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Whilst all fatalities on UK roads dropped last year the figures are still too high. 2,222 people died on the roads of Britain last year, down 12% on 2008. Car occupant deaths fell 16%, pedestrians 13%, cyclists 10% and motorcyclists 4%. Whilst speed awareness courses are often not taken seriously by drivers who have been caught speeding and prefer to attend a course rather than suffer a conviction, the courses have been known to improve drivers’ attitudes towards speeding. This is particularly Read more »

Buying a used car from a dealer? Then you should be more aware of your rights according to the Office of Fair Trading, who have reported that the number of complaints against dealers, for faults that have come to light within the first 3 months, has increased by 18% during the first half of 2010. The Office of Fair Trading Direct received over 38,000 complaints and, as Michele Shambrook of the OFT pointed out, ‘Most of the faults that come to light are the dealer’s responsibility.’ Had a bad used car experience when purchased from a car dealer, please let me know? By Graham Hill

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• Second-hand car complaints soar (bbc.co.uk)

Transport Secretary, Philip Hammond revealed in a speech that 84% of all journeys made in the UK were made by car. This means that there is little prospect that we will move away from cars and onto public transport in the near future. However, the Campaign for Better Transport has carried out a survey, in which they found that certain towns and cities were more dependent on cars than others. The worst offenders and those most car-dependent were: Read more »

It would seem that magistrates have gone soft, as a result of the recession, if you have accidentally reached the automatic driving ban of 12 points on your licence. Some say this is wrong and that the ban should be automatically imposed, especially in extreme cases like the driver who was allowed to keep his licence even after he amassed 54 Read more »

If you are a regular reader of my newsletter and blog you will recall that I announced that the Government was considering moving out the first MOT to 2 years and the annual MOT tests thereafter to be moved from annual to bi-annual as a result of pressure to do so by the EU. This has sparked some strong resistance from road safety groups. RoadSafe has said that the Government shouldn’t change the current Read more »

One of the last meetings I attended at which we discussed the state of the motor finance industry, we were told by one of the leading accountancy practices in the UK along with a couple of large leasing operations that the biggest problem faced by the industry was lack of liquidity or in other words lack of money to lend to you and me. This has been confirmed by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders Read more »

The last Labour Government made a big thing about toll roads, this was going to be the way forward if we were to make the roads less congested but according to research by the Campaign for Better Transport the showpiece M6 toll road has failed to meet its targets. The report claims that the operator, Midlands Expressway is losing millions of pounds every year. The cost of £5 drops to £4.50 at weekends and Read more »

The AA has revealed that we are seeing a North South divide open up when it comes to fuel. Apparently prices are rising faster in the south than in the north. Recent drops in oil prices should have resulted in pump prices dropping but the garages in the south seem reluctant to pass on the savings. The average price of a litre of petrol in the north is now 115.5 pence but in the south it’s 117.2 pence. The gap has opened Read more »

Surprisingly, there has been a public outcry over the switching off of speed cameras around the country after the Government decided to withdraw funding to local authorities necessary to maintain and operate the cameras. In Oxfordshire the council has announced the turning off of the speed cameras after their payment to the speed camera partners was reduced by 70%. This has outraged residents, according to Read more »

The Government has revealed that drink drive deaths dropped by 5% last year from 400 in 2008 to 380 in 2009. Has the message finally started to get through? Or could it be that last year we were in the grip of a recession and people couldn’t afford the booze or if they did they didn’t go out they simply stayed in and drank indoors? Hopefully it’s because people understand the need to not drink and drive. Serious injured casualties, resulting from drink driving, fell also from 1,620 to Read more »