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Highways England has announced that it is falling into line with the EU proposition to digitise the road networks thus setting a single standard of road networks that would stretch from the UK across the rest of Europe. Through sensors and wireless tech the network will be able to communicate and interact with individual cars.

Informing drivers of traffic delays ahead, temperature, road surface conditions and will even be able to inform and direct emergency services to accidents. According to Auto Express here are a few of the things planned:

1. Road sensors installed in studs or railings to convey messages to cars and help steer autonomous vehicles in future.
2. Big Data will help to predict traffic movements, prevent congestion from building up and warn drivers in individual cars to take another route. I thought that could be done already!
3. Potholes could be detected at once as the road would be able to report damage. Currently, patrols go out every few weeks to check for damage.
4. Sensor Tech could make it possible for heavy goods vehicles to ‘Platoon’. This allows lorries to travel in tight formation with fewer drivers saving fuel.
5. Self-repairing roads are something else that Highways England is currently trialling. This would reduce roadworks and costs.
6. Road charging would be possible with connected roads. This has already been suggested as a replacement for the road fund licence.

Sounds quite amazing! By Graham Hill

I made a quick comment on this a few weeks ago but I’ve since learned that it’s more serious than I thought. Unknown to many is that car manufacturers are not really manufacturers they are assemblers. They take components from all around the world and assemble them into finished vehicles.

I now understand that the movement of goods around the EU members is free of duty irrespective of where the component parts come from. However, where a free trade agreement has been negotiated between the EU and a non-EU country one of the conditions is that 55% of the product must originate from EU countries. And this is where it could affect the UK badly.

I have a customer who manufactures dashboards for a wide range of cars. They started making them for just one car manufacturer, they now make them for many manufacturers and export them all over Europe. It has now been realised that when we exit the EU we will no longer be considered as part of it when assessing which proportion of cars are made inside and outside the EU.

This could, therefore, mean that in order to meet the terms and conditions of the free trade agreements, even if we come to a free trade agreement between us and the EU we still fall outside the EU and could either cause Europe based car manufacturers to source components from inside the EU for cars being exported to non-EU countries or companies like my client to move to an EU country.

Yet another thing that wasn’t explained before we voted. All very worrying. By Graham Hill

With so many drivers switching from diesel to petrol, often after many years of driving a diesel car, the AA is reporting an increase in misfuelling callouts. The majority of callouts are from company vehicle drivers, accounting for 59% with consumers accounting for 41%.

Not all were for petrol cars being topped up with diesel, many were the other way round but the majority was a result of changes in company car policy or attitude of consumers towards diesel vehicles. I must say that after many years of topping my car up at the local Tesco filling station and automatically knowing that the diesel pump was the one on the far right.

In their wisdom they decided to change the pumps for new ones with the new pumps having the diesel nozzle on the far left. I didn’t do it myself but it caused many drivers to top up from the wrong pump through not paying attention. The AA offers a fuel assist programme for just this purpose, probably not a bad thing to take, especially if you are moving from one fuel to another.

The AA put down the mistake to drivers being pre-occupied, driving an unfamiliar car or visiting an unfamiliar filling station. So if you are about to change from one fuel to another make sure you don’t misfuel, if you do don’t start your car and lastly don’t even move it as this can cause all sorts of problems. By Graham Hill

According to What Car from 2021 self-drive cars without a driver at the wheel will be allowed on roads in the UK. Is this Government nuts? Don’t answer that! That is 3 years away!

Just after reading reports that self-drive cars still need an alert driver at the wheel ready to take over the controls in an emergency or if the car suffers a fault, we now hear that the self-drive cars will not only be allowed on our roads whilst the driver reads the paper, he can actually be indoors watching the TV. Crazy!

The move will apparently be achieved by removing the current legal constraints and overhauling insurance policies. I think slightly more important than that is to actually guarantee that people won’t get run over by a driverless car and killed before sorting out insurance policies.

In the US, Google’s self-drive technology firm Waymo, recently announced a driverless taxi service in Phoenix, Arizona. The cars will be completely driverless and if I’m anything to go by passengerless as well! I struggle getting on the driverless train between the two terminals at Gatwick Airport.

It travels on tracks with computers that stop the train automatically whilst travelling at its fastest at walking pace. Someone needs to tell the Government what to do with driverless cars – I think I just did! By Graham Hill

We are awaiting the results of a £7 million traffic lights trial on the M62 where it meets the M6. We’ve all seen the traffic lights installed on motorway sliproads at times of peak traffic  in order to regulate traffic flow.

