£1500, fun and 30mpg plus... what would you buy?

It's a good question, isn't it? Particularly if, like me, you happen to have that budget, and those requirements from a car. £1500 gets you a surprising amount these days, anything from tidy superminis, MPVs and third-hand family cars to classic roadsters, hot hatches and sports saloons. Some will make great runarounds or first cars and others fun weekend toys.

But, if you're like me (young, skint, and like a bit of fun from your car now and then) you might find your choice rather more limited. Sure, you can find plenty of old hot hatches at this price, but unfortunately many have been ragged to within an inch of their lives by now, and insurance is still very expensive even with a few years no-claims behind you. Such is the plight of the young driver.

However, hope is in store. There are still choices out there, if you look hard enough, that will provide you with fun and reliable motoring, but importantly, not emptying your wallet come renewal time or at the pumps. With fuel prices as they are, easily doing more than 30mpg is virtually essential nowadays. Below is a selection of cars that meet the above criteria. What would you buy?

BMW 316i/318i (E30)

The E30 3-series is slowly becoming a collectors' item. Partly due to it being an important model for the marque, and partly to ensure the survival of original cars before they're all snapped up by the tuning brigade. The 316i and 318i aren't the fastest, but they are both cheap to run and the £1500 budget will get a model in very nice condition. A bit of rear-wheel drive fun to start the list.

Honda CRX ESi (3rd gen)

Having seen the success of Mazda's MX5, Honda decided to make their own sports car based on the Civic. It wasn't as light and loony as the model that preceded it, but it has it's own character and roof-out fun. The ESi has roughly 120bhp, does almost 40mpg and is much cheaper to insure than the screaming VTi.

Honda HR-V

A choice from way out at left-field here. You might not have expected to see a small 4x4 here - after all, they're not known for their great fuel economy or fun. Yet Honda were singing from a different hymn book with the HR-V - not only does it do at least 33mpg, but it's also supposed to be good fun to throw about.

Mazda MX-3 V6

Mazda's coupe has managed to avoid the general public's consciousness thus far (thanks to more popular choices like Ford's Puma and Renualt's Megane Coupe), making it a great second-hand choice with low prices. The V6 engine sings yet manages mid-thirties mpg, and the cars seem generally well built and reliable.

Mazda MX-5 mk1

Another small Mazda, but one you've heard of this time. £1500 is remarkably little to buy a classic, but it's achievable with the MX5, and it's going to buy you a whole bundle of affordable fun. Ignore the hairdresser jibes - anyone who's driven one will tell you it's impossible to have perfect coiffure after five minutes with the hood down...

Porsche 924

You what? A Porsche for how much? It was always designed to be affordable and now you can buy one for pocket money. It isn't, as you might have heard, equipped with a van engine - it was an Audi engine that was tuned for use in the 924 and detuned for use in a VW van. Owners report 30mpg, and £1500 should get a nice one.

Saab 900 T16

Turbo lag and torque steer. Right, now the stereotypes are out of the way, we can appreciate the car's unusual styling, great seats, bucketfulls of character and great performance. Not only that, but many insurers consider it a classic now, so you might be able to benefit from cheap classic insurance.

Toyota MR2 mk1

Rumor has it that the MR2 project was initially developed with Lotus, but Mazda took the project on fully when Lotus had financial issues and abandoned their share. So if you squint a bit, you're looking at an 80s Lotus Elise. Maybe. Either way, it's a brilliant drivers car which does mid-30s mpg. You may have to look hard for one untainted by rust, however.

Toyota Paseo

Even less known than the Mazda MX-3, and arguably not as special, but with 40mpg easily achievable it has it's own merit. And of course, being a Toyota, it'll last for ever, and ever, and ever. It enjoys a very low insurance group as well, and should be fun, if not up to Ford Puma levels.

Volkswagen Bora Tdi

Although a small saloon seems a bit incongruous next to small sports cars, coupes and hatches - especially a diesel one - the Bora represents brilliant value for money. It's cheaper than the equivalent Golf both to buy and insure, yet shares the same great engines and build. The diesels get an easy 50mpg and can be tuned very easily for much more power and torque.

Volkswagen Golf GTI mk1

My final suggestion is, undoubtably, a classic. If you want to spend £1500 on one, do it now because they're unlikely to stay at that price as they become more scarce and more popular for restoration. Manages 35mpg and faster to 60mph than the standard mk4 Golf GTI. Cheap to insure on classic insurance, too.

An eclectic mix then, and perhaps a bit more interesting than your average hot hatch, yet likely to provide many miles of reliable, economical and fun motoring. If you're lucky, you may even find a little practicality to add to the mix. £1500 really does get you a lot of car.

