Well after a great Christmas, and a good new year Kate and I decided to take a drive up the coast on New Years day. That’s all well and good normally as I’d be in the Jaguar. However when I go to visit Kate, I always take my other car, a ’96 Renault Clio as I don’t feel secure leaving the Jag parked in a street overnight.
Now I know the Clio isn’t the best car in the world (I for one really don’t like it), but:
- it doesn’t get stolen as no one wants to nick it
- it’s normally mechanically sound as I do all the work on it myself
- it’s cheap to run when compared to the Jag.
Now that I’ve mentioned the good bits I’ll mention the bad:
- it’s made out of recycled biscuit tins, the metal is uber-thin
- it leaks water from about every seal on every door, even after they were replaced
- to change the clutch you have to take the entire engine and gearbox COMPLETELY out of the car
- dealer parts are in some cases more expensive than Jaguar
- it’s one of the worst built cars for working on. Renault gave no thought when they were designing it for people actually being able to work on it. For example, taking one part off requires that you take about 100 other parts off first. Not cool.
So after all that, there we were driving back down the coast on the single carriageway that runs along the beach. There was a puddle in front of me in my lane, and a car coming in the other direction. All I could do was drive through the puddle (not fast I might add). Well that was it, the force of the water splashing on the underside of this garlic-loving-frog-mobile was enough to tear the exhaust clean off the manifold.
“Bugger” I say. Dodgy looks from Kate are coming in abundance at the spine tingling, ear piercing screeching coming from the exhaust grinding the tarmac.
So the Clio surrenders to the side of the road to try and assess the damage. Due to the exhaust being in the dead centre of the car, and the fact it’s fairly low, I had no way of doing and kind of makeshift repair. So sadly I had to resort to phoning the RAC. Literally 5 minutes later the RAC man was stood next to my car. Best service yet!
At least I had all my thermal gear on!
After jacking the car up, then tying up what remained of the exhaust with some steel cable I was able to be on my way. Having no exhaust drew some startled looks from pedestrians due to the fact the car sounded like a stock car!
All I can say is stay away from these cheese-eating-surrender-monkey cars as if your life depended on it!!
