I’m not very good with numbers. Hopeless in fact. I’d got myself in a bit of a tizzy over my tax return and thought I owed a lot more than I did. In fact, the tax bill was much smaller than originally anticipated. Too late though as in a panic, I’d lobbed the Discovery on Ebay, where I discovered the downsides to selling just after Christmas. It made just £600. Yes, that was more than the utterly bargainous £450 I’d paid for it, but I’d spent a lot on it since then.

Driving it while the auction was live gave me a real sanity check. I really like it! With half a ton of sawdust briquettes in the back, it rides like a limousine – we thought we’d better collect the next load while we actually owned something capable of hauling it. However, I’m an honest man and when the auction finished for a feeble £600, I was fully prepared to honour the deal.

Things didn’t go to plan though. I usually ask people with less than ten feedback on Ebay to contact me with a phone number before bidding, in the hope it’d keep the timewasters at bay. So, I had a phone number for my ‘buyer’, who seemed reluctant to get in touch. I called the number – number not recognised. Great.

Looks like I can do more of this then!

Days ticked by, so I opened a dispute on Ebay, which you can do after two days. The ‘buyer’ now had four days to pay for the item. He occasionally dropped me a message – his phone had been stolen but he still wanted it – but the four days lapsed. I claimed my money back from Ebay and the ‘buyer’ got an unpaid item mark against him. Despite providing my PayPal details, a deposit was not forthcoming. Tough! Proving that the ‘buyer’ was perhaps just not very Ebay savvy rather than a malicious timewaster, he actually phoned me six days after the auction finished wanting to make arrangements for collection! No, sorry. You had your chance, failed to respond to the dispute, time is up.

So, I still own the Land Rover, and have had yet another hopeless Ebay experience. That’s two cars that have failed to sell now, and when you check the sales listings, it’s amazing how many cars are “relisted due to timewaster.” I think I shall try elsewhere in future.

However, after a lot of faff, I can now look forward to continuing with the Discovery’s restoration. I’m hoping to tackle some RTV trials too, for something a bit different!

The days of super-cheap cars appear to be with us once more. People are looking at economy figures more closely than ever, but I’m not sure they’re actually saving money by downsizing.

Take this car for instance.

Big needn’t mean expensive

It’s a 1991 Saab 9000 that I bought a few years ago. It was a lovely machine: swift, comfortable, powerful and able to deliver 35mpg on a run. I paid £595 for it and couldn’t believe my luck. It had 124,000 miles on the clock, full main dealer service history and I was only the second owner. Aside from rather sloppy initial turn-in when driving hard, I really couldn’t fault it. In one weekend, I took it from home in Aberystwyth to Suffolk and then to Croydon near London before returning home. It ate miles up with no bother at all, while delivering economy you might not expect from such an enormous beast.

Let’s say for instance that rather than taking the little Sirion to Scotland, we’d taken the Saab. Calculations reveal that yes, the larger car would have cost more, but only £60 more over the course of the 1577 miles we covered. Now, £60 is a useful amount of money, but it doesn’t seem a lot to pay for extra comfort the Saab offered. The difference between 35mpg and 45mpg is therefore not as vast as you might think.

People don’t see that though. They see an economy figure and assume that it makes a massive difference. They get so blinded that they pay much more for a newer, more economical car, when it probably made much more economical sense to keep what they had. Unless you’re swapping a Land Rover V8 for a Smart car, you’ll notice less of a difference than you may expect unless you’re clocking up vast amounts of miles.

With the Land Rover heading to new shores, I’ll be looking to bag myself another barge once the tax bill is out of the way. It’s been painful to watch an MOTd Vauxhall Carlton 2-litre sell on Ebay for less than £200. £200! For a road legal car – and a nice one at that. Here’s hoping that the bargain barges are still around when I actually have funds.

The Sirion has only been on the fleet since October, but it has already clocked up 3000 miles in my ownership. I was starting to feel that I hadn’t done that much driving in 2013, but the 2CV has clocked up almost 2000 miles since September too. Clearly I am driving more than I think.

At rest after a busy year

Since purchase, the Sirion has become the default vehicle. It’s the one I jump in for most journeys on account of the fact that it actually keeps inclement weather outside, it gets up to temperature REALLY quickly, and I still like driving it. For sheer effortlessness, it’s hard to beat. I’ve driven it to Birmingham, Sussex and Kent – as well as the very top of Scotland of course. Before I bought it, the Sirion had been used for a banger rally down to Nice in Southern France. After a life of bimbling around Cheshire, it seems to be heading for retirement having plenty of fun.

And yes, it sadly is heading for retirement before long. It may only have 73,000 miles on the clock, but the body is sadly not as healthy as the mechanicals. A week of high mileage on heavily salted roads has left the rear wheelarches looking iffy again, and corrosion has already had a good munch on other areas. It’s quite depressing really, as it feels like a car with a lot more to give.

There are a few downsides. The ride is not very good at all. It really does crash about over poor surfaces. The rear wiper switch position continues to irritate and the lack of a flick-wipe for the front wipers is also a pain. Really though, these are very minor grumbles. Usually, after 3000 miles in a car, I’ve thoroughly had enough! So, the Sirion will remain on the fleet and we’ll see just how bad things are when the MOT comes around in the summer. Unless something else tempts me in the meantime…

The rise of a certain internet auction site has led to an entirely new way of buying cars. Buying blind. This means buying a car you haven’t actually seen in the metal. Previously, this was really not considered the best way of doing things. It isn’t just on Ebay that things have changed though – car dealers have told me that they now sell a lot more cars ‘blind’ than they ever did before.