Obama: Reading The Signs

This is a photo I took near my neighborhood the other morning. It sums up my position nicely.

(c) TheAutoProphet. Photo may be freely distributed and used as long as attribution is given.

SydsEastside Now Sharing Photos at flickr.com/motorcars/

Syd's Eastside has joined up with flickr and setup a small photo stream sharing resource at http://www.flickr.com/motorcars/.

Since the practice of showing off our used cars and trucks catalog online requires that we take some photographs of the vehicles, we have decided that instead of Copyrighting these photos and then keeping them all to ourselves, we will share them with the world. At first we were looking for our own web application to do this from one of our own websites, but preliminary trials on some of the applications available showed that most of the freeware and registered shareware open source software applications that are supposed to perform these duties are purely incapable of doing so. Almost every application we installed failed miserably (even the registered shareware we paid for a license for).

In our hunt for a manageable online photo album application, we found flickr.com, and so far it is offering us the most reliability. However, we are continuing to investigate other possible web application solutions that we can host ourselves so that we can utilize our photography to more fully promote our brands.

Although we are currently only just getting started at flickr, which is currently a Yahoo! property, I think I was able to upload a nice little assortment of cars that we have had listed for sale in our Used Autos: Cars & Trucks For Sale section of the website.

While we are still looking for a more configurable solution that we can control more fully as a web application on one of our online properties, it certainly is good to have this option available from flickr. Unfortunately, flickr.com also stifles its user creativity by limiting its membership to only 3 sets (albums) of photos each. This drastically limits the free membership's ability to categorize photos accurately. I suppose they have to do something to get members to the paid membership program, though.

I'm not sure if it will work here, but one nice feature of flickr is the ability to easily create a slideshow of your photos that you can share from your other websites. Let's see if Google will support it...



It appears to work, although I am seeing an error from the Adobe FlashPlayer 9. Perhaps there is some incompatibility issues here on the Blogger pages? For now, I'll just leave it up. If anyone has a fix for this, be sure to let me know, I would appreciate it. If the error gets too anoying I'll just put it on some other page and point a link on the blog to where I put it. ;)

Thanks!

-Syd's Eastside

Chrysler, GM Cross Shopping

Edmunds has a fascinating analysis of how customers who shop for Chrysler products cross-shop other makes. Read the whole thing here. For example, customers who shopped for Chrysler Town & Country minivans also shopped for:

Top Most Cross-Shopped Against the Chrysler Town & Country
1. Honda Odyssey 43%
2. Dodge Grand Caravan 33%
3. Toyota Sienna 33%
4. Nissan Quest 12%
5. Hyundai Entourage 12%
6. Volkswagen Routan* 9%

The conclusions that Edmunds draws from the analysis is that if GM bought Chrysler, they would want to kill off just about everything except for Jeep and the minivans, where they don't have as much presence. In segments where they do compete, such as mid-sized and compact cars, GM is a frequently cross-shopped brand. This means that if GM killed the Sebring, for example, it would expect to gain some of the volume for itself.

Top Most Cross-shopped Models Against Chrysler Sebring
1. Pontiac G6 13%
2. Chevrolet Malibu 12%
3. Honda Accord 11%
4. Nissan Altima 10%
5. Toyota Camry Solara 10%
6. Dodge Avenger 9%

Nissan is one of the least cross-shopped brands with Chrysler. This implies that a Nissan/Chrysler merger would make more sense for Nissan, because they would pick up more products they don't compete directly against. With the caveat that many of these products aren't doing well. But it might be an opening for Nissan to redevelop Chrysler's cars based on Nissan designs, manufacture them cheaply in Chrysler's plants, and play harder against GM and Ford in the competition for the "domestic" car buyer.

Honda GX Stonewall? Hardly.

According to this piece in TheAutoChannel by one Edwin Black, Honda is pulling an Evil GM (see: EV1) and intentionally limiting the number of Civic GX (compressed natural gas) vehicles it produces and sells.

For all the sinister insinuations, Black doesn't really have an explanation for why it would be that Honda might be producing Civic GXs in limited quantities. That's because Honda clammed up and won't talk to the press about it, which is not surprising. All he can come up with is that Honda is pushing its much thirster Pilot SUV. As if a mid-sized SUV would somehow be hurt by sales of a compact sedan?

There are a number of plausible explanations for why Honda, which is certainly interested in polishing its already good environmental credentials, would be cautious with the Civic GX. Here are a few that are obvious to me:

Quality. Honda is obsessive about quality, and they may want to roll their CNG Civic out slowly until they fully understand how it can fail in the harsh environment of real American drivers.

Cost. Honda may not be making money on these, in fact they could easily be losing money on them, perhaps due to supplier issues. Honda may be treating the program as more of a marketing and product research exercise (like the original Insight?) until they understand the market for CNG better.

