@carmad funny how irate my message makes you seem to have touched a nerve?! As you can probably gather I haven’t decided on any car yet, hence the enquiries. For your information as you seem so invested in my car choice, I have had a 3 times qashqai over the 9 years, then an a class due to good mpg, then now I currently have a Vw Tiguan. As you can see I’m not after and don’t need a status symbol lol funny how quick you are to judge and pre perceive someone. I want a reliable car and was recommend a BMW or Mercedes funnily enough off a male in a motability forum due to their positive experiences. But like I said above would welcome ANY recommendations.
Best to just ignore Claire. One of the negatives of this forum are the regular silly comments from people who dismiss the premium brands as being nothing more than for ‘badge snobs’. I’m never sure whether it’s jealousy or ignorance, but suspect that it could be a bit of both.
We had a run of VW Tiguans and were fortunate that when we changed 2 years ago there was quite a bit of choice. Having looked at the VW Tiguan, Ford Kuga, Volvo XC40, Audi Q3 and a few others that I can’t remember now, we went for a BMW X1 and haven’t regretted it for one second. I could write a very long list of all the areas where it is significantly better than the Tiguan that it replaced . Sadly it is no more, but the near identical (albeit smaller) X2 is, however it’s a smaller engined variant than our X1 (and a manual) and almost double the AP that we paid. My concern with the X2 would be boot space. There is an auto but it’s the PHEV and is over priced IMHO (as are many of the PHEVs now – you’d have to do the maths to see if the fuel saving, less charging costs, exceed the excess AP sufficiently to warrant the high outlay)
Unfortunately, I don’t think that the new X1 will join the scheme any time soon so, of what is left, I would agree with others that the Qashqai ePower looks very good and the Hyundai Tucson gets rave reviews, although the PHEV version is over priced on the scheme (see above) and the petrol model doesn’t return good fuel economy. The Mazda CX5 is a good quality car but, again, mpg lets it down.
Quarter 1 saw a few half decent additions and hopefully quarter 2 might see the same, but I suspect that we are at least another year away from a significantly better choice than we have now – but that might be a vain hope!