Faults:
Head gasket blew at 169000 kilometres. Head machined and new gasket & seals replaced.
Now has some wheel bearing noise left & right hand front. Will need replacing shortly.
At 168000 kilometres had brakes fully serviced, replaced all pads and had discs checked for wear which turned out to be minimal. Fluid also replaced.
General Comments:
Overall performance is very good for a 1.6 , obviously better than the standard 'Swing & 'city' models. It's not a Ferrari so one shouldn't expect that type of performance. It's very nippy, easy to park. My car, (red) has been well looked after, regular service, kept clean inside & out. Always garaged. I treat the little vehicle with respect by not over-revving or trying to make it do things it wasn't designed to do. I love driving it around the hills, it clings to the road very well because of it's wide wheels & tires. Very predictable when cornering, like most cars if pushed too hard into corners it oversteers. I've found it quite comfortable on long drives up to about 5 hours. It will sit on 110 kph all day and is surprisingly quiet at that speed.
It's economical as long as you just cruise around, if you go for some hard driving around the hills and use higher revs then fuel economy suffers. But, you don't get something for nothing. I took the car overseas to Canada some years ago, I was there for 3 years. Apart from the fact that the car was right hand drive I didn't experience any problems with it, even driving in the constant wet BC weather and in the snow. It is very similar to the Pontiac Firefly in looks, performance and size.I've been fortunate to own a variety of 'exotic' cars over the years. The most recent being a replica Shelby Cobra and a 289 1967 Mustang coupe, both now sold. My last run-about was a 1995 Honda Prelude which I recently sold as when I moved I only had garage space for one car.
As the price of gasoline has increased I think keeping the Barina was a wise move. From the comments I have read, I have been lucky to get a 'good one'. Thousands of these cars are sold around the world under different badges, so their popularity continues. I don't have any plans to get rid of my car, I'm even considering taking it back overseas.
26th Jul 2006, 04:59
I don't think Holden ever made any Barina's, but if they had it probably wouldn't have been much better. Unfortunately you bought the Opel version, with a Holden badge which looking at all these bad reviews, was the beginning of the end reliability-wise for these cars, and now they're Korean (Daewoo Kalos, unsafe car). The previous Japanese (Suzuki) ones were apparently heaps better and I recently read somewhere that they were the best built cars with the fewest warranty claims in the Holden line-up. How things change.