Buying a Ford KA - Rust?

The KA is an unreliable car

Rubbish.

This again being one of the cars i've owned (1.6 sportka), suffered suspension lower arm problems and chronic rust although I admit it was a lot of fun to drive for a small car.

You can't ignore the customer satisfaction surveys which don't do this care any grace and favour, for what is supposed to be a cheap and cheerful car too much of the tiny amount of equipment it does have is prone to go wrong. Get a well serviced Corsa

The KA is an unreliable car and is well known to rust. If you can get one very cheap and your not really bothered about having to scrap it when you move on well then fair enough, but if you want something a little bit better try a corsa C 1.2

Rubbish.

Hey guys, Just after a bit of advice from anyone with more knowledge,

I passed my test recently and one of the cars I'm considering is a Ford KA, It's not my first choice but one has come up locally at a very good price

I'm aware they are common to get rust, And this one already has rust on the passenger side door and has patches on the sills which I'm aware can be failed on MOT.

Should I stay clear or would it be worth going for it given the good price provided it passed a new MOT? Apart from the rust everything seems to be excellent with it.

So you had to replace some suspension components and it got a bit rusty. So what? That's just the cost of owning a car.
That doesn't make it "unreliable".
A car is unreliable if it doesn't start in the morning.
A car is unreliable if it is incapable of completing a journey on a regular basis
A car is unreliable if it overheats every time you take it out.
etc. etc...

A car is NOT unreliable because you have to open the bonnet once in a while, or change a few consumables. That's just the reality of owning a car.

Have you lost your mind? If things break and you have to keep changing them obviously that makes it unreliable. Yes you expect to have to change a couple of things now and again, but say all the internal electrics broke and needed replacing all the time (like on 02-08 mercedes) would you still be brilliantly impressed with the reliability? Besides which some of these things are MOT failures, so unless your planning on driving it around without an MOT then its not going to be capable of completing a journey.

Yes the rust you can live with, but the engines pre-2003 have a known problem which is expensive to fix (unless you get a new engine which is probably the best option) and the engines don't last into high miles like their competitors. Moreover there are problems with the steering racks and the suspension. Unless the poster doesn't think steering the car is important . . .

Things break on cars - that's a fact.
Reliability of a car is defined on whether you can *rely* on it to start in the morning and whether you can *rely* on it to complete it's journey.
Steering racks and suspension don't break in 5 minutes. With the exception of coil springs which can break on anything at any time, You need to do thousands of miles before something will go very wrong.

The engines are fine. They trace their roots back to the pinto which was first designed in the late 50's. So long as you treat them with respect and don't pretend you're driving a honda s2000 and rev the nuts off the things it'll be fine. It's a basic SOHC, pushrod four. It's about as simple as you can get.

Incidentally, the term "reliability" was coined in the 70's when japanese cars were starting to be imported that would start in the morning when the local stuff perhaps wouldn't.
If you can't get your head around what that means then I can't help you.

Yes things break on cars, but the difference between a reliable and unreliable car is how many things break and how often. If someone asks if a car is reliable they're asking about all of the car, if you were to say to a customer "yes this car is very reliable, the suspensions ****ed, the steering rack doesn't work and all the electrics are useless" how impressed do you think they would be? You have to do thousands of miles before it goes wrong?? Well pardon me for making an assumption but most people do do thousands of miles in their cars and they want to be able to do those miles with only normal maintainance. My parents had a Previa for 10 years that did 100k and all that went wrong was the sunroof, thats reliability for it. You'll find few modern cars that will regularly not start unless they are especially ****ed so thats really a moot point.

There is a known fault on the pre-2003 models, and even on the latter models they tend to deteriorate at lower miles than competitors engines. It came from the 1950's ey? Must mean its brilliant.

End of the day the 1.3 ka is a poor car in comparison to whats avaliable and its a bad choice to make, you can have much better for the same money.

Of course you can have much better for your money. What's a fiat panda cost these days? 11 grand? You could buy a 60's mustang for that or a TVR.
We're talking about budget motoring here, though.

The fact the engine can trace its roots back to the 50's means that it's simple by todays standards and thus cheap to maintain.

I'm not going to waste any more time arguing the point with you. From the standpoint you are taking you've clearly never turned a spanner in your life and you also strike me as one of those people that think you can own a car and never lift a bonnet between services.
I've owned over 50 cars throughout my driving history and one of them was a KA. It was fine.