Well, the same principle is being used on the M62 where it meets the M6 but the lights control all lanes of the motorway rather than just a slip road and work in conjunction with information signs and variable speed limits.

Highways England believe that these measures will ‘provide smoother traffic flows’ and if successful will be rolled out across the whole of the UK wherever 2 motorways merge. Traffic levels are currently hitting an all-time high so anything that can reduce the bottlenecks will be welcomed by motorists. But traffic lights on motorways – could that be a step too far? By Graham Hill

I get very worked up over this subject and I’m really pleased that the Driver & Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) has now issued warnings to all car manufacturers over Safety Recalls after the disgraceful attitude towards safety displayed by Vauxhall and BMW over recent months.

Before I get to the meat of this piece do you know what a safety recall is? Briefly, if a car is found to have a problem and the manufacturer, through its harvesting of statistics, finds that the fault appears on a lot of cars of the same model manufactured over a specific period of time, they will find a fix then issue a recall to all the current owners of cars that potentially carry the same fault in order to have the fix applied.

Now, this could be something simple like a boot lid having to be slammed to close or the intermittent wipe on a rear windscreen wiper not functioning. These are called technical recalls and not so critical as the potential for a car to catch light in certain circumstances or a gearbox to fail at speed. This type of recall is a safety recall and it is these that the DVSA are tightening up on.

A recall can occur at any time, in the case of the BMW safety recall it applied to cars built between 2007 and 2011 so this isn’t restricted to just new or nearly new cars.

This all follows the highly publicised cases of the Vauxhall Zafira model B’s that caught light and the BMW’s that had an electrical fault caused by a B+ battery connector. Neither Vauxhall nor BMW were prepared to acknowledge the faults until BBC’s Watchdog got involved and exposed the problems.

So to start with shame on Vauxhall and BMW. In the case of BMW Narayan Gurung lost his life when he hit a tree trying to avoid a broken down BMW as a result of this known fault. Following the accident BMW recalled 36,000 vehicles, it was only after the Watchdog show that a further 312,000 vehicles were recalled.

There are two important points to be made here. Firstly the faults very rarely apply to all cars so whilst we see that a total of 348,000 cars are recalled it doesn’t mean that all the cars have the fault. Having said that we don’t know until the cars are inspected whether the car has the fault or not, so even though you haven’t experienced the brake fault or electrical fault that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t return your car to a main dealer to have it checked.

If you don’t you could be putting yours, your passengers and third party’s lives at risk. The new rules imposed on manufacturers by the DVSA means that once a safety-critical fault is known the manufacturers have just 10 days to issue a recall notice or face prosecution and a fine.

DVSA CEO Gareth Llewellyn has made it clear that when the 10 day warning has been issued it will also be made public, unless the manufacturer can give a good reason why the recall shouldn’t be made. This will put pressure on the manufacturers to take action. The situation gets a little more complicated when a company car driver isn’t made aware of a recall as the notice would be served on the company that owns or leases the cars.

Whoever is responsible for the company vehicles will be held responsible and if a recall isn’t conveyed to the driver and the car inspected he can be fined up to £20,000 and face 3 months in prison. I hope that the DVSA gets tough on manufacturers who seem to take a very casual approach when dealing with life-threatening safety recalls.

It should also be pointed out that if a car has a recall notice on it and the driver doesn’t have it inspected it could invalidate your insurance. Something that few people are aware of.

If you would like to check the MOT history of your car and whether there are any outstanding recalls you can check online by entering your registration number. Go to: https://www.check-mot.service.gov.uk/

Whilst I believe that there have been suggestions along the lines that recall notices should be checked at the time of the car’s MOT test it doesn’t cover cars during the first 3 years of a car’s life. Maybe that should also apply to those servicing your vehicle also, they should check at the same time. By Graham Hill

Finally, after banging the drum for the last two years, Transport Secretary Chris Grayling has agreed with my views that diesel still has a part to play, especially when the Bosche system starts to find its way into new car production. By 2020 when the Bosche system is fully rolled out across all manufacturers the NOx emissions will be a tenth of that required when Euro 7 rules are introduced making diesel cars more environmentally friendly than petrol.

In the meantime,, Nissan hasn’t helped by being caught out doing something similar to VW and falsifying emissions tests in Japan. That aside Chris Grayling supported diesels by saying, ‘If you’re driving long distances and are out and about on the road for work, diesel is a perfectly sensible option.’

