Fiat Punto 1.2 8v

When my husband and myself were first together we were running around in a car that my dad had bought me for my 21st birthday but when it came to my husband wanting to learn to drive himself he decided that he would like to buy a car that was ours. My dad helped us to find a car and we came across a 1.2 Fiat Punto Active, which had been used as a garage demo model and as such, only had 4133 miles on it at 10 months old. We managed to secure a deal of just over £5000 including them fitting us a 10 CD auto changer in the boot, these cars are available in a wide variety of colours and even have some metallic options, our car was a dark metallic blue.

The car runs on unleaded fuel and is in a low insurance and tax group making it a good little starter car, the combined mph of the car was supposed to be around 50mpg and we did find it was an economical car which in these times is always a huge consideration. The car had all the usual things that you would expect, trip computer, mpg indicator which I generally managed to keep somewhere between 45 and 48mpg probably as I could see what I was getting from the car and I do like to compete with myself and adjustable seating. The vehicle also had the little extras such as central locking, electric windows, ISO fixing for child seats and CD player which is not always standard.

Unfortunately we had problems with this car although I believe a lot of this was down to the garage rather than the make of car, first of all we had a warning light which would come on intermittently telling us there was something wrong with the steering, after a lot of parts being exchanged and numerous computer hook ups it was found that the auto changer that had been fitted by the garage was not compatible with the car and had to be changed. The second issue we ended up with was that the main computer system kept playing up and in the end had to be replaced, the explanation we were given for this which I have no reason to doubt as the garage that told us were simply doing the job under warranty and not where we got the car from was that when a service is done on a car there are certain updates loaded onto the computer system, as our car had it’s first service at 4133 miles rather than around 12000 the updates ended up out of sync. Luckily all the work that needed doing was done under warranty so wasn’t a cost to us.

The car was a nice drive and very nippy, inside was comfortable and although the boot space wasn’t huge I have seen much smaller. Whilst we had the car we had our first daughter and there was plenty of room for all the stuff that comes along with a baby however I would say that this car would not be comfortable for three adults in the back even though it is 5 seater car.

The car was lovely and I really like it but once we got to thinking about a second child we accepted this vehicle was no longer going to suit us and decided to trade it in, I would say this is a good starter car and even a good car for a small family but for the larger family it would become less suitable.