Twelve Cars In A Year!

I decided to do this a couple of years ago, currently in the second year of doing it and i now own 24 cars!!!

Bookmarked ..i'm guessing that you're going to put them on the market as soon as you get it so as to be assured that its gone come months end?
Hopefully all this effort will show your mate that a cool car is very much a realistic reality.

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Incidentally, if anyone see's something i buy that they would like in their collection, please do feel free to let me know.

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might be a plan to give your location

Thats ok, I think you're probably being very realistic. I'm hoping that as the cars i'm planning to buy are at the cheaper end of the spectrum i will be able to sell them on again quite easiliy, and hopefully get my money back, i've got my fingers crossed anyway! But thats sort of the point of an experiment, to see if it can be done! Hopefully it can, as i've got nowhere to store any more cars! I think another problem will eb getting the dopcuments back from the DVLA quick enough to sell the cars on again after my month of ownership is up! As for insurance, this might be a problem, but i sold the sacrificial family car a while back and i was paying £890 a year on that fully comp, the Frontera is costing me £220 a year fully comp, plus £25 admin fees for swapping my vehicle, so maybe even with the transfer fees my insurance might (hopefully) be cheaper this year than it was for me last year.



Good thinking buddy, i've updated the initial start to this thread, i am in Hampshire, and to be more precise, i'm in Winchester, in Hampshire.

No then, as we're halfway through the month it's time to start thinking about putting this Frontera up for sale. But before i do, i figured that i was going to want some half way decent photos of it for my own records for want of a better word, so yesterday in between dodging the rain i managed to wash, polish, then find a place to try and take some photos of it, by the way, i'm not much of a photographer, but i try the best i can, anyway here they are...





My favourite one of the photos i took...







Although, i quite like this one too

I'm quite happy with how they turned out, and as you can see, it scrubs up pretty nice too!

So, without further a do, here's a link to my ad in the for sale section:-

retrorides.proboards.com/thread/175841/1997-vauxhall-frontera-580-winchester

Please forgive my ignorance, but what's a road risk policy? What kind of cover do you get with that? I looked into getting a traders policy, but I was told by several different insurance companies that you can only have a traders policy if your main source of income is related to car sales, or testing. Is this not right? Obviously I just have a regular job, so I didn't take it any further and took them at their word.

Wat a great idea!
Bookmarked!

I see, thanks hamps, i'll look into it.

Ok then, one down, eleven to go! I hate selling cars, the whole idea of it fills me with dread! And after my last car selling incident, i really wasn't looking forward to selling this one. However it needs to go, because i'm pretty much completely out of storage space, even taking up my parents drive, and my brothers front lawn! I have a drive of my own too, but crazily its too narrow to fit a car on, although i did once own a Mini, and that fitted on it... Just! So, i decided to put an ad on Gumtree for the Frontera, and included a small selection of photos, nothing fancy, just this sort of thing.



I didn't really want to list it on the bay of E, mainly because of the messers who infest it, and make sellers lives a misery buy winning things, then not turning up to collect them. I'd never tried Gumtree before, so i thought i'd give it a shot. I thought that as my original purchase price was £580, i would put it up for £650 to leave room for haggling. Withing five minutes of listing it, i had already had a couple of texts from people offering me a hundred quid, and they would pick it up tonight! Er, yeah, right-o then, come and get it... NOT!! I honestly don't understand these people, and i genuinely believe that if i had said, ok to them, i would've never heard from them again! The other thing is, all these texts were in text-speak, which i hate, honestly, why write "100kwid m8 n il pik t up 2nite" I despise text speak, i look at it as mindless babble from an under-educated zombie nation! Anyway, i thought i'd better respond as i think its both bad manners, and bad form not to, so i just said "no" and never heard from them again. I think that in my next ad for the next car i will stipulate that i will only answer phonecalls, as i think this will deter the non-serious people. Eventually, after my ad had been up there for three days i did get a phone call from a chap who wanted to come and have a look at it in four days time. I said that would be ok, but in the back of my mind i thought this was going nowhere, as who wants to come four days after making contact? However, four days later the fella arrived with his mate, and gave the Frontera a look over. The good news is that it was just what he was looking for, and he liked it. Then the inevitable haggling, i had it advertised for £650, and he wanted to pay £500. Fair enough, but that puts me out of pocket to the tune of £80, eventaully we settled on £550, and he was off down the road.



