So, I`m a rural mailman driving in a little sleepy nowhere village in southern Finland. My steed for the past almost a full year has been a Citroen Xsara Picasso diesel that has been converted to a 1+1 van with the rear seats removed and blocked so they can`t be refitted. It`s been driven to the moon and a good part back at 430tkm on the meter and it`s starting to show pretty much everything being just a little bit broken. I`ve done MASSIVE amounts of repairs to it over the past year, probly sunk at least the car`s worth to the repairs myself not even counting the cambelt&waterpump job I had done not a month ago.
Last weekend (the one a week from now) we had our first snow and we had quite a bit of it in one go considering the time of year so the roads have been super slippery in the countryside. Last Wednesday I was in a bit of a hurry, took one corner maybe a weeeeee bit too hot, lost control of the back end, tried my best to correct but the car spun too far sideways for it to have any proper effect so I ended up sliding off the road, flying over the ditch on the inner curve and landing nose first into the opposite bank crashing the front end in.
I was luckily not hurt in the crash other than having a bit of a sore neck one day but the car is a write-off. Headlight mounts have broken, the bumper is cracked in several places, the crash bar within has split from the middle and the radiators have moved inwards from the bottom at least, wouldn`t be surprised if I`d find bent frame rails but haven`t felt the need to further investigate so it`s off to the baler for this one I`m afraid... the weird part is the airbags did not fire. Anyway I managed to get a hold of a guy with a tractor that lives nearby who came to pull me out and followed me to the church parking lot a couple hundred meters away where he picked me up and gave me a lift to the village bar where I waited for my wife to come get me home.
Speed scroll a couple days of me trying to dig through nettiauto, tori.fi, facebook marketplace and what else I could think of without finding pretty much anything good, a few 307SW:s but they`re not really suitable for mail delivery, I need something high and roomy.
Til I suddenly came across this.
2008 1.6 diesel, also van converted, 234tkm on the clock, in MINT condish save for a couple scratches here and there that matters zero in my line of work, only problem is it`s over two hours away. Recruited my father in law as a driver and come Saturday morning took off to go see it. And turns out this car has a bit of a story:
Turns out the previous owner of this car was an old geezer living in Ylöjärvi which is a suburb of the city of Tampere. He`s had it for a long time and kept it like a flower which explains the super low mileage, but apparently he started to have a problem with the car randomly cutting out for no apparent reason. He took it to a service shop where they poked it for weeks without being able to determine what is the problem as everything appears to be fine till something glitches and it cuts out again. During this process the old man reached the age of having to go through a medical to keep his license which he knew he wouldn`t pass so he never went and the car kind of got abandoned to the service shop.
Enter the new guy who happens to be a teacher at the Tampere Polytechnic vocational school`s car line and knows the owners of the service shop. He acquires ownership of the car through ways untold to me and takes it to the school as a study piece where he and his students spends a semester troubleshooting the problem swapping out all sorts of sensors and relays til it no longer cuts out. They then did the needed modifications to get it conversion inspected as a van and went through that, after which his daughter drove the car for six months til she`s moving to Denmark a the turn of the year as an exchange student so he decided to sell the car. This story told me he doesn`t have much money invested in it so I managed to talk the asking price of 1390eur to 1050, did the paperworks and went on my merry way struggling to hold a grin knowing the car is worth much more than that being FULLY kitted with every bling the factory offered at a time including automatic climate control, electric windows, rain detector and phone controlled webasto diesel heater, even all three keys are still there, oh and EVERYTHING works!
Boy let me tell you, 430tkm vs 230tkm, you`ll feel the difference alright.
