Time to replace the car, with an Octavia vRS?

Dav4 said:
Town driving about 24mpg, mixed 27/28, motorway commute most days about 30mpg. Life’s too short to worry about mpg if you want something with some power. Very easy to get a good remap on that engine aswell for around £400 which will increase mpg a little and add 40bhp.
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I agree when you're actually getting decent power for your 27mpg... Range is a concern for some though. Had this with the S2000 that does similar mpg and has a 50 litre tank - forever at the pumps!

Oh the Mondeo has a 70 litre tank! Well then, problem solved.
 
Thanks for all the replies. Certainly lots to think of.

I had a look on autotrader and there weren't many Mondeos about, and tbh 27mpg does concern me. Once my wife is back at work, she'll be using the car for commuting, and I think like that it's going to drink fuel. It doesn't matter how much power it has if it spends most of it's miles doing 10-15mph.

As with most German cars, the vRS looks to suffer with people not having ticked the right options when having the car new; having head the likes of auto wipers and lights in my French cars for years I'm shocked to not see them!
 
GeX said:
It doesn't matter how much power it has if it spends most of it's miles doing 10-15mph.
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How long is the commute? You seem to be looking at ~10 year old cars with relatively powerful engines, so are any of them really going to be significantly more fuel efficient?

Maybe drop the requirement for a powerful engine then?
 
It'll be about 20 miles a day. I don't regard 200bhp as a 'powerful' engine. It's just not slow and has a bit of poke. Looking on 'honest John', the vRS does 33 vs the Mondeo's 28.

I'm not expecting to see the ~45 the Clio does, but I was expecting at least low 30s
 
GeX said:
It'll be about 20 miles a day. I don't regard 200bhp as a 'powerful' engine. It's just not slow and has a bit of poke. Looking on 'honest John', the vRS does 33 vs the Mondeo's 28.

I'm not expecting to see the ~45 the Clio does, but I was expecting at least low 30s
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Out of 466k cars on Autotrader, only around 100k have a 0-60 time of less than 8 seconds. Anything 200bhp+ should be well under 8 seconds, so I'd say that was relatively powerful and more than just "not slow".

If fuel is £5 a gallon you're saving in the region of 50-60 pence per commute day on the vRS against the Mondeo. To me it's a completely different class of car so it'd be worth it, but I'm biased :)

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I was pleasantly surprised just how nice of a place to sit the MK4 facelift Mondeo is.

Almost purchased a 2.2D Titanium X Sport. The seats were so comfy, and the first car I'd sat in with heated and cooled seats which was novel.
 
I'm a big vRS fan, having owned three (Mk1, Mk2 and currently a Mk2.5). I bought my current car from new, and it's now 7 years old, 102k on the clock and for the main has been painless.
I did have an issue with an inlet manifold, which really shouldn't have cost me what it did and the best I could get from Skoda was 50% goodwill.
Otherwise just the usual, coil packs.
 
Dav4 said:
Behave! Your comparing a new gen Octavia that’s 6 years newer than your older gen Mondeo that was launched 11yrs ago.
If you put a 2008 Titanium X or X Sport next to a 2008 VRS the Mondeo craps all over it in every department apart from being about 0.5 seconds slower to 60.
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I was just thinking this.

When we were looking for a new car we narrowed it down to a 2011 Mondeo Titanium X and a 2009 VRS (so both were facelift models).

We test drove them and it was like night and day, the Mondeo was miles better than the Skoda (newer and cheaper). I was really disappointed with the VRS.
 
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Agreed, the Mondeo is definitely a better car than the Octavia of the same era. I considered a VRS before I bought my current Mondeo but I'm glad I went the other way. Once I'd gotten over the fact it's the "hot hatch" VRS edition, I realised the Mondeo is probably better to drive both in terms of comfort and handling, it's considerably better equipped, it's probably quicker (2.5t, or in the case of the 2.0 Ecoboost, once remapped (or we're talking about the facelift 240bhp)), and it's likely to be more reliable.
 
I too looked at vrs's but always kept coming back to the Mondeo - picked an 11 plate facelift titanium x a month ago - its a great car.
 
What if I remove the requirement for 'a bit of poke' - does Mondeo still come out top? I should stop thinking of this as my car really, as my wife will drive it most of the time; and it'll be left in a public car park and will likely have doors bashed into it :(
 
GeX said:
What if I remove the requirement for 'a bit of poke' - does Mondeo still come out top? I should stop thinking of this as my car really, as my wife will drive it most of the time; and it'll be left in a public car park and will likely have doors bashed into it :(
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If your just after something bigger than the Clio which has 5 doors then a mk3 Focus would probably big a good option aswell. 5k should get you into a 2011 mk3. If your wife is anything like most women drivers then she will really struggle to park a Mondeo or Octavia :p
If you want a massive boot but not really bothered about power then imo the Mondeo Titanium X is still the best option and can be had with a normal 2 litre 150bhp engine which are very reliable. Or you can still get the 2.5 Turbo with 217bhp.
 
Dav4 said:
If your just after something bigger than the Clio which has 5 doors then a mk3 Focus would probably big a good option aswell. 5k should get you into a 2011 mk3. If your wife is anything like most women drivers then she will really struggle to park a Mondeo or Octavia :p
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Nice generalisation there! My other half is quite adept at parking my Mondeo, her old work's minibus, her dad's LWB Transit.. :p
 
Howard said:
Nice generalisation there! My other half is quite adept at parking my Mondeo, her old work's minibus, her dad's LWB Transit.. :p
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Lol she sounds like a rare breed :D any woman I have ever been in the car with acts like a Fiesta or similar is a bus when it comes to parking. When I tried to convince my ex to get a Focus I gave her a go of my ST and she thought it was way too big to parallel or bay park :eek: despite driving for 8 years.
 
[TW]Fox said:
What warranty would be worth the paper it's written on for a 6k car anyway?
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Sounds like you've had some bad experiences - we've however been fine on the few occasions we've put a claim in (cars we're between 7k and 12k in value at time of claims).
 
[TW]Fox said:
What warranty would be worth the paper it's written on for a 6k car anyway?
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Is any warranty worth the paper it’s written on nowadays? You only have to look on PH for countless threads of companies wriggling out of work that’s supposedly either the drivers fault or wear and tear. Even brand new car warranties seem to be getting worse. Seen two Nissan threads not so long ago were they refused to cover a new clutch on a car with 12k miles and a DPF failure on one with less than 20k on both around 12 months old.
 
Dav4 said:
Is any warranty worth the paper it’s written on nowadays? You only have to look on PH for countless threads of companies wriggling out of work that’s supposedly either the drivers fault or wear and tear. Even brand new car warranties seem to be getting worse. Seen two Nissan threads not so long ago were they refused to cover a new clutch on a car with 12k miles and a DPF failure on one with less than 20k on both around 12 months old.
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To be fair, with enough bad technique you could wreck a clutch in a lot less than 12k miles
 
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