Now, unfortunately this did make me out of pocket by £30, which is irritating, but as with all hobbies, they do all cost money. Besides, a lot of my friends have a hobby called smoking, which i do not parttake in. But the average price of a pack of smokes is apparently £8.47, most of my friends who do smoke, smoke between 20 and 40 a day, so if we say the average is to smoke 30 a day, that costs them £12.70 a day, or £88.90 a week!! So i can justify my £30 loss to myself by saying to myself that if i was a smoker, i would have lost another £58.90 a week smoking! Incidentally, if you are a smoker who enjoys on average 30 smokes a day, it's costing you about £4622.80 a year, that would be a pretty cool ride in your drive instead, something to think about!! Anyway i'm rambling, so i'll get back to the point, what was it like owning a Vauxhall Frontera?



Well, it was pretty good actually. Starting with the looks of the thing, i think they look pretty cool, i like the chunky looks of it, i realise that it was a bit scruffy around the edges, and had the odd rust blister but to be honest, every time i looked at it i felt happy about it, i even liked that it has a black bonnet.



Inside the car was a pretty nice place to be, although the drivers seat needed attention it wasn't uncomfortable. The dashboard was clean and uncluttered, and everything worked. The only thing that did niggle me a bit was that the switches for the electric windows were down by the handbrake, what idiot decided that was a good place to put them? Why not put them on the door? Mind you, thats all i really had to moan about!



In the back the kids had acres of room! Infact, we've had a couple of so called BIG American cars in the past, and even a fairly big Dodge pick up, but this little Frontera is the first car we've had where the kids can't kick me in the back while we're driving along. This feature i liked, a lot!



The boot could've been bigger, but then ofcourse i've be getting kicked in the back by the kids, so i can live with a small boot lol!



The engine, this was a 2.0 litre petrol engine, which was ok, it had plenty of power, even enough to get a bit of a drift going on a piece of private road! For what most of these soft-roaders are used for the 2.0 litre engine was perfect. I must admit, i did try it off road, in typical city 4x4 ownership style i parked on the grass verge outside my folks house, and it was ideal for that, i didn't even have to put it in four wheel drive or anything! When i picked up the Frontera its odometer read 139590, and when it left me for pastures new it's odometer read 139978 meaning that in my month of ownership i managed to travel 388 miles. This cost me £100 in petrol which amounted to 93.56 litres, or in English, 20.58 Gallons. This means that on average i was getting 18.85 mpg!! Not the best mpg figure i've ever seen, and according to Parkers website i should've been getting about 23 mpg from a 2.0 liter injected Frontera Sport, but heck, it's an old car, it's been a long way, and most of my driving with it was on the school run, and around town, and thats never great for your mpg!



To conclude i can say that i really enjoyed my time with my Frontera, the drive was a bit bouncy and choppy due to its short wheelbase, and high centre of gravity, but driving it put a smile on my face every time, and i always felt like i was driving a full scale version of Tamiyas Wild Willys!



I know they look nothing alike, but thats how i felt! Yes it was a bit thirsty, and yes it wasn't as good off road as my old Range Rover was, but thats not what these cars are about, and i think if it had a big set of knobbly tyres, and not fat road tyres it would've been better off road, but most people who own this type of car never go near anything more off road that parking on a verge! Would i have another one? Yes i would, but maybe the next one should have a bigger engine, and maybe a bit of a lift, and some big knobbly tyres! Having said that, it would probably be as cool to go the other way, big engine, slam it on the ground, and add some big rims with faaaaaaaaat low profile rubber, i reckon that would look pretty damn awesome, and with the Fronteras small square footprint with a wheel at each corner it would probably handle quite well too!

So, onwards and upwards... NEXT!!!!

Thanks. I've got the next one lined up, I'm hoping to collect it on Sunday.

Didn't have faith in this selling so quick, fair play

Cracking write up too, my Discovery also has the window switches down by the handbrake.

Frontera's cant be too bad offroad, a guy drove his to the top of MT Snowdon a few years ago.