Amalgam, thank for the reply. My wife is pretty switched on, in fact she has a truck licence and knows how to do more than your average chick (and I suspect bloke). Her car we traded in for the Passat had done 300,000 km, so she gets that cars have things go wrong as they get old.

Yes predicting relaibility is speculation, but given most cars only have a few things go wrong with them, and ours has had heaps and weve fixed them, then we should hopefully have used our failure quota up.

From what I can tell (thanks VDUB) weve had the big things go wrong and fixed them - so I'm included to hang on to it and hopefully there should not be any more big nasty suprises.......