‘I can’t resist an ugly duckling’
Danny rescues an end-of-life vehicle
This quick and dirty interlude with an emerging classic is worth retelling for one main reason… it starts with the foresight of a Kia franchise director who, rather than see a tatty but MOT’D trade-in go to the scrapyard, decided to give us a call and offer the car for the metal-trade-in price. That man was Richard Lodge, and the car was a Fiat Multipla JTD 105 SX.
‘It wasn’t worth our auctioning it because it was very scruffy,’ he said. ‘But it was a one owner car with 148k miles – so had life in it.’
I went to Oxford, bought it for £75, and drove it almost every day for a month. Even though it had an MOT until April 2021, it was declared Cat C in 2016, putting it firmly on the not very wanted list – a shame because, like all Multiplas, it drove really well.
New tyres and a big history file meant I was happy to jump in and head off on any journey. It went into London to pick up some Saab parts, to Norfolk to see a friend… and it even did the school run, although both daughters refused to get out of it within sight of friends. It fetched and carried until Polish Steve from Milton Keynes offered me £200 for it. I’d changed the oil and put some diesel treatment through it so there was some care involved in ownership, but as an example of ‘bottom of the pond’ Bangernomics, this is as good as any.