One For The Road: A fully kitted-out five-door hatchback
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Your support makes all the difference.Carol Berry wants a well-equipped five-door hatchback, mainly for town use, which must be able to accommodate two grandchildren and a pushchair. The budget is around £15,000.
A Car for the Head
Carol would like Bluetooth, iPod docking, heated seats, automatic tyre-pressure checks, parking sensors, leather seats and possibly an electric driver's seat and satnav. That is quite a shopping list and I think we are going to tick only some of those boxes because we need to keep the car compact rather than buying a great big Mercedes limousine. Is is, however, possible to get a rather smaller Mercedes with an awful lot of kit within Carol's budget. It is even a practical hatchback with most of what Carol requires. I found a 2008 B200 CDi Sport 2.0, which has leather and heated front seats, and also the hi-tech stuff such as a tyre-pressure-loss warning system, and a media interface that should provide Bluetooth connectivity. Plus Parktronic, which automatically parks a Mercedes.
A Car for the Heart
I'm not sure why Carol wants a tyre-pressure monitoring system but obviously not every car has one. You can buy an after-market device and fit that. Maplins has one for £99, which seems easy to fit and requires no wires. Now all we have to find is a car with leather and heated seats and things. I did find a Range Rover with all those toys but reckoned it might be a bit big. Oh, and you can have heated leather seats fitted by a specialist company, although in my experience it's best just to buy a Saab. Having said that, the company is no longer with us and I would only buy a cheap example, say a 9-3. You can find them, too, in a Ford Focus. No leather, but a 2010 1.6 Titanium is £13,000 and has rear parking aid, Bluetooth and satnav as standard.
Looking to buy?
Email James Ruppert at onefortheroad @independent.co.uk, giving your age, address and phone number, details of the type of vehicle in which you are interested, and your budget.
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