spacious but soooooooo unreliable! (Renault Espace (1991-97))

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Product:	Renault Espace (1991-97)
Date:	21/08/00 (226 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: *very* comfortable for passengers, very spacious.

Disadvantages: most unreliable car we ever had.

This was the most expensive car we ever bought - in every sense of that phrase. It was top of the range and for the passenger, felt as though you were travelling in an armchair.As it had a 3l engine it was powerful, but very heavy on fuel. The space it had available was also wonderful, and it *was* nice to be able to play around with seating so that the 3 kids couldn't reach eachother to fight.
There are its' good points.....now for the rest.
It was the most unreliable car ever.
I cannot begin to enumerate the many and varied ailments it suffered.......we got an extra year free warranty because of its unreliability in the first year. We then made the mistake of thinking it would get better....
We had an axle break, an engine fire, it broke down in the outside lane of a *very* busy motorway one rush hour, it spectacularly failed in temperatures of over 100c on a *french* motorway in the middle of nowhere when all the garages were closed......and these are only the incidents which i have particularly bad memories of!
In addition it came with a rather nice mini disc system which got stolen very quickly, and an alarm system which it was obviously fairly easy to disable. we didn't replace the minidisc player because the insurance didn't cover its £800 cost, but it was broken into a second time by someone *looking* for the cd system. Friends locally also had their espaces broken into and the disc players removed.
In addition to all this, I did not find it a comfortable car to drive as the seat is at a different and more upright angle to the pedals than most cars, and it has absolutely no real boot, whhich means that on the thankfully few occasions I had to go shopping with it, the shopping ended up all over the floor of the car.
It's comfortable and it's big, but not a lot of use if it's permanently going into the garage.
Oh, and it did *not* as we'd been promised, hold its value well when we came to
sell.

Summary: