Around thirty years ago, before we got married, I sold my “fun” Morris Marina with a twin-carb 1.8 litre engine (which, given that cars were much lighter then, went like the proverbial bat out of hell) and bought a Renault 4, which was much less fun to drive, but also had considerably lower running costs. At the time, we were moving house from Macclesfield to Bristol and so spent quite a large amount of time driving hundreds of miles up and down the motorway in the R4. This was not fun at all because the car was noisy enough at 70 mph, that we had to drive with ear plugs in, if we wanted to still be able to hear after we arrived. The first time we did that, when we came off the motorway and removed the ear plugs, we immediately stopped to inspect the engine, as we were sure it couldn’t normally make so much noise!
We’d completely forgotten about the trusty R4 until last Sunday, when we drove down from Santander to Salamanca (about 320 km) for another couple of weeks Spanish course. The nice lady at Hertz at the airport tried hard to persuade us to upgrade for the one way rental from the cheapest category, without success. Which meant we kept the Toyota Aygo that we had booked. I don’t know if it was typical for the model, but I have never driven such a noisy car since the old Renault 4 – an enormous amount of wind noise from the roof aerial and almost as much again from the exhaust. It had only done 7700 km, so it shouldn’t have needed a new exhaust yet.
We’re hoping that by the time we want to return to Santander, they will have rented the car to someone else, who will have taken it away from Salamanca – otherwise, we will have to seriously consider an upgrade for the return trip!
