Is a vw golf a good first car ?

Don't go black box. Compromise on the car instead, those boxes are a scam. Run some quotes and see. However, most insurers won't like 17 year olds in bigger cars, the lowest quote I got was £2500 no box about 10 years ago for a MK4 Golf, in a decent area.

If you don't care about driving for fun, a 5 door Fiesta will be great. It's easy to drive and doesn't look too bad either.

To be fair, I find my Fiesta a lot more fun to drive than a lot of cars supposedly more "fun" because it doesn't spend half its life in the garage! I also like the fact it's easy to park in small spaces!!!

However, I will concede that at 80mph the car starts to shake a bit, so stick within the speed limits.

Most cars have rattles and shakes, especially if you aren't using top end tyres. A Fiesta is fun around corners and stuff, but it isn't very fast in a straight line. Still miles better than anything Vauxhall, and the second best looking supermini.

why not get a Škoda ? they are owned by Volkswagen and are reliable and good value.

https://www.john-clark.co.uk/skoda/latest-news/fabia-great-first-car/

They have Continental tyres on at the moment as they were what they had on when I bought it a few months ago. They'll end up with something more budget when I replace them! But you can really tell the engine is struggling at those speeds, although I don't often break the speed limit anyway....

Vauxhall are made by the PSA Group so they are indeed a pile of crap just like the Citroens and the Peugeots. Only buy an old one if you like sitting on the side of the M3 waiting for the AA.

What's the best looking super-mini out of curiosity?

In my useless opinion, the Alfa Romeo MiTo.

And that's surprising, Continentals are supposed to be good. Must be flat spotted at one point, probably from the previous owner parking it for months.

That MiTo is a nice looking car. I'm not sure if Alfa Romeos have a great record for reliability though?

If you are going to buy an older car, then Volkswagen are a safer bet than most but I would urge caution on an older car more generally. I know it's your first car and you won't have a huge budget but my experience (I'm 38 now) is that cars don't tend to last as long as they did about 10 years ago.

I've never been particularly bothered about what got me from A to B so I've always bought second hand cars, normally about 5 years old from the start. However, whilst this was a good strategy when I began driving in 2004 and the 1999 car (a Ford) I bought lasted until I sold it still in good working order in 2010, I more recently in 2016 bought a 2011 Citroen C4 and my wife bought a 2013 Peugeot and I reckon we must have spent around £5k fixing problems in the four years we owned them until we ended up selling the Citroen for parts and managed to get rid of the Peugeot in a part exchange. And before anyone suggests it, the mileage on both were below 30,000 when we bought them.

The problems (and I'm not mechanic) seem to be first that parts just aren't the same quality anymore and second that there are all kinds of computers on modern cars now and when parts go wrong there is a programming element that local mechanics can't do. For example, there is a mechanic in my hometown who specialises in Renault, Citroen and Peugeot who couldn't fix the Peugeot accelerator because he couldn't even diagnose the problem without logging into it and we had to take it to a Peugeot garage who charged us £100 just to tell us that their cars accelerator was broken. Fixing that alone cost us £2k.

Your safest bet now is to prioritise age and brand over size. A Volkswagen built in 2015 might not be too bad because it is a much more reliable brand than anything associated with the PSA Group whose cars are particularly poor quality (Peugeot, Citroen, Vauxhall). However, I'd strongly recommend you opt for a smaller, newer car if you can. Toyota are pretty good (although Japanese cars tend to be expensive when they do go wrong because of the parts) but my recommendation would be a Ford Fiesta. I have one myself and I'm tall (6'5") and I have plenty of space in the car and honestly they're not much smaller than the Focus I drove 15 years ago!

Same deal as Skoda I think, they're supposed to have really got their act together. I keep being tempted by 159s

With the reports of the Guilia...

That MiTo is a nice looking car. I'm not sure if Alfa Romeos have a great record for reliability though?

My step dad works at Alfa you son of a b*tch