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This week our gadget of the week should be called dopy gadget of the week or more money than sense gadget of the week. It’s in fact a polish for your car, priced at, wait for it, £275 for a 270ml pot or a pound a millilitre! The polish is Raceglaze’s Signature Black Label Wax which contains a high content of carnauba, apparently one of the most prized car care products – bit of an understatement that one! But the best is Read more »

If you are looking to take out an aftermarket vehicle warranty (that’s a warranty that you take out when the manufacturer’s warranty has run out) you can check to see if the provider has signed into the code of practice provided by the auto watchdog Motor Codes, unless it’s an AA warranty and I can tell you that they aren’t. The code was set up to help customers by ensuring that the warranties provided by the warranty Read more »

It seems that the manufacturers are not going to fight a price war but outdo each other by providing more for free as part of the purchase package. The latest has been the extended warranty. Toyota had to react to the drop in sales following their recall problems by extending their standard warranty from 3 years to 5 years. In the meantime Kia/Hyundai have reacted following their massive growth during the Read more »

Service intervals have crept out with some cars not needing a first service until it is 2 years old. Some of the earliest first service intervals are still a minimum of 12 months but there is a problem with this. You see years ago, by the end of the first year, your car would have had 2 or 3 services with the first after just 1,000 miles to have an oil change and remove the swarf that had built up in the bottom of the oil sump. Read more »

A warning from Warranty Direct suggests that turbo charged engines are more likely to break down than non turbo charged. Around 11% of their customers suffer an engine failure with a typical repair cost of £619 but turbo charged engines have a failure rate of  28% with an average repair cost of £875, worth considering if you are thinking about buying a used car. Don’t forget that most diesel engines, especially those fitted in larger cars, are turbo charged. By Graham Hill

If you aren’t going to be sensible and take a car on lease through me don’t get conned by a dealer when negotiating the purchase price of a new car if you are specing it up with a pile of factory options. According to What Car, dealers receive exactly the same discounts from the manufacturer on the factory fitted options as they do on the car, so if your dealer is offering you Read more »

I have received a couple of words of warning about topping your oil up. The first is probably fairly obvious, make sure that the car is on flat ground when you check it. It may seem obvious but in cars where electronic sensors are fitted drivers often forget that when the level is checked the car still needs to be on flat ground. But the lesser known piece of advice is not to overfill the engine with oil. This is especially important with diesels as the oil can find its way into the exhaust and damage the particulate filter which can be very expensive to replace and would not be covered by the warranty. By Graham Hill

If you are a lover of 4 wheel drives now may be a good time to buy or lease one with rates and prices plummeting. You may find in the future a lack of choice and not for the reasons you may think. When the EU announced that all manufacturers in Europe were to be given CO2 targets across the whole of their production or face some substantial fines many of the manufacturers dismissed it and said Read more »