Weeding the cars

Having changed my car a couple of months ago, I decided it was time to do a little weeding in the filing cabinet. I see that I bought my new car five years almost to the day after I had bought the previous one. The old car was a VW Passat estate with a 1.9 litre diesel engine; the new one is a newer version with a 2 litre engine. The new car does have a few extra refinements, such as cruise control, a sixth gear and an electronic parking brake, but the CD player can only handle one disc whereas the player in the old car was an autochanger which could handle six discs. Interestingly, I paid £2,000 less for the new car than I did for the old. Both of them were ex-demonstration cars.

In the five years that I drove the old car I covered 84,000 miles at an average of 45.36 mpg. Over the first two thousand miles, the new car has averaged 45.05.