Lol why is that Jane woman stalking me!
Most strange, Im taken hunni sorry!
My point was that for people that just want a new, clean, tidy, "reliable" car, who don't want a Supra, or an EVO with 650BHP on tap etc etc then an Astra makes a reasonably good car.
Lets be serious here... you would not spec a blade server or a Dual Socket Quad Xeon monster for your mum or sister to browse the web on, you would recommend a generic, rubbish, slow PC, that gets the job done and no more.
There is no problem with the choice of car, nor generally speaking, its reliability OR performance (and yes, its woeful, but not as literally life sappingly woeful as the 1.4)
I have driven a staggeringly large amount of modern cars, and while most are totally devoid of character, feel, dynamics etc... things have certainly moved on, and £5K (I hope) on an Astra is certainly not the end of the world as we know it, and could almost be classified as a sensible choice for a young person on a budget.
I'm not really sure this needs to be about the car, but should be more about whether he got good value for money, and i really hope for his sake he did NOT pay £10K for it. Having said that, why are people saying he could have got a flipping V8 Jag for the same money?!! One is a clapped out gas guzzler that will cost him limbs to fix, the other is a cheap, light, run around, that looks modern and tidy....
OP, was it £10k ? You could have bought speedboat for that!?! LULZZ LOL ETC