Opels really a bad buy?

LizzyBennet

Just wondering why Opel have such a bad name ? Everyone says not to buy them but my question is why ? is it that they are unreliable or the parts are too expensive ? Looking to buy a 2012 - 2013 car in the coming months and just doing my research. The same goes for Renault , they dont seem to have a great name and are cheaper to buy than other manufacturers any input would be appreciated.

Bigus

Later Renaults as in 2012 are great , both to drive and reliability wise.

Gael23

I can't help on Opel but Renault had a bad name in the past, but they are not as bad as they used to be. The newer ones are actually pretty ok, they share many of their parts with a Nissan.

Spanish Eyes

Have an Opel Insignia.

Recent. 142 bought as demo last year.

Great so far apart from the button handbrake. Took a while to get used to that!

Had a banger before as you can guess. LOL.

freddieot

I suppose, at least when it comes to Renault, there were a lot of reliability issues in the past. I have no idea about the later models \ years.

I owned one Renault in my life and it is not an experience I would ever contemplate repeating. Worst car I ever had, totally unreliable, parts cost fortune, hard to work on (more cost) etc.

It was however one off the most comfortable so when it was broken down I could wait in comfort for the breakdown truck.

Maybe later ones are more reliable, but in my case, once bitten (hard) twice shy. There are plenty of other makes that don't have this reliability sigma hanging over them.

sbsquarepants

I'm not really a car lover - I begrudge every penny I have to spend on my car, it get's no tlc whatsoever, I basically get it serviced when it needs to be nct'd and if something breaks i'll get it fixed only if I can't drive with it broken.

At the moment I have an opel astra (the 2nd I've had over the years) and despite being treated like above it has never once complained. Sails through the nct and the only "maintenance" if you could call it that has been blown headlights. I quite literally could not recommend it more highly. It's absolutely news to me that opels have a bad name!

All that being said however I should point out that I don't do a particularly high mileage in it so that's probably getting me away with murder, it's 9 years old and has 110,000km. If I was a long distance commuter, I'm sure things would be different.

bmwguy

Anybody in the market for an astra start looking at Ford focus and golfs!

filbert the fox

LizzyBennet wrote: »

Just wondering why Opel have such a bad name ? Everyone says not to buy them but my question is why ? is it that they are unreliable or the parts are too expensive ? Looking to buy a 2012 - 2013 car in the coming months and just doing my research. The same goes for Renault , they dont seem to have a great name and are cheaper to buy than other manufacturers any input would be appreciated.

It's mystifying how influenced people are by rumour and sweeping generalisations. Opel are still in business. So are Renault. How can this be if the goods are rubbish?

It's the attitude to cars in this country that gives them an undeserved reputations. "Oh yeh, I bought a ......... and I paid diddlysquat -and the thing broke down after 18months of non servicing, driven into the ground and lack of maintenance. Those cars are obviously rubbish"

Furtzy2

I've owned 6 opels over the years and still have a soft spot for them but they do have a very annoying habit of not rectifying common faults. For example I owned 3 Vectras spanning two 03's and a 05 all bought new but everyone of them had the exact same suspension cup issue. You'd think they would have rectified the problem in 2 years of production.
Opels reputation suffered terrible with the Vectra B released in 1996. It was an awful awful car so between that and their historic issue with snapping timing belts has hit their reputation badly