Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2004 21:11:56 -0000 From: David Taylor <djtaylornospamoot.com> Subject: Re: 1987 saab 9000 turbo and CLOUDS OF WHITE SMOKE
> Selling/Scrapping it at a loss, and buying another unknown car for the > rest of the winter as another winter/beater car, that may equally have > unknown problems of the same or worse magnitude. To put this in perspective, long time readers may remember my tale of woe last year with a blown head gasket. In short, I paid £1200 for a Saab 9000 2.0t because I needed a car quickly, like the next day and this was a local buy and it had A/C. My criteria being that I wanted a car for under £2000 with A/C. I had been perfectly happy with the car, an exhaust change and a set of tyres and a service. Then one day the head gasket went, no white smoke but in short the head cracked so not just a new gasket but head too (second hand but then reworked). Now in the grand scheme of things, some people would say that it wasn't worth repairing, especially as this turned out to be a protracted repair fraught with problems from someone that didn't really know Saab's. In the end the car was taken to a main dealer and I had the option of also having the timing chain done at the same time. I went for the full hog of new sprockets and associated bits. The grand total was just over £2000. So is it wise to spend that much on a car that cost almost half? Sure why not, the car still runs, plenty of life left. On the other hand, which is more dumb, buying a car that over the cost of nearly two years has cost me around £3500 (inc services and consumables like tyres) OR buying a brand new car for say £15k to £20k and watching say £6000 of that get lost in the first year in depreciation alone? With an old car I figure you can keep buying near to scrappers and just throwing them away or you can get one at residual value and just keep topping up what is a solid car to keep it going. I liked my purchase so much, I bought a second one but the second one is a 9000 Aero which I've hardly driven as it's in store until I move house. The only difference is that I'm going back to my younger days where I used to do all my maintenance myself instead of filling the pockets of a main dealer to the tune of £400 for a gasket change and another £400 labour for chains. David.
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