What car? Automatic with a £2k budget

Dunks

Dunks

Dunks

Soldato
Joined
31 Oct 2004
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Hello Motors,

I'm more of a lurker than a poster in this area of the forum, but I could do with your motoring expertise!

My girlfriend is currently looking at buying a car, with a budget of £2000. Ideally she would like an automatic as 95% of her driving is through London traffic, although I'm sure this probably hampers the quality of car available at this price range..!

Her current car is a 2000 Polo 1.4 auto, so she's after something of similar size also.

What would her best options be? Thanks!
 
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Is there any reason why she needs to change the Polo?

Only reason is at £2k not sure if it will get you into anything newer/better.
 
Yeah, I thought that might be the case!

I got the year in the OP wrong, it's actually 2000 (I think, X reg!).

She's had it about 2 years, bought for £500. The alternator has gone so with cost of a replacement + labour she was thinking of seeing what she could get for roughly £2k, but it seems she would be better off increasing her budget!
 
Dunks said:
Yeah, I thought that might be the case!

I got the year in the OP wrong, it's actually 2000 (I think, X reg!).

She's had it about 2 years, bought for £500. The alternator has gone so with cost of a replacement + labour she was thinking of seeing what she could get for roughly £2k, but it seems she would be better off increasing her budget!
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Well in that case you would get something a few years newer, but it would still be of an age where it has the potential to be an expensive purchase. It might just be worth repairing the current car, you could spend the whole 2k on something from around 2006, but if in a few months time problems with that start to appear, she might be left wishing she kept the Polo. Its a gamble unfortunately. But if I was looking for an auto at that budget, I'd be looking at cars like Micra's and Yaris's as they should SHOULD be quite reliable.
 
An alternator is not a big job at all, why not fix it, you won't get anything amazingly newer for 2k.

Otherwise I would recommend the Toyota Yaris.

Do not get the K12 Micra!
 
If you have some basic tools and a bit of time you could buy a used alternator for probably ~£20 and get the polo running. That could buy some time in order to save some cash for the replacement car?
 
Thanks guys, seems getting the alternator replaced is the sensible option for now!

It seems to take forever changing gears now sometimes when approaching ~50-60 mph, hopefully the gearbox isn't on it's way out!
 
Even if it was, given the start value of the car waiting for some sort of total failure would be worthwhile - it'll probably still be worth a couple of hundred quid anyway
 
Dunks said:
It seems to take forever changing gears now sometimes when approaching ~50-60 mph, hopefully the gearbox isn't on it's way out!
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If it has any way of checking the transmission fluid level, check it and top up if necessary.
 
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