A little more than two years ago, in the middle of the summer of 2013, I bought one of the cheapest cars I’ve ever seen advertised with valid inspection, let alone bought for myself. It was a white Peugeot 205 XS with 230 000 km on the clock, it cost 350 euros and I pretty much immediately wrote it up for Hooniverse. After being used as a student runabout, it was the way you would imagine a cheap, somewhat neglected car to be, as the paint was dull, the interior smelled of smoking and the engine bay was horrendously dirty. There were a bunch of weird noises here and there, the tires were bad and I didn’t really know what I was going to do with it, except tidy it up and drive it. And that’s exactly what I’ve done in the past two years.
It’s most likely one of the best deals I’ve ever done.
I’ll now let you catch up on the two years’ time I’ve had the affable little French econobox, and it’s going to be photo-heavy. Even so, that it’s better to splice up the pieces into several posts.


I binned the tacky hubcaps the minute I got anywhere with the car.

As well as a good wash and wax, the Peugeot needed some maintenance done. I had no idea when it had been properly serviced the last time, so I paid a friend to do the belts on it. That revealed the water pump had been close to death some time, so if I had just been beating the car up like the previous owners, there would have been some issues close at hand.

The TU-series engine is a pretty little thing when you can see it clean.

I had jetwashed the engine bay to make it easier to detect any leaks, and it cleaned up pretty nicely – in fact, after polishing the paintwork, I noticed how well the car has weathered. There are some cracks in the paint and a few dents, but despite being a quarter of a century old, it doesn’t really rust that eagerly. See here for an underbody shot:

It’s all just dirt, really. The spare tire tray had some light rust underneath it, and the tire itself had been there since day one. I was happy to find out the rear axle bearings were still holding up fine, too.


Replacing the crummy aux lights on the front bumper brightened the looks a lot, but googling for some 205 XS photos, I got an idea for how I should make the car look in the end.


Here’s a British XS, which I decided should be the visual goal. Photo from 205GTiDrivers.

I continued to use the car almost daily for the coming fall, but I did notice some mayo-like stuff on the oil cap soon enough. For the record, there had been oil in the coolant tank as well, for the length of the ownership, so I deduced the head gasket had suffered enough and was due for a change.
A local school’s auto shop did that for me over the winter, along with reconditioning the head and changing the valve stem seals, so I could get rid of the cloud of blue smoke the 205 did at startup. The entire overhaul cost me about the car’s worth, which is really not that bad. And yes, up until then I thought the car was carburetted, but no – Bosch single point fuel injection hid there under the plastics.


Come spring, I started envisioning a trip to make with the Peugeot. Earlier on, I had planned to get 15-inch aluminium “steel wheels” for it, as Citroën C5:s had those as base wheels. They weigh 4,7 kg each, and sprayed white they looked Rallye-esque enough.

I ordered a set of Uniroyal Rainsport 2 tires for them, in the size of 195/45R15. Along with the wheel job, I resprayed the tired bumpers sort of gunmetal, and the car was transformed into what I had seen in it all along – matching my motivational photos. The set of wheels and tires cost me roughly the worth of the car a second time around, which is again not that bad.

Now that the car had come such a long way, I wanted to take it further. Where I went will be detailed in the next posts.