The Government is aiming for zero emissions by 2040 but as Grayling pointed out this has to be industry and consumer-led and technology neutral – no I haven’t got a clue either but that’s what he said. But he went on to say, ‘Diesels can still play a valuable role in reducing CO2 emissions during that transition period to a low-emission future.’

However, Grayling told the SMMT that diesel engines need to continue getting cleaner. The response from the SMMT was to question whether his views would translate into positive changes to the tax regime. The Government promised to remove the 3% diesel company car supplement from April 2016.

However, not only was that decision reversed in the wake of the VW emissions scandal it was increased to 4% from April 2018. Of course, if I was being cynical I would say that the UK Government along with Germany and France have allowed false information to circulate in order to penalise drivers of diesel cars.

However, this attempt at crucifying diesel drivers will end up biting them on the rear end because diesel car sales have dropped through the floorboards leaving them with far fewer drivers to rob. Time will tell how this argument pans out but I’m pleased that the Government has come out positively. By Graham Hill

The RAC Foundation is to receive funding from the Department for Transport (DfT) to look into the ways that accidents, resulting in fatalities and injuries, are investigated in order to find out the genuine cause and how the accidents may be prevented in the future.

£480,000 is being invested in the project allowing the Foundation to recruit the services of specialists and use sophisticated data analytics to come to more accurate conclusions. For example, speed may result in an accident but why was the driver speeding?

Was there a distraction, a fault with the car or simply trying to meet unrealistic appointment or delivery targets set by an employer? Beyond individual cases, the data will be used to identify patterns relating to the make and model of car, the driver, temperature, time of day, road conditions, number of passengers etc.

By analysing the accidents in a totally different way to the police, who are looking to apportion blame, they are hoping to have a positive effect on the number of accidents and the outcomes. Let me be clear, accidents resulting in death or injury are down massively.

In 2016 the number of deaths was 1,792, up 4% over 2015 but compared to 10 years earlier the death rate is down 44%. However, the rates are starting to flatline so new ideas have to be developed if we are to bring them down further. The RAC Foundation believe they will be having a positive effect very soon.

They are introducing some of the techniques that accident investigation teams use when working for Maritime, Air and Rail organisations when trying to find the cause of a crash. By having an independent body it will take a lot out of time spent by the police investigating accidents leaving them to get on with other duties. By Graham Hill

Knowing the best products to use on your car can be a bit daunting. Ask the advice of a shop assistant and you have to ask if he or she is giving you best advice or is he simply looking at the commission he can make or the product with the most profit in for the shop?

Well, I’ve got the answer thanks to Auto Express who evaluated 236 products and came up with the best. To help you I’ve shown them below:

So there you have it, the results of tests carried out by Auto Express.

Fleet News highlighted the problems faced by most of us in the industry this week as manufacturers try to resolve the problems they face attempting to get their cars through the WLTP (Worldwide harmonised Light vehicle Test Procedure). As cars are tested and fail the more stringent tests they are removed from the manufacturers’ price lists whilst they work on a ‘fix’.

They fix the problem, test it themselves, feel that the car is OK and back on the list they go ready for the next test. The car then fails again because the manufacturers haven’t been able to totally replicate the test conditions imposed on their cars at the test centres. So the car is removed from the price list again.

This means that some manufacturers have stopped taking orders and stopped production of some of their models altogether. Orders can’t be placed as the manufacturers can’t say when their cars will be approved and without knowing the cost of the modifications necessary to get them over the line they can’t set the list price.

Without the cost, they can’t calculate the new list price. Without the list price the leasing companies can’t release their rates – it’s a mess! As a result of all the confusion, one leasing company has decided to take all cars off their lease quoting system unless they have been WLTP approved. One of the reasons for this is the confusion caused over interim arrangements put in place to calculate benefit in kind tax for those driving company cars.

The rules tighten further from the 1^st September which means that if cars have not been approved under the WLTP rules they cannot be sold. This will, in theory, lead to a lot of cars being pre-registered in August at big discounts unless, like the rest of Europe, our Government allows an extension. This has led to uncertainty amongst those waiting to take out a new lease expecting some mega-deals in August.

This situation could well lead to some brilliant lease deals – but it may not. It’s a gamble that I won’t advise on when asked if customers should wait. What with the uncertainties of Brexit life is tough at the moment in the car industry and confusing for customers. By Graham Hill