Someone Else's Problem: I bought a green car. (2014 Insignia)

So... new rear plate ordered since it's a bit knackered. It cost a whopping ?6,50. It'll arrive in a week or two. Fun fact: all Finnish license plates have been made by the inmates in in Helsinki Prison for many many decades. I also spent ?0,12 for a couple of plastic caps for the exposed front license plate screws.

I booked a windscreen change for next thursday, and told them to take a look at the beeping problem with the folding towbar while it's there. Hoping it's an easy fix.

I also saw another Country Tourer today (a biturbo since it had dual exhausts) as well as a normal Tourer with a 4x4 badge. I never paid attention to these before.
 
Really decent and really nice colour. Here in the UK they are re-baned and sold has a Vauxhall, but there literally isn't an Insignia in my town which appears to still have its Vauxhal badge. They all seemed to have dropped off revealing the Opel logo outline underneath is this a common issue?
 
Really decent and really nice colour. Here in the UK they are re-baned and sold has a Vauxhall, but there literally isn't an Insignia in my town which appears to still have its Vauxhal badge. They all seemed to have dropped off revealing the Opel logo outline underneath is this a common issue?

:blink:

I've never noticed anything special about Opel badges.

What I do know is that Vectras and Astras from around 10 years ago lose their door mirror glass frequently. The glue behind the actual mirror glass is apparently crap causing the glass to simply fall off.
 
Got a new windscreen fitted on thursday. 3 hours later I was heading north doing 110km/h when a logging truck coming the other way dropped something right in front of me and WHACK right in the face. It woke me and my passenger the fuck up, let's just say. It sounded like a big rock and left a dirty stain, but thankfully the glass seems to be OK.

The factory foldable tow hitch has a couple of microswitches in the mechanism, connected to a beeper. One switch is in the release lever and another in the folding mechanism itself. It beeps to warn you if the mechanism isn't locked properly and release lever isn't all the way back in, but for some reason it doesn't stop beeping when you fold it in. The mechanism and the trailer electrics work perfectly otherwise. These things are not really made for salty Scandinavian winters and I know it's not uncommon for the motorised ones to grind to a halt half way out followed by a never-ending beep. :D Mine doesn't have an electric motor though, thankfully.

I unplugged the (replaceable) beeper to make it shut up, but I guess I should bodge the bodge repair a bit further by sealing the open connectors somehow. I guess I could buy a matching pair of connectors, seal them up with hot glue and use them to plug the open ends.
 
Now that you made me aware of the existance of these, I'm seeing them almost daily. In the same colour too. I guess I never really differentiated them from regular Insignias.
 
Now that you made me aware of the existance of these, I'm seeing them almost daily. In the same colour too. I guess I never really differentiated them from regular Insignias.

Yeah, it's not like XC70 vs. V70. Volvo did their marketing better, and the XC70 sits quite a bit higher than the normal V70 while the Country Tourer only sits like 2cm taller than the normal Insignia. It also shows by how Adunaphel simply wrote "2014 Insignia" when he edited my thread title. :p

I have only seen a single other Pea Soup Metallic Insignia so far and it was a regular sedan, parked next to me when I came out of a supermarket earlier this week. Wonder if the owner parked there on purpose.

AWD has proved useful a couple of times already, even though winter is (supposed to be) gone. 15cm of newly fallen snow and 235/50-18" Conti Sport Contact summer tires. Apply throttle (any amount will do) and the car goes. Zero fucks given. :D
 
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I ended up being the designated driver at a friends stag party last night. This meant five burly men and their gear, along with the not inconsiderable amount of tools and junk I keep in my car this time of the year. Again - zero fucks given. :D It picks up speed just as effortlessly as when I'm alone in the car. It handled twisty, bumpy back roads fine loaded too. The featherlight Octavia didn't handle passengers and luggage very well at all.

I've got a bad rear wheel bearing which turned out to be a PITA to source. One of my suppliers offers a FAG bearing but it's out of stock. The other supplier doesn't know of any wheel bearings for my car at all and when I feed it the GM parts numbers for cross reference (there are two in Opel's own catalog) I get three different SNR bearings. I ordered all three, they look identical. I've got the repair scheduled for Tueseday, let's see what happens. Apparently it's a bitch to replace on these. You certainly wouldn't want to tackle it yourself, and your independent mechanic will probably regret taking on the job if he doesn't have the special extractor tool. The same goes for the NG 9-5, and probably the Buick Regal too.

Also, I was riding in the back of a 1997 V70 the other day. I used to have one of those myself. It was like sitting in a greenhouse compared to the Insignia. :D
 
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Found my car's little brother today. It's called Opel Adam ROCKS, apparently.

