Quote:
Originally Posted by AlainBrighton
I have been reading your thread with a lot of pleasure and interest today ! From the whole discussion about getting a high mileage car that hardly has time to get a cold engine compared to diesel cars that were just used to drive to the supermarket 2 miles away and people still insist it is better to buy a car with a few miles ..... all the way through to the washers (being a Dutch native speaker I initially was under the impression this had to do with the headlight washers or windscreen wipers :-( ) the navigation issues as well as the trust one has to put in indies but with the knowledge of the whole forum behind you "to keep them honest", the family addition to the final remarkable fact a forum member can point you out in the right direction when you see a warning which could spell all kinds of disaster. Quite an odyssey in itself and congratulations on your family expansion.
Very interested as I want to give my honest 05 XC70 a slight break and put a 11-14 XC70 next to it, or a X3 or 3 touring x drive. And suddenly thinking about a XC90 reading this. I was wondering (having read about astronomical costs of running how a XC70 would compare to a XC90 in running costs ? I pay £350 for my insurance, £325 for my road fund licence (which is about 20-25% of the costs if it had a Dutch license plate so a doddle) £160 a year to park the car in the center of Brighton about 200 yards from the sea and wonder if these costs would be doubled with a XC90 ?
Furthermore you wrote somewhere you would like to give the "burn-it-yourself" navi discs a go if you had some ....... whilst still clearing the 10000 odd books in my dad's 2 studies in the Netherlands I have come across quite a stash of DVD-Rs so let me know how many you need and I can pick them up and post them your way or drop them off on one of my trips to Cambridge and Norfolk if that would help you experiment and as such helping other members of this forum with your newly gained experience.
Good luck with your sinum currus :-)
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Thanks very much for your warm words and for taking the time to post. I've benefited hugely from threads similar to this with regard to other cars so I figured I'd try and return the positive karma with a thread of my own, and I'm glad you've found it so useful.
In terms of the DVD-Rs, that's a very generous offer but I was fortunate enough that the hitherto unreadable navigation disc suddenly decided it could be read, therefore allowing the navigation to update itself. I'm now leaving it will alone and probably will continue to do so for a number of years!
With regards to your question of XC90 vs. XC70 costs, I can't speak for your insurance or parking at Brighton but I will try to help with others. The Executive XC90 I have is in quite a high insurance group so I'd imagine it will cost more than your XC70, but you might be surprised. Road tax for the XC90 was £325 last time I bought it, and it's doing around 28 to 32 mpg on average, running on standard (decent brand) diesel. I can't think this is significantly different to your XC70.
I love BMWs but not a fan of the X3 so I'd struggle to recommend it. The 3 Series Touring X Drive I'm sure is a great car (years ago I had a E46 330i Touring which was fab) but is a
LOT smaller than the XC90. This may not be a problem for you, but you'll be sacrificing a lot of interior space by opting for that car over the XC90.
A brief aside though, even my XC90 felt tiny inside and out compared to the car I hired in Ontario...
