Fiat 500 poor resale? | Page 2 | GTAMotorcycle.com

Fiat 500 poor resale?

Fit is a fabulous car once you get past the odd looking exterior. The interior is very roomy and well thought out. It’s probably Honda’s most reliable car. They sell them in droves in the UK marketed as the Jazz. I just sold my 2007, but now have sellers remorse.
 
My dad used to have a Fiat 126. Comfortably fit 4 midgets and could fix it with a bike wrench. It actually had cruise control which was a rod that pushed/pulled on the accelerator parts. Completely illegal and totally dangerous I believe, even at the time.
 
I’d take the Fiat over a MINI.




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A MINI is a car you lease, not own
 
Another word for "character". I'd prefer reliable and cost effective for basic transportation. Then again, I miss my minivan over the SUV I have now.
I'd take reliability over character. There's character in something that takes you to work every single day.
 
Thank you Brian, I appreciate the counter point. I do find that what I will and won't put up with in a car can be very different than from the next person, maybe I would drive it and like it. That would leave their low value as a mystery then, unless NA truly does hate subcompacts.

This still just idle talk, but do you do any mild work on it, like brakes or what not? How is it to work on?

In this day and age of low fuel prices, small cars are not popular. Ford is giving up on the Fiesta. smart gave up on gasoline powered models leaving only the electric-drive for the few remaining dealers to sell (in tiny numbers). Add that to FCA's reputation (whether they deserve it or not) and you end up with something that is in low demand.

There's a flipside to the low resale value that you can take advantage of: Buy a used one! I didn't, and bought new, for a number of reasons. (1) I get paid mileage, this car will earn its keep several times over. By the time I'm done with it, it will have 200,000+ km on it and will be worth within a rounding error of nothing. (2) Warranty. (3) I bought a new 2015 that had been sitting in the showroom for a year and a half for thousands off MSRP because apparently nobody except me wants a car loaded with every option but with a manual transmission. (4) At the time, they had a 0% financing deal, so even though I didn't need to finance it, a free loan is as good as thousands more off MSRP.

Mine is under warranty so oil changes have been dealer thus far. The only things I've done myself have been swapping between winter and summer wheels.

There are some quirks, there are some known faults. (There is no car out there which is free of any such thing.) From the internet forums: The LEDs that illuminate the license plate burn out frequently. Mine have been fine. This is a "who cares" fault that you fix when it's time to sell the car and it needs to be certified. On the older ones the LEDs were built into the tailgate handle. Apparently they are now separate parts but I haven't had this happen. The pin that the outside door handle pivots on corrodes then seizes and then the little bracket breaks. Solution: squirt that pin with Fluid Film every few months (you can see it and spray it with lubrication by holding the door handle open, it's at the front where the handle pivots).

The Honda Fit is certainly the more practical car, they are huge inside (better than the Fiesta - which also has a cramped back seat that won't fold flat). The quirk with those - with manual transmission - is the gearing. They are geared short. The 6-speed manual didn't fix this ... for some bizarre reason, they didn't make 6th a tall highway cruising gear ... same ratio as the old too-short 5th. 80 mph / 130 km/h is 4000 rpm on those. The engine is in your ear. The Fiat does 3000 rpm at 130 km/h and the Fit would be like me driving around in 4th on the highway. The Fit with automatic is not like this - they're geared tall ... but it's a soul-sucking CVT. No thanks.

I have a constraint in that van + clearance to back doors + car + room to open the hatch + some clearance for maneuvering has to be less than the length of the driveway. The Fit is too big! It's nearly two feet longer than the Fiat.

I considered the Mini, but Mini = BMW = break my wallet. BMW's direct-injection fuel pumps are failure-prone. And they're expensive. The cheapest possible Mini with the base 3 cylinder engine and no options was about the same as my loaded Fiat ...
 
the mini might be the one car with a worse reliability reputation than the 500

recall back when I was a young dude
wanted an X-19 in the worst way
it was a total POS
slow as hell
terrible quality
terrible seats
but it was cool
maybe some people see the 500 that way
 
Lamborghini, Ferrari, Porsche, Masseratti, Aston Martin (kind of still) etc etc etc. I'll just stop there though.
Those cars are not known for reliability.
 
Fit is a fabulous car once you get past the odd looking exterior. The interior is very roomy and well thought out. It’s probably Honda’s most reliable car. They sell them in droves in the UK marketed as the Jazz. I just sold my 2007, but now have sellers remorse.

Never understood why they call it the Fit here. Jazz is way cooler
 
Hey @BrianP when do you expect to 200k? Might make the perfect starter car for my son when the time comes.

sent from my Purple LGG4 on the GTAM app
 
Anyone whose never driven a manual before can sit down, start the car, rev is up to 3k, and dump the clutch.

Haha, a friend was taught to drive standard this way. She bought a manual cavalier (affordable) and her uncle taught her to drive stick (very poorly). She complained about getting going and talked me through the process (rev and dump). If she did it at 2500 it would stall, at 3500 it would spin, there wasn't much room in the middle, I can understand why she was having trouble.
 
Anyone whose never driven a manual before can sit down, start the car, rev is up to 3k, and dump the clutch...

Yeah but it's after that that they get into trouble. At least I rode before driving stick, so I had an idea what to do. First manual car I ever drove was a BMW 5 series. Was on loan from head office for a video shoot, glad it wasn't owned by anyone. lol ;)
 
Hey @BrianP when do you expect to 200k? Might make the perfect starter car for my son when the time comes.

sent from my Purple LGG4 on the GTAM app

I do about 40k a year for work, so another 4 years would put it around 200k.

There's a thing called the JD Power Initial Quality Survey that everyone looks at for product quality. The difference between the best and the worst is, on average, approximately 1 "thing gone wrong" per vehicle at the best end to approximately 2 "things gone wrong" per vehicle at the bad end. Bear in mind "thing gone wrong" could be anywhere between the transmission exploded (very rare nowadays) to "my phone won't pair with the bluetooth" and such things (most common fault segment nowadays is infotainment). I can handle 2 "things gone wrong" of that sort ... like my wonky outside temperature display. Big. Freaking. Deal.

Consumer Reports is the other one. The problem there is that the cars they find most reliable are invariably dull as dishwater. Me in a silver Toyota Prius would result in the Prius being launched off a cliff because I'm sick of it - too bored.

I've put 400,000+ km on each of two VW diesels. The first one was a B4-generation Passat, which was a sea of black marks in Consumer Reports. VW automatic transmissions back then were disastrous, and lots of those cars were sold with automatic. Mine was manual. Early VW VR6 engines were nightmares of overheating and leaking head gaskets and heater cores, and lots of those cars were sold with those. Mine was TDI. Those cars had issues with sunroofs ... mine didn't have it. Those cars had issues with the power supply in the instrument cluster frying ... yep, happened to mine twice. Can't avoid that one. Consumer Reports doesn't distinguish between options, powertrains, and trim levels ... they're all lumped together. If you do some digging on the forums, you can find out what the problems are and frequently either avoid them (don't order that option / powertrain / trim level) or do something about it (like squirt the door handle pivots with lubrication now and again).

My Fiat will not have a blown turbocharger. It doesn't have one.
 
Anyone whose never driven a manual before can sit down, start the car, rev is up to 3k, and dump the clutch.

And make their theft getaway in first gear bumping the limiter.

As much as the "manual transmission is a theft deterrent thing" is a joke, it's rooted in reality.

http://www.nydailynews.com/autos/manual-shifts-increasingly-stop-car-thefts-article-1.1153530

[video=youtube;gZ9VVEkIbcE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZ9VVEkIbcE[/video]

I remember reading a thread somewhere years ago that had a ton of "reformed" car thieves candidly telling their stories and secrets of the trade, and it was surprising how many said that they walked away from standards because they couldn't drive them, or couldn't drive them well enough to not attract undue attention during the theft/getaway.
 

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