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I bought a green car. (2014 Insignia)

Damn you! I want a modern Chevy Malibu wagon!
 
It'll be a cross tour x trim level like an Audi allroad. I don't want that awful trim or a lift.
 
I don't want that awful trim or a lift.

That's the awful trim that's on mine :p I love it.

And the "lift" makes it about as tall as my coworkers' Golf MKVI. I wouldn't mind another inch or two, personally.
 
I bought a green car. (2014 Insignia)

I realized that after I posted. Sorry!

Does your market have golf sportwagon all tracks? How does it compare to one of those?
 
Does your market have golf sportwagon all tracks? How does it compare to one of those?

Yes, we do have the Golf Alltrack and many others like it from various manufacturers, mainly European ones. A4 and A6 Allroad, Golf and Passat Alltrack, Octavia Scout and Superb Outdoor, Seat Leon X-Perience... that's 7 different ones from VAG alone. :p Volvo has the V60 and V90 Cross Country and PSA sells the 508 RXH and C5 Cross Tourer. Mercedes is just now joining the party some 20 years after it started, with an E class All Terrain.

There are many more to list if you count every car with plastic body cladding, but these are just the ones where it's a trim level on top of a normal estate. All of them have optional or standard AWD except for the PSA cars. The 508 RXH came to market as a hybrid with a diesel up front and electric drive on the rear axle, but apparently it didn't work out because it's gone now. The RXH is still around but it's FWD only.

My car is one size bigger than the Golf. It's more a competitor to the Passat Alltrack. I otherwise wouldn't mind a Passat, but I wanted a diesel this time around and with my budget that would have meant a dieselgate car. I don't particularly care about emissions but the mandatory "fix" ruins the torque curve and causes EGR failures.
 
So, it's been three months of mostly uneventful motoring.

It's a big, lumbering barge that wallows over bumps around town and you can feel the weight when you're starting from a standstill. It doesn't turn on a dime like the Skoda did either. If you're looking for a little econobox for tooling around town in, this is not it. :lol: It also has a surprisingly small trunk for an estate car this big. The diesel noise is always present at lower speeds and it clatters like a 350,000km 1.9 TDI when idling. This is unusual for a car this new. GM brought out some new "WhisperDiesel" engines around the time my car was made, but the biturbo is not one of them. It quiets down completely once you're on the open road, though. Which is where this car belongs.

Like I said, it belongs on the open road and that was one big thing I missed when I had the Skoda. It's quieter and the (active) suspension sits planted and soaks up bumps a lot better. It also doesn't care if you hook a trailer to it and load it up with passengers and their luggage, unlike the Skoda which didn't like any of that. The climate control has way better brains than the VAG partsbin Climatronic. The rain sensor is a lot better as well. I really like having a proximity key and push-button start. The motorized tailgate is, however, useless. I'd rather just open and close it myself than stand in the rain waiting for it to do its thing. If it had the wave-your-foot-under-the-bumper thing I would get it, but I still have to put my groceries down to press a button. At least I can do it from the remote so it's done by the time I get to the car. :p

I have yet to really see how competent it is in snow, but I don't doubt for a second that it'll be night and day compared to the Skoda, or any other FWD car with a small aluminium engine for that matter. For the first time in forever, I'm actually looking forward to winter. :lol:

As for faults, well... it's a GM product. :p The HVAC fan motor is making a barely noticeable bearing noise, which is unusual for a car this new and with less than 140,000km on the clock. The fan motor has way more "kilometers" on it than the rest of the car since it's used to defrost and heat the cabin for 20-30 minutes every morning during winter. It looks like it's easy to replace so I'll do it myself in a couple of weeks when I'm a bit less swamped with stuff and things. I have yet to do anything under the bonnet except to top up the screenwash, but it's cramped in there. Good thing the cambelt was replaced around 10k ago.
 
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So, this is now Someone Elses's problem. I owned it from 120.000 to 195.000km, at which point I figured I would sell it while everything still worked. It was a car with lots of bits that can go wrong, including magnetic shock absorbers and AWD with torque vectoring. The car was still worth money which means any expensive problems would need to be repaired to protect the investment. It's the most reliable car I've ever had, though.

I can't remember what I bought it for but i think it was advertised for around 22k back in 2016, a two year old car at the time with 120k km, fresh out of the bodyshop because it had been rear-ended. It was now seven years old with 195k on the clock and some dents and scratches. I got about half my money back when I part exhanged it today so I'm not complaining.

The new daily hack is a 2018 Passat Alltrack TDI. Finally a car with CarPlay and ACC.
 
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