We were urged to sell our Renault on at (almost) any price, says James Baggott

I’ll admit it, the digital guffaws and online ribbing about the very fact we’d bought a Renault Scenic did take their toll. The minute we posted last month’s magazine update on the world wide web, the text messages, emails and tweets began. None of which congratulated us on an excellent purchase. Far from it.

My favourite went something along the lines of: ‘You’ve committed the ultimate car dealer suicide move and bought a Scenic.’ They didn’t say Scenic. They’d cleverly used a swear word in its place and morphed it into sounding vaguely like Scenic, but it got the message across pretty clearly.

Horror stories in the motor trade are as common as McDonald’s wrappers on Saturday mornings in dealerships and the Renault people carrier has more than its fair share. Reliability woes are plentiful and cover such large sections of the internet that anyone would think Scenic was a sexual fetish.

And the problem with horror stories is that most people believe them. And by people I mean the very people you’re trying to punt the car on to. The general public love to believe a good What Car?/Auto Express/Which? Tale of Woe and they very soon become ingrained in that model’s history that it might as well wear an ‘I’m A Dog’ badge.

So the words of advice from one of our trade gurus made making the decision to sell for a wipe-our-feet rock-bottom price all the more easy. ‘The first offer you get, bite their hand off,’ were the pearls of wisdom that rung around my head every time I worried about shifting the Scenic.

‘Two weeks rolled by and with the out-of-sight out-of- mind motor easy to forget about, we did.‘

When we left you last month, our mechanical marvel Matt Kendell had just given the Renault a going over and a clean MOT. After the highs of selling the Volvo and Skoda we were on a roll, and it would have been wise not to lose momentum – but then we did, leaving the Scenic at Kendell’s for long enough for him to realise we’d forgotten about it.

‘Want me to stick a price on this Renault seeing as you’ve left it here anyway?’ he asked in a text message. Blinding idea, so he stuck £3,295 in the window and put it out the front of his garage. Two weeks rolled by and with the out-of-sight out-of- mind motor easy to forget about, we did. I know we’re aiming to get to a 911 by 2011, but when you’ve got a magazine to run these things get pushed to the bottom of the to-do list.

Then the dreaded DVLA letter arrived telling us the tax was due. In the government’s never-ending quest to squeeze as much cash out of motorists as it can, you’ll be aware all cars must be continuously taxed. This makes life difficult for those of us trading on cars for charity as a lapse in tax (despite the car being on the drive) is a monumental pain in the backside to get around.

But thankfully, a day later, Kendell called – we had an interested party! Batch was dispatched to Portsmouth to drop off the documents and we waited in anticipation to see if the buyer returned the following day with ‘the cash’ as they’d promised. We all know what that usually means, but fortunately this one was telling the truth. That’s probably because (as we later found out) she was a Reverend… So the Scenic found a new home for £3,000. It needed some remedial work to a big scuff on the front and the boot struts had lost their ability to perform their primary objective. That, and the fact everyone advised us to simply get shot of it (even for what we paid trade if we needed to), made the decision an easy one.

So now we’re back to being car- less. We’ve still got about £900 in the Bank of Michael Nobes (I’ll refer you to last month’s update and the trade deal we did to get this car and the other two), so we plan to go back there and buy another cheapie.

Hopefully this time we can source one with a bit more profit in it. Still, £600 is not to be sniffed at, but when you look at our track record it’s pretty poor. If only we could find another one of those i10 football cars.

THE STORY SO FAR…