Finally! I have my first car, I’ve had it for a few months and boy I have some stories to tell.
Some general things about it, “Midnight Black” paint.
It has a 1.2L I4, fuel injection, N/A making 93hp which is actually fairly nippy and for a first car its good enough to keep your foot in up to the speedlimit. It’s front wheel drive obviously, front transverse blah blah generic hatch stuff. Manual gearbox, 5 speed and its pretty close range too, its just a little noisy at 70mph, so I might get a longer final gear on it.
Here’s some pictures. Black on Black on Black, with the racing stripes on the side 
Now some of you may know, I’m a race driver, I race cars, used to race karts etc. You might think that makes me an idiot on the road, which to some people that might be true but what it actually does it make me super aware of the consequences, other peoples driving and general knowledge of driving is a lot more than many people on the road already. The road is not a race track. Do not use it as one.
Anyway, I actually went to look at this car after a school karting race. I had to beg my dad to go, since we were already 3 hours out of our way from home, and it was another 4 on top of that. (When you live in the south of the UK the north is quite far)
I’d been looking for a while, tossing up between Toyota Aygos, Citroen DS3’s and Swifts. This Swift was a literal bargain, it was a catagory S which means the insurace wrote it off as too expensive to repair, S just meant it had structural damage. If you’re not familiar with the catagories just look them up, there’s like Cat N,D,S,C and A, B
The car had been repaired already (too an extent which we’ll find out later) and it only had 21k miles on it. They were asking £4000 for it, and they said £200 to deliver it. We haggled the guy down to £4k for everything and the next week it was in my driveway. Badass. 66 plate car for that money was great, I’ll hopefully take good car of it >.<
The garage that had repaired it weren’t being very specific about what they had done, just that it was repaired. They were super vague and it was a little anoyying, but it was well worth it, the garage did all sorts of CAT repairs to cars so thats a trade that I’ve learnt about, you can actually get some really good cars for cheap, and depending on the insurance company you have they might not even care that its a Catagory car.
The car had some nice options on it, it’s got cruise control and a special bumper that only comes on the new facelift of the swift but is on mine because of the repairing stuff. There was a large amount of structural damage around the front driver side, the subframe was bent in, and the lower bar around the bottom of the radiator had to be replaced (i can tell because its blue, not black). Both lights were fine though.
Some things I discovered though was that I could only hold about two (2) squirts of washer fluid before I ran out, this was due to a large hole in the bottle that was made in the impact, the subframe had crushed it, the frame also crushed part of the airbox, so the pipe arm bit was loose. All this stuff is fixed now. I got to do a bit of fibreglass work which was cool, I’ve never done it before so it was quite interesting. Was a pain in the ass to fix though, since it was tucked in behind the light, and to get the light out you had to take the front bumper off. Still, could be worse.
Other things that were broken was the rear left brake light (that was actually really easy to replace, the bulb was broken (also repaired) and the front right side bulb was gone too. There’s a slight dent on the rear left quarter by the fuel cap, but its not noticable unless you point it out and the strut for holding the bonnet up was missing the clip in point (it had lost half the clip so it wouldn’t stay in place) but that’s glued in now. Oh and also the A/C didn’t work for a little bit, it just needed gassing up so we did that too, not that important for English weather but you know It blows hot quite nicely.
It’s a fun car, its quite chuckable although there is a large amount of body roll because the car is rather tall, thats probably my only gripe about it. The boot is decently big, you could fit a few sports bags in there, the head room is good in the front, not so great but still comfortable enough in the rear (I’m 6ft and a tiny bit).
The fuel eco is great, its fantastic when you drive with the intention of being effecient. I average 49mpg and thats with ripping around, but on a normal day to school its about 68 (lets call it 69 yeah?) and that’s pretty good i’m almost certain. It took me a while to figure out how to use the buttons on the dash bit, for changing time etc but of course Youtube does it’s thing so that was fine.
I’m thinking of doing maybe an intake and exhaust and that’s about it. It’s fun enough already, just need a bit of noise but not obnoxious noise. I’ve also got a Citroen Saxo VTR lying in the garage, but I guess thats another thread. I’ll try add more story to this in the coming days.
