[Eddles]

Originally Posted by Piwoslaw

Sorry to hear about the ECO4 getting trashed, I hope no-one was hurt. Did you get to keep any parts? That'd be awesome, since ECO4 parts are so rare.

It happens. Was just a minor fender-bender, but the insurance company wrote off the car without looking at it. I did think about buying it back and repairing it myself, however I saw how the scrapyard moved cars around with a forklift, that put me off. Someone contacted me on Facebook and it turned out that they brought the car for £600 and repaired it for £100 - the insurance company paid me £1,700 for it - so I'm glad it's back on the road and saving someone money. I'm not confident enough in deciding whether the shell wasn't damaged, so it's safer all around to walk away for me, so I'm happy with my decision.

I only got the non-OEM parts off it, unfortunately, I wasn't allowed to get the OEM parts.

When did you get the "new" Astra, and how old was it, how many miles on it? Has it been checked and tuned up yet? Maybe an oil and filter change will help, maybe alignment should be checked.

It has 104,000 miles on it. The dealer claimed that they did a full service on it, but it turned out that they only changed the oil, and nothing else. I will be finishing off the service myself next week/2 weeks time. The air filter is a bit black, so it'd certainly help to change that. Will get alignment checked when I get the new wheels on, it's definitely slightly off.

If you do swap the wheels/tires then maybe try a roll-down test to see the difference in RR.

I'll see if I can get the time to do that.

Can the boost be increased?

I'd guess so but I'd be wary about doing so for 2 reasons - 1) I don't want to damage the engine or shorten its life and 2) the engine with the high pressure turbo has higher fuel consumption, so I'm not quite sure if it's benefitical.

An engine swap is out of the question, I guess?

Unfortunately the Fiat engine is only rated at 120,000 miles, while the Isuzu engine is rated at 250,000 miles, probably partly because of the power difference - 120lb/ft torque for the Isuzu and 175lb/ft for the Fiat despite being 450cc smaller - and partly probably because the Isuzu engine was designed 30 years before the Fiat engine. And it'd probably be more money & time than it's worth - I mean, it'd be better and easier to buy a Smart diesel if I'm serious about fuel consumption! I expect to put at least 100,000 miles on the Astra in 5 years before considering a new car.

Actually... this made me think, and I know the newer Astra model has a choice between the Fiat 1.2 engine and the Isuzu 1.7 engine so I decided to look at the government ratings for both, and it's 58.8mpg combined for the 1.2, and 56.4mpg for the 1.7. Very poor compared to the older model, but this shows that the Fiat engine is more efficient than the Isuzu CDTI, but don't know about the older DTI version. Another interesting note is that the 1.2 in the Astra is 80bhp, while the 1.2 I know was 68bhp, so I'd guess the Fiat 1.2 68bhp engine in an ECO4 would give excellent fuel consumption if a bit slow?

Originally Posted by Arragonis

Ah - I see. I thought you were going to swap the eco4 wheels - which I think were narrower - to the replacement car. Insurance people can get picky

You thought correct. Look at the quotation marks I put on...

Chippable ?

Think so, yes, though I'd want them to decrease the power, not increase it, but not sure if that'd work. If I'm wrong and increasing the power will improve fuel consumption, then I'd be worried about shortening the life of the engine.

Thanks to everyone for your comments so far! Interesting discussion...