Recommendations for a bigger motor car

[SirDavidAlhambra]

Hello everyone! I won't be ditching my Alhamb but need to get a second motor car which is a bit bigger.

What would you recommend?

My criteria are as follows:

• Budget of up to £10K
• Has to hold 6 big adults comfortably (yeah, proper big fatsos)
• Ideally can carry 8 adults
• Not prone to rusting (I'm looking at you, Mercedes-Benz and Ford, yes I know your sort)
• Good spacious boot
• Reasonable insurance
• Reasonably priced parts and inexpensive to maintain and repair
• Reasonable fuel economy (I'm looking at you, 3.5L petrol Viano japanese imports)
• No sky high mileage (yes, that includes you, airport taxis with 300K on the clock)
• No dodgy imports (what do you mean the radio doesn't work on my jap import and the indicator stalk is on the wrong side!)
• Reliable
• Ideally some creature comforts such as heated front window, heated seats, decent radio, parking aids etc.

Thank you very much!

[brianh]

Your going to struggle to find anything other than a minibus to seat 8 adults, particually if that isn't including the driver. If your looking on a budget the japanese import option might be your best bet, most can have the radio swapped out so it will work, you'd just have to get used to the indicator stalk being on the other side (or swap it for a uk spec one maybe if you think thats really an issue?).

My brother has a Japanese import Mercedees van of some sort (might be a Viano, I'm not sure) and seems happy with it, he was in the process of getting the radio swapped over when I saw him last for some all singing and dancing one with camera hookup to solve the lack of fm issue (which is that Japan uses a different band of the freqency to us, so it ends around 88mhz where we start). Hes got that to replace the company car he had upto that point, so he has gone from a BMW X3 to that.

If your looking for reasonable insurance, identify what vehicles could suit your needs and then start looking at what insurance group they fall into. Though a lot of insurance cost depends on your circumstances (type of use of vehicle, job, mileage, where you live, etc etc).

Personally I think you will have to compromise on a couple of points of the above depending what you can find.

[SirDavidAlhambra]

Thank you, yes I think you are right that I may need to compromise... it's so tricky looking at new types of motor cars, they all seem so different and half the problem these days is that viewing second hand cars is near impossible because garages don't like doing viewings