2021 Kia Cerato Pricing and Specs

This very website has an absolute wealth of information on this topic. Follow this link: https://www.carsguide.com.au/kia/cerato/2016 and you’ll find everything from pricing guides to performance data, dimensions and even towing capacities. It’s all there in black and white and one of the reasons CarsGuide is the best in the business. 

The answer will come down (somewhat) to whether the car dealership you buy from wants your car as a trade-in or not. Even if it’s agreed that your Sportage will act as a trade-in, if the car yard in question doesn’t really want it, they won’t offer you much for it. Sometimes, a car dealer will even give you what’s called a no-trade bonus which is a few dollars off the price of the new car on the basis that you’re not lumbering them with a trade-in they don’t want to have to sell on.

You stand to make a little more by selling the Sportage privately, but only if you can be bothered with placing an advert and then having a stream of strangers in your driveway on a Saturday morning. Trading the old car in on the new one is the simplest, easiest way of switching cars, but as with any deal like this, don’t be star-struck by the trade-in price, because the extra you think you’re being given for the car will almost certainly be added on to the price of the new car. The important number with this type of transaction is the change-over figure; the actual amount of money you need to stump up to swap from one car to another.

A ticking noise from the engine of a modern car is often the first signs of a build-up of sludge inside the engine. The hydraulic lash adjusters (which control the amount of clearance in the valve-train) operate on the same oil that lubricates the entire engine. If sludge has begun to build up in the engine, these lash adjusters are often the first components to be damaged.

What causes this build-up? Most commonly, the cause is poor servicing over the years. If a previous owner has stretched the oil-change intervals beyond the factory recommendation, the oil becomes contaminated and dirty and that leads directly to sludge. Does your car have a written record of its past maintenance? If not, I’d be very suspicious of its service history.

You may be lucky, however, and simply have a single lash adjuster that has failed for no good reason. If that’s the case, it can be replaced (I’d replace all 16 of them while I was at it). Perhaps in the first instance, the wise move would be to have somebody who knows these engines have a listen to see if the cause is something else. Modern aluminium engines can often be a bit noisy, and your problem could be related to an injector or fuel pump or perhaps something even deeper inside the engine.