Faults:

Sills and chips got both rusty. Sills were extremely expensive to replace. The part cost 188 euros for a piece and whole process cost almost 1000 euros.

Constant adjusting of tappets which were caused by worn-out camshaft. New camshaft cost 280 euros and with work it cost 750 euros to replace. Nice.

Muffler rusted.

Sway beam had to be replaced.

General Comments:

Nice car to drive. Very stable and good-looking.

However the quality of Ford left something to hope for. I got tired of my old 15 year old Fiat Tipo and it`s constant repairs, but Ford Ka was worse. And the spare parts were more expensive.

My next car will be made in Japan.

Faults:

Initially I had a strong smell of petrol, which was rectified by the dealer under warranty.

After 18 months I was informed by another dealer that the brake discs and pads needed replacing after only 10000 miles. Being someone who at the time didn't know much about cars I went ahead with this work and now realise it only needed pads and I was in effect 'conned'

At 4 years and approx 40 000 miles I had to have the engine rebuilt due to a design fault with the cam shaft. Stupidly I did nothing about this and should have tried to get the £900 it cost to repair back from Ford.

Other than that it has required very little doing to it, new rear brake shoes and new electric window switch come to mind.

Another on going fault with engines of this ilk is that they cut out after heaving braking. But a friend in the know advised me how to clean the air inlet sensor, which when done cures the fault immediately.

Oh, and it had a leak in the front passenger foot well as well. Huge thing, used to fill it with water. Was coming from around the engine management system, but Ford didn't want to know.

General Comments:

I loved my KA, little more I can say. It drove well and it got me to where I wanted to be.

Performance was low if there were too many passengers, but it worked well and I would have another if I didn't need something bigger.

I only had to get rid of this car because it was written off by someone driving into me.

Faults:

There was a persistent problem with the tappets from 30,000 miles onwards.

Rear windscreen wiper didn't always work.

Bushings on the front wheels had to be replaced roughly every 10,000 miles.

Front bumper came away from the body of the car.

General Comments:

The car needed to have its tappets re-aligned every 5,000 miles or so despite the best efforts of the mechanics in my local Ford dealership. This problem is what ultimately caused me to sell the car.

Storage in the car is unbelievably poor, with precious little space to store things like maps, sunglasses, cassettes and other things people usually keep in their cars.

The radio was cheap and nasty.