1987 Volkswagen Polo review from UK and Ireland

Standard servicing stuff.

Watch out for rear brakes - they fail regularly.

I had to replace the carb at 120,000 miles.

Seat support broke - 50 pence fix.

Front wheel bearings.

What more could you ask for? These cars seem to be indestructable to all intents and purposes, the car so far after 20 months has cost me approx 57p a day, as I only bought it for £400!! that's less than I pay for fuel a day!

Okay, it has some minor niggles...

The brakes aren't powerful, but I actually like them because they give you full feedback about what's happening at the wheels (i.e. if you've got a busted pad, you're going to feel it through the pedal.) Besides, who needs a servo in a car that weighs less than 3/4 of a tonne?

While I'm on the subject of brakes... if you buy a polo, regularly inspect the rear drums for signs of fluid leakage, especially if you've done an emergency stop. I had a rear cylender fracture from a particularly hard stop, had it replaced and it failed again within a month.

Try to avoid high mileagers with the mid-late 80's pierburg carb as these cause no end of problems trying to get the vehicle through an MOT, not to mention that after 100k miles they make the car very 'bolshy' and unwilling to move off smoothly. If you do get one of these, replace the carb with one of the older solex carbs off a low mileage scrapper (£10-15?) and the car will run beatifully after a garage has set it up.

The tyres need far more pressure in them than the handbook suggests as the vehicle handles like its on jelly suspension otherwise. I'd suggest going with the tyre manufacturers recommendation, not the VW one.

As small cars go this vehicle is amazingly nippy, I don't know how VW got the 0-60 figure to be 19.6 seconds?!? After a bit of tuning this vehicle does it in just over 13 seconds (I clocked it - though you really have to thrash it) - it beats the pants off most modern 1.4i's.

One last point - sometimes you'll be sat at a set of lights with the vehicle in first and it will suddenly start to judder, which can be rectified by taking it out of gear and dropping it back in. This is not a failed clutch - and don't let a garge tell you it is. It seems to be some artifact of high mileage polos that this juddering occurs - I bought a new clutch and went to replace it, only to find that the clutch didn't need replacing - it was the automatic adjuster causing havoc.

Apart from these minor faults I don't think I could have made a better first buy.