Well, my Audi A4 is very old now and we will probably need a new car in a year or so.

I’m really thinking of getting another Audi, but I thought I would check around and see what else I could get.

I was looking at Opel, mainly to see how much the Opel GT (Speedster/Spider) was, but I found a 200 bhp Astra for ~ €25k

The Opel GT is only ~€22k and does have 250 bhp, but its a little small for every day use.

You can get a VW Golf GTI for around €26k too.

You can get an Audi A3 with 200 bhp for around €27k

Its about €27k for the 200bhp Honda Civic Type R

It would be good to have a 200bhp car but I really dont know if I can justify it. You can get large, more efficient cars. My A4 is only around 125 bhp. Well it was when new, its 11 years old now so its probably even less.

Oh and I nearly forgot the Ford Focus ST. Its 225bhp and around €27k

Mazda also do a 191 kW (259 bhp) Mazda 3for ~€26k

All prices are current from German websites.

Well this morning Steve actually worked out how many MPG our 11 year old A4 gets. Roughly its around 25mpg. Not great, but not bad either. The wikipedia page for the A4 says the new cars only do around 30 mpg. This new VW Gold gets 82 mpg. If it has the same petrol tank size as my car, it would do around 2000km on a 60 litre tank. Thats just crazy!

82 miles per gallon = 34.861784 km/litre
60 litres * 34.8 km/litre = 2088 km

I’m not sure I would buy a hybrid car though, they may be more fuel efficient, but that does not mean they are that good for the environment.

You have to remember batteries and plastics are very bad for the environment and in the total lifetime of the car, the environmental impact of the manufacturing and disposal of the car are often ignored.

If you want to know the best car for CO2 production then the telegraph has this story about C02 production in current cars.

I’d be very interested to find out how environmentally friendly old cars are. I know they don’t do 50 + mpg but they were mainly steel and wood, both easy to reuse.

You may want to read cleancarcampaign.org article too. Its called END-OF-LIFE VEHICLES: A THREAT TO THE ENVIRONMENT.