I just purchased a July 2005 Megane II GT 1.5dci. I just wanted to tell you about the choices I went through (please note I'm living in the Netherlands). Main thing was I just wanted a nice family station for driving about 20k km/year which basically would give me the lowest total-cost-of-ownership so I scoured the web looking at people's findings on 3 different cars: the megane II GT, the ford focus station and the peugeot 307 'break' (since german/japanese cars went out the window due to their high initial cost). What I basically found was
- really, REALLY low pricing on relatively new renaults with quite some mileage (>150km)
- lots of people complaining about reliability of the megane II and laguna II, but on the other hand, some *real measurements* of reliability from the german ADAC (the people in germany that help you if you break down) showed that the megane outperforms both the ford and the peugeot on reliability,except for the 2003-built meganes. If you want to look at the stats, search for 'ADAC pannenstatistik' and try to read some german
- high mileage doesn't seem to affect the diesel's reliability as much as the price drop would seem to show
so, in the end I went for a 170km 2005 1.5dci for about 6k euro (sounds insane since it cost 25k euro when it was bought in 2005) since the 2-3k of euro's I'm saving there would probably not be offset by repairs on the same car, not to mention the outrageous mpg you get on the 1.5dci (coming from a VW Polo petrol the costs per km are more than halved).
time will tell if I made a good choice there, but I'm prepared to shell out the 1k euro each year for repairs, etc.
cheers,
Steve
