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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

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

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.

It seems that a lot of claims could be turned down because drivers aren’t making complete and honest returns on their insurance proposal forms.

Saying that a car is stored in a garage overnight when there isn’t enough space to store a bike in your garage could cause a claim to be rejected. It now seems that even silly things can lead to an insurance company rejecting a perfectly normal claim.

In some extreme examples, explained by one of my colleagues on Rip Off Britain, an insurer could reject a claim because you didn’t mention that the car was fitted with a tow bar or a roof or cycle rack. Even if the part fitted had nothing to do with the accident you could still have a claim thrown out.

The most ridiculous and extreme examples include the fixing of stickers and say company adverts or logos, regarded as ‘adjustments to the bodywork’. So be warned, better to advise than not. By Graham Hill

As you get older it’s pretty common knowledge that you become more grumpy. I like to think that I’m not grumpy but I probably am.

However, alongside being grumpy – or not in my case, I find myself worrying more about things around us than I ever did when I was younger.

I worry about the health service, possibly because I’m no doubt getting closer to the time when I could become reliant on it. I worry about our kids’ education and the way we don’t prepare them for the real world.

Kids should have better life skills such as opening a bank account, credit cards and how they work along with debt advice including car finance – right the way through to basic cooking skills, how to iron, get a passport and especially, with so many youngsters dying on our roads, attending a speed awareness course – BEFORE they start driving.

I worry about the environment and I worry about the disgraceful state of our roads. Accidents are happening daily as a result of poorly maintained roads but what are we doing about these avoidable accidents? Naff