This is my wife's school run car. As you might guess it is not really my cup of tea, but it ticked a very important option box – it was free.
Yup, that's it, free. So I can forgive it pretty much anything.
And you know what, if I have to drive a modern, it's as appealing as most.
Why? Because this was a car that was built in 2001 and, believe it or not, has no central locking, no alarm and still has wind-up windows. Brilliant. Just like a classic.
Its best feature is that it is near-immaculate. Every corner has been mildly bumped, grazed and otherwise molested, but the interior and most of the exterior are pristine.
I guess that is thanks to all those modern things they add to cars, such as rust prevention. A lot to be grateful for then.
Except, in a modern world where nothing is done until it is utterly overdone, stretched to the point where it snapped, they have also "improved" things under the bonnet.
And that is where the problems started.
I was over the moon to take the call telling me it had flown through the MoT, but my joy was short-lived when the long-suffering tester Alan announced that now "the bl***y thing" wouldn't move off his rollers.
Some kind of issue with the revving, in that it didn't want to.
So Alan, bless his heart, spent a lot of time working through about 4000 meaningless computer codes to try and find out what the problem was and then resetting stuff. I am sure it is more complicated than that, but he didn't charge me, so my knowing and caring sensors are dormant on this one.