Dealerships. Since the CNG Civic has a specialized fuel system, different engine software, and perhaps other changes, special tools and training are required to service it. Since Honda doesn't (can't by law) own dealerships, dealers may have to put up significant capital to get CNG certified. Or perhaps Honda foots the bill, in which case Honda pays significant money for each dealer.

Honda isn't going to spread CNG dealers around the country, if there aren't enough fuelling stations, or customers for that matter, for it to make sense. They will pick a few entry markets, like California and New York, and go there.

And since Honda is obligated to service their CNG Civic, they obviously aren't going to want to sell them in places where they don't have a dealer certified for it yet.

The market is shifting rapidly this way and that. At first, pundits thought diesel was the new way--then the price of diesel shot up so that there was not much of an advantage over gasoline. The ethanol pendulum is swinging one way now, but could swing back the other way again if a backlash builds up. Oil is starting to look cheap again.

Honda isn't being sinister, they're eing cautious in an unpredictible and dangerous economy.

Choosing to Get Classic Car Insurance >> NEW<<

Those who own classic cars know the love, care and attention that go into taking care of these cars. Whether you drive it around or not, it is still a good idea to get classic car insurance that is made special for those who own classic cars. One of the reasons to get classic car insurance is because the classic cars are quite expensive thus it is more prone to thief compared to other types of cars. Since classic cars are more expensive and are exposed to higher risk of thief, getting a regular insurance coverage may not really be enough to protect your classic car.

To make sure that your classic car is fully protected, you should always buy adequate classic car insurance for your car. The good thing about a classic car insurance is that it allows to you ensure your vehicle based on its true value rather than stated value. Yes, getting classic car insurance may be a bit costly but if you really want to safeguard your car against theft, accidents and the likes, getting classic car insurance is a must.

Classic Car Insurance

In America today, less that half of collector cars on the road are insured with classic car insurance. These policies have been available for a long time, but many people do not know about them. Most people have a regular insurance policy with high premiums and restrictive policies. You won't get that with classic car insurance. Standard premiums can be at much as 500 percent higher. Why pay that much for such a limited amount of coverage?

There are a few different types of coverage that you have with classic car insurance. There is actual cash value that gives you the book value of the car on a claim, the state value that lets you state the value of the vehicle for coverage, and there is the agreed value that guarantees all of your money back in the event of a total loss. This is the only policy that will not depreciate over the years.

If you are wondering what is considered a collectible vehicle, it may be hard to define. There are many different types of cars that are collected these days, so to find out if your beauty is considered a collectible, you will want to contact a classic car insurance carrier in order to see if your car qualifies for this great insurance.

Finding the Very Best Classic Car Insurance

Before you start hunting for a classic car insurance company for your car, you need to find out first how much the true value of your car is. Getting the true value can sometime be tricky. Bear in mind that an insurance company will want to know how much insurance you want on your car so you need to know the true value of your car.

The value of classic cars can vary and it can be greatly increase based on its uniqueness, its model, its present condition, its age and its history. If your car has some really great history attached to it which can be verified, you can fetch a handsome price on that car. To determine how much is the true value of your classic car, bring your car to an appraiser who works with classic cars in your locality. The classic car appraiser should be able to give you the true value of your classic car.

After determining the market value which is the true value of your classic car, you may now start hunting for a classic car insurance company. First you should call those well known classic car insurance companies. Ask these classic car insurance companies for insurance quotes depending upon the true value of your classic car. When comparing insurance quotes from all these classic car insurance companies, pay close attention to the features of the policy and the cost. Make sure that the cost of the insurance is well justified. You do not really want to pay more money than you should on your car insurance.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0.2 Vista Bug

I'm posting this to help others find the answer to this bug.

Vista is running fine, but Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 had me pulling my hair out... after patching it up to v5.0.2 like Adobe says, and importing my catalog from my old computer, like Adobe says... the Organizer application wouldn't run. It showed me a splash screen, then disappeared.

Task Manager told me that it was running, but it wouldn't open a UI.

After much fooling around, un-installing and re-installing PSE, I finally found this article on Adobe's support site.

Apparently, the file monitor service breaks Organizer on some Vista sysems (like mine). To fix it, I simply turned off the service. From Adobe:

Solution

Turn off the Active File Monitor service.

1. Choose Start, type msconfig in the Search box, and then press Enter.
2. On the Services tab, deselect Adobe Active File Monitor V5.
3. Click OK, and then click Restart.

Note: You may not be able to use the Watch Folders function if you turn off the Active File Monitor service.

This fixed my problem, but now the Organizer won't be able to find new photo files that are dropped in disk folders.