£1000 Challenge

Mitsubishi Galant

We knew that getting our Galant through its MoT was going to take a bit of work; regular readers will remember the structural corrosion points on the floorpan that we found buried under the car’s underseal and the rear brake pads that needed replacing. However, being so thorough in our pre-MoT inspecting, I naively thought that we at least wouldn’t have any nasty surprises when we finally sent it in for its annual test.

When we sent the Galant off with a brief of all the work it was going to need to pass an MoT, the team at Motorvation in Barnack quite sensibly put the car through a quick test before getting started just to be sure that they did in fact have the whole picture. What came back didn’t make for pretty reading. Yes, the corrosion and the rear brake pads were a fail, as expected, but they also discovered that the handbrake wasn’t working on the nearside wheel and that the nearside track rod end bush was knackered.

Now, when we first picked up the Galant, I said that part of the reason I chose a car with such a high mileage was that I wanted to prove that they’re nothing to be afraid of. Well, I’m willing to admit that I may have chosen the wrong car with which to do that because our bill totalled more than £400 by the time the Galant was welded up, its brakes fixed and the track rod sorted. It’s not as though this is the first big bill we have had for the car, either, though it is certainly the single largest.

In fairness, I don’t think I got it completely wrong: I chose a car wellknown for being solidly built, capable of high mileages and which had been lavished with maintenance by one owner from new. The problem, which I hadn’t realised until after we bought it, was that our Mitsubishi’s milemunching days were long behind it when we collected the car. While the same person had owned our Galant until 2018, a study of the service history shows that it went out of use in 2012. It may have been tested before we bought it, but it had been sitting in a garage for more than five years prior to that. Clearly, the Mitsubishi’s owner either bought another car or simply stopped driving, but either way, the Galant was no longer being used regularly.

That was my mistake, I believe – I maintain that high-mileage cars do not necessarily need to be feared, but my advice is this – study the history and look not just for lots of maintenance, but evidence of the car having covered recent mileage.

Still, this isn’t to say that we’re giving up on our Galant – we’re more than happy to keep this oncehumdrum, but now extremely rare car out of the scrapyard for another year. And while I can no longer say that it hasn’t pulled any surprises on us, I can at least prove that it is still a fundamentally good car – and hit our 250,000-mile target. With another 12 months’ MoT now paid for, we’ve got big plans to hit that figure quicker than the 10,000 miles we have covered so far, so watch this space!