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In an effort to reduce car usage, the Government and indeed all parties led by the Greens tried to encourage more people to work from home. Whilst there was a small increase at the time latest statistics show that the number of employees working from home has stalled since 2002. Just 3% of workers work from home although 7% do so at least once a week. These results were recently reported in the 2008 National Read more »

Tyres are on the move! Increasing in cost that is. The sudden jump in the cost of crude oil last year followed by the drop in value of sterling resulted in a continued increase in the cost of the raw materials that are used to manufacture tyres. This has meant that prices increased by 20% over recent months with the industry warning that prices will rise even further during 2009. Kwik Fit Fleet say they are expecting some Read more »

If you are still one of those that likes to own a car but is worried by the loss in depreciation – if you are then don’t buy a Maybach 62 which is reported by trade valuers Parkers to have lost £128,899 during 2008. However, downsizing and demand for city cars has kept used prices of smaller cars high producing the lowest cash losses in 2008. You should therefore ditch the Maybach, Bentley or Aston and replace with one of the following: Read more »

Fraud and forgery crime increased by 16% in the 3^rd quarter of last year blamed on the credit crunch. Attention has been drawn towards brokers that arrange mortgages and finance as some of the main culprits helped along by the increasing acceptance of the Internet. As I recently reported things are getting tough for most of us involved in the finance industry and as happened in the last recession desperation Read more »

My advice when applying for finance is make sure you check your credit file and sort out any errors. If you went through a difficult patch, divorce, redundancy, death in the family etc. and things are fine now make sure that you put that information on your credit file (as explained in my book ‘An Insider Guide To Car Finance’) by entering a Notice of Correction, this also applies if you think that an error has Read more »

It looks as though things are happening to make it easier and cheaper to park in our towns and cities although hopefully we won’t be following the French who have a much greater problem with parking than we do. So they are introducing intelligent parking meters linked to the parking bays. The clever French get the meters to assess whether a driver has exceeded his allotted time and if so an alert is sent to the Read more »

There appears to be a bit of a shake up in  the way that cars are insured. Where companies allow drivers to use their own cars for company business it is being suggested that the companies now take out company policies that include the cars owned by the employees in order to ensure that all cars used for company business are adequately covered. There are also proposals to introduce Read more »

Do you ever feel that you are banging your head against a brick wall? How many times did I say before Christmas that some of the deals that are available may never return so take them whilst you can. But no, obviously I was lying or simply trying to pull a few deals in to pay for my extravagant Christmas and New Year celebrations. The truth is that I wasn’t. There was a huge effort on the part of some manufacturers to Read more »

At the end of 2008 we were inundated with great deals and offers as manufacturers looked at ways to clear their overstock of cars but since the start of the new year we haven’t had anywhere near the same number of deals or the great value that we saw previously. Part of the reason is the continued weakness of the used car market whereby even if the manufacturers were giving as much away in bonuses and Read more »

In my opinion leasing is by far the most cost effective way of funding a car provided you can be flexible and look for the best deals around at the time you take your new car. However, there is one major drawback to leasing and one that I write about regularly in my newsletter, trade press and national press. It is the one area that I receive most complaints about from buyers of my book. It is the end of contract charges. I Read more »