A66 caravan smash 594

Uno-Hoo! wrote in

I'm just the same: I'm on my second Peugeot 306 HDi and this one has done 110,000 miles and still achieves over 50 mpg as it did almost from new (once the engine had lost its initial tightness). On a long motorway journey I've sometimes got 55 out of it and when I'm on holiday in Yorkshire, driving at a maxmum of about 50 mph most of the time but with very little town driving stopping at lights or roundabouts, I've sometimes got just under 60 mpg from it. My 1.8 Golf did about 35 mpg. And it still has pretty good acceleration in the crucial 50-70 mph range that you need when overtaking cars on a motorway. If I let it (and Mr Plod wasn't watching) it would get up to 90 or 100 without any problem. I drove a 16V 1.8 petrol version of the car while mine was in for a service and it was a tiring experience. It had great acceleration providing you were willing to let the engine rev to silly speeds, but it ran out of puff on the motorway: in either 4th or 5th gear, it had very little 50-70 acceleration and the engine was screaming away at about 4000 rpm at 70, whereas my car runs at about 2500 and is quieter - so much for diesels always being noisy. OK, so it clatters a bit when the engine is cold, but that soon goes once the engine gets up to temp.

It's great being able to crawl along in a traffic jam controlling the speed only with the clutch and with my foot off the throttle - can't do that in a petrol engine. And it's got lots of useful torque in 3rd gear for negotiating roundabouts without having to change right down into second gear. Climbing steep hills (eg Sutton Bank or Park Rash in Yorkshire) is a doddle because of all that lovely low-end torque.

The only downside is that the engine is so efficient that it takes a while for the heater to warm up in very cold weather because less energy is being wasted as heat than in a petrol engined car!

And apart from the time that the fuel pump failed, it's always started first time every time, something that my petrol engined cars were reluctant to do in damp weather. And it doesn't have that annoying chugging engine and fading of power when accelerating that a petrol engine has when it's cold.

I'd get another 306 if they still made them. Sadly the 307 isn't a patch on the 306: it's got this modern design of a steeply sloping bonnet so you can't see anything of the front of the car beyond the bottom of the windscreen, which I found very scary when I test-drove one. It also felt inclined to roll on corners, presumably because it's a taller car. I'm 5'10" but I could ahve done with the seat being about six inches higher to have proper visibility out of the front and back windows instad of feeling as if I was driving blind. The new Golf is a lovely car - I test-drove a TDI one with traction control a few months ago which was very sure-footed. But VW are *still* fitting these stupid toy spare wheels (the spacesaver ones) and the rear seat bases don't fold down or remove, so I wouldn't be able to carry my bicycle inside. These spacesaver wheels are a liability: of the three punctures that I've had over the 7 years I've had with my 306, every single one has been at night near the beginning of a long journey, so I'd have been stranded if I'd had a toy spare with its distance restriction. "Just take the flat tyre to the nearest garage" isn't practical on a Sunday or at 8PM when I've got a 200 mile journey ahead of me :-(