timing belt will need to be replaced for the second time and to top it all, the front tyres are now down to the legal limit.

So realistically, it’s just about coming to the end of its economic life, as I couldn’t possibly justify spending the amount of money on it that would be needed to rectify all of those problems. However, it’s not that easy to find a suitable replacement here in France. As far as we British are concerned, as with several other things, the French have a blind-spot when it comes to used cars. Compared to the UK, the whole French used car market is grossly over-priced. After all, how can anyone be asking over 1000€ for a 1997 car (no, model as it was actually sold in 1996) even if it does have a CT (the French version of the UK MOT road-worthiness test), but the small ads are full of them, as they are of cars with gearboxes and engines ‘HS’ (hors service ie knackered and not working), which are advertised by sellers for a few euros less than the ‘normal’ price because they can’t be bothered to repair them themselves. But they expect you to after buying it off them without having any chance of knowing if what they say is wrong actually is, and if it would run even after repairing what they say is the problem ie only the gearbox, or the crankshaft, or the turbo or some other ‘minor’ thing, according to them.

So I’ve been casually looking for another car for the last few weeks, but without much success. My next car has to be left-hand drive but it would be difficult for me to get it from Belgium or Holland the way that some people do because the prices there are more reasonable compared to France. I would also prefer a diesel because the fuel is so much cheaper in France than petrol/gasolene, making for considerably reduced running costs. I thought therefore, that I might go for a diesel Renault Scénic, that was until I read the English internet owner forums and the small ads more thoroughly.

I’m afraid the conclusion that I came to is that French cars are just not that reliable. On the English forums I frequently read of huge electronic problems – Scénics and Clios whose electronic key cards had arbitrarily ceased to work, rendering vehicles totally immobile, requiring them to be re-programmed or have parts of their systems replaced at huge cost. Nice-looking, low-mileage Citroëns (C5, C4, C3) with so many complex electronic problems after less than 10 years use that even the manufacturer’s agents couldn’t solve, necessitating the owners disposing of them for scrap or ‘parts’ at huge losses. And I have been gob-smacked by the number of Renaults and Peugeots I’ve seen that in their short lives have had head gaskets replaced, new water and fuel pumps, new turbos, new central locking and new electric window motors to name just a few, all of which their proud owners, who are trying to get rid of them, say that they have a wad of invoices for. And then I’ve looked at what my little Astra has cost me in the time that I’ve owned it and despaired.

And my Astra is far from being an ‘old banger’. It’s the Elegance model that comes with features such as cruise control and alloy wheels and as it is also automatic, I was becoming resigned to taking a bit of a climb-down for my next car. That was until just the other day when I was speaking to my mother on the phone. I was just talking about these kinds of problems, as you do, and saying how I was searching for another car that would meet my needs but that with my budget, I’d be unable to buy the car that I’d really like. To my complete surprise, she said that in that case, she’d let me have the difference, as a kind-of belated birthday present, if you like. That was the nice surprise and that’s the reason why I’m about to become the proud new owner of the little beauty shown below.

It’s a Kia Sportage, a car that I’ve always loved. Not only is it not French but it’s also one of the most reliable cars manufactured anywhere in the world. The one I’m buying is a 2006 model with a 2 litre diesel engine and an automatic plus sequential gear box. It’s also the ‘XS’ version which is the top of the range with cruise control, heated leather seats, climate control and other ‘goodies’. It has electronic 4-wheel drive, which will be very handy down here in the Dordogne if/when we get heavy winter snows again and also on the airfield so I should at least never get bogged-down again the way that I did earlier this year. And it has a reputed top speed of just under 110 mph, not that that was a factor as far as I was concerned, with an overall fuel consumption of around 38 mpg, which definitely was.

I had hoped to get the sale sorted within a few days, but in France this seems to be well-nigh impossible. The transfer of ownership is a tortuous process. If you lose the registration document or it’s stolen before it’s put into your name and you can’t, for some reason, contact either the previous owner or the garage you bought it off, it’s technically impossible for you to get hold of another and the car is therefore rendered practically worthless even if it’s only a few years old. Also, although a CT (compulsory French road-worthiness test) lasts for 2 years, when you sell a car, you must have another CT done for the new owner if the existing one was done more than 6 months before the date of the sale. And finally, all cars with ‘old style’ number plates have to be re-registered with ‘new style’ plates in the name of the existing owner before the car is sold and ownership transferred to the purchaser. So whereas I thought I’d be able to pick the car up and pay the outstanding amount within a few days of seeing it on Wednesday, it appears that it could take anything up to two weeks for that to be possible, for goodness sake! But nothing can be done to speed things up – after all, this is France 😐

OK, you say, so what was the nasty surprise? Well, I switched on and used my PC quite normally this morning, then switched it off and went off for a couple of hours to do a few things. When I came back aqnd switched my PC on again, it failed to boot up. It’s now not recognizing the boot (C:) drive and Windows has just decided without any warning to stop working. I can’t say that this is the first time this has happened but in the past, when I was still running my business, it was much more fraught because if I hadn’t done a recent back-up, it meant that I’d lost my accounts, Office files and all of my email records. Now it’s not so important but it’s just so ruddy annoying and pathetic that software designed and created by so-called professionals and that you have paid good money for, can in this day and age behave in such a way. God Bless Microsoft – NOT 🙁

It’s Saturday May 17 and I’ve just come back to say that after trying to boot my PC several times yesterday and having given up, this morning I tried to boot from the CD to see if I could repair my XP operating system. It wouldn’t have it, but after a couple of tries the PC entered set-up mode. It wouldn’t do that yesterday so that was encouraging and sure enough, after I’d gone through the set-up procedure, it booted up normally. So for now I’ve got my PC back, although experience says to be very wary, back up everything important and then wait for it to pack up again in the near future, probably terminally. The last thing I want to do is shell out for a new motherboard and processor but it looks as though I’m going to have to bite the bullet and do so in the very near future 😡