Lucas: Prince of Darkness

The quote says it all, although British Leyland's management preference for using the cheapest quality parts and the assembly workers at the plants that had no interest in doing any sort of work, let alone quality work, contributed more to the problems in my Jaguar than anything from Lucas.

By the time the Land Rover was built in 2003, the brand had already been bought by BMW and then shortly afterwards sold to Ford.

Auctions are a gamble. You can get royally screwed, or you can make out like a bandit.

the rule of thumb I was given years ago was "buy a 2 yr old car every 2 years" - the major depreciation will have already happened, it'll still be within warranty period and more likely to be reliable, and sell it before it gets to be too much trouble, and you're still going to get most of the value back out of it if you don't trash it.

Doesn't work for everything - but it's a fairly good starting philosophy

Then again - what do I know - bought a Land Rover

And whilst mooning over the new Aston Martins in a show room - musing about how nice it'd look parked in our driveway next to the Disco, Him looked at me and said "Gods woman don't you want at least one car that works!?"

I guess they both sound bad, now that I think about it.

The other side of the coin.

http://www.chicagonow.com/life-as-i-...71351_huge.jpg (Totally SFW).

(This version of BBCode doesn't allow you to resize images inline? Will just have to click the link :P)

I resize them on my desktop using paint, then post.

People generally drive their own cars just like rentals. But rentals usually get properly maintained. And the rental companies tend to sell their better models directly. Their reputation is attached to that sale.

Today, a car with 40,000 miles is still a new car.

Unfortunately, auto manufacturers, who could not maintain sufficient sales due to that model's quality, then sold cars to rental fleets at a loss. To maintain factory production. Notice few if any Toyotas, Hyundai, or Hondas in a rental fleet. Those manufacturers don't need rental sales to maintain production.

As for Land Rover and Jaguar, well, those are now Indian companies. The Indians (Tata Motors?) are upgrading those those products.

Consumer Reports' April issue is essential to the decision process.

and it is funny. i was hoping someone would take the counterpoint :)

Thanks for the suggestion. I subscribed. Never would have bought the damn Caliber if I'd read their data on it. We've had issues with basically everything they say is low-quality about it.

The random internet reviews we read of it were glowing.