Sunday 7 July 2013

Making my mind up

Myself and my wife are a 1 car family and have been for several years. Now that we have children this is almost impossible to continue so I have decided to purchase a new car. 

With a budget of 6k I started to search the autotrader, gumtree and yes even eBay listings. The problem I immediately face was that nothing inspired me. VW Up, VW Fox, Toyota Yaris <thud as I drop off to sleep>, Ford focus. So very mainstream and desperately dull. 

My father has had a few old and more modern classic cars over the years. The respect he shows for these cars seemed to directly equate to the amount of enjoyment he got out of his occasional drives. I started thinking about a modern classic that my Dad was looking for for several months, sadly without success, the Nissan Figaro.

The Figaro was produced by a special projects division of Nissan, the Pike factory, in 1991 in very limited numbers - 20'000 in total.  The Japanese market went crazy for them and had to enter a lottery in order to have the privilege of buying one. Virtually none were exported out of Japan. Now British importers have started invading the Japanese car auctions and are importing hundreds. They are a rare sight but not so much around the more affluence areas of West London.  The perfect quirky city car, they are popular here. 

It is a beautiful little car styled from 194,5,60's sports cars. Being reasonably modern it has the benefits of a turbocharged 1 litre engine and all the mod cons you would expect in a modern car, electric windows, CD player, aircon, and so on.

In my next post I will describe the method I am using to find my Figaro and hopefully it will work for you.

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