It requires a huge amount of trust and a certain amount of daftness, but I do it all the time. I have no problem with it, as I rarely spend very much buying a car. Take the Discovery as an example. I found it hidden in the parts section of Ebay with very little description and one poor photo, which utterly failed to capture the described accident damage. Incredibly, I let it go with £500 and no bids. That required impressive levels of self-control. I then contacted the seller and found out a bit more about it. It’s important to do this bit in writing – ie email – because I now had a good description of the vehicle and some more photos. We haggled a bit and I agreed to pay £450 for it. I think I used PayPal to secure it with a deposit, then used various methods to get to Northamptonshire.

The way I saw it, a £450 Discovery just couldn’t lose me money. If it broke down on the way home, I could get recovered home and then break it for parts to get my money back – or even sell it as a going concern. As it happens, it was really a fair bit better than it had any right to be, though it has obviously needed work since. You expect that with any sub-£500 car.

It’s all about asking the right questions and deciding whether you trust the seller. Establish a relationship and judge for yourself. The seller needs assessing just as much as the car itself. Do your research and find out key problem areas for the car you’re looking at and ask what these bits are like. Be suspicious if the car is described as perfect, as it almost certainly won’t be!

I don’t always get it right. The Sirion is a great little car, but is more rotten than I’d hoped. I’m not really complaining at £370 though, and I’ve not had to spend much on it since buying it. Indeed, expenditure is very low for the 3000 miles it has now covered. I bought it because it sounded good mechanically, with a service history including important things like a timing belt change.

My nearest disaster was a Citroen CX Safari. I foolishly agreed to swap the CX for my Renault 21 Monaco and a bundle of cash. This was silly on many counts. The really tidy Renault was soon a rather sheddy Citroen. I filled it up as it was running on fumes and it started leaking petrol all over the place. Then, on the M6 in a traffic jam, I discovered that the cooling fan didn’t work at all, and the heater fan was hopeless. It hit 109 degrees Celsius at one stage. It also misfired a fair bit.

The relationship with the CX was occasionally frustrating

I did avoid complete disaster with that car though. A new air intake hose cured the misfire and it went on to perform very well bar the odd complete refusal to start. I used it to help a friend move house, and loaded it up for our own house move in 2010. That huge load area was a massive boon. Once in Wales, it proved incredibly good in snow and survived its coolant freezing in -15 degree weather. I sold it for £565 to someone who bought it blind. I replaced it with a Land Rover 90 V8 which I bought blind for £1600. That was pretty good too and I sold it for £2300. I was well chuffed as it was actually pretty disappointing to own. Certainly nowhere near as good as a 16-year old me imagined.

This 90 V8 was a definite success

So, don’t be afraid to buy blind, but do take precautions. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Bravery can be rewarded by a genuine bargain though. It’s all part of the fun!

On the face of it, the ClassicHub fleet has settled down quite nicely. The Sirion is a superb little car for most driving, the Disco is the heavy-hauler and off-road toy and I can’t cope without a 2CV on the fleet, so the 2CV fills that slot. All is not well though.

The fleet. Not as good as it looks…

Let’s start with the 2CV. She’s badly rotten and I’ve still no idea what I’m going to do about it. The bodyshell is in a right state, with some previous restoration and accident repair work hindering future restoration. It may be time to give up on this bodyshell. The running gear is still surprisingly good though. Some tricky decisions need to be made before the MOT runs out in April.

Then there’s the Sirion. Good as it is, it sadly proves that modern cars still rot. It will take either a miracle or a good deal of welding to see it gain another MOT, which is a bit disappointing for a car with only 71,000 miles on the clock. It ticks more boxes than many cars I’ve owned though, demonstrating huge capability but also being very easy to drive, nice and small and wonderfully efficient. It’s a hard car to replace. I love 1990s vehicles, as they have enough cleverness to make them work very well, but not so much that you need a computer to work on them.

Lastly, there’s the Discovery. This is the hardest vehicle to justify, which is why it might well find itself for sale in the New Year. As a vehicle, I like it very much, despite its many and obvious faults – the chief of which is a horrific inability to keep the weather out. Yes, it is useful for hauling stuff about, but my trailer is only rated at half a ton, which is within the capabilities of many smaller vehicles – if not quite as small as the other two on the fleet. Really, it’s just a big toy for playing about in. There are other downsides too. 4x4s seem to attract text talkers like no other vehicle. The Maverick was just as bad. I’m sorry, but I like my English as it should be written. I don’t always get it right, but I do my best to use all of the letters that should be used. I like to write how I speak. I rarely come across text talk amongst 2CVers, BXers or the Autoshite forum of which I’m a member – which celebrates the wonder of unloved cars. In fact, text talk is often rightly vilified amongst the members of the aforementioned enthusiasts. I’m not sure why this is, but I very much agree.

The simple truth is that I don’t NEED a 4×4, and January is probably a good time to sell. It’ll be a sad sale, but it’s becoming a rather inevitable one.

Before any of this though, there’s the small matter of taking the Sirion on a 1200-mile roadtrip to Scotland. Will I come back loving it more than ever or will it find itself joining the Disco in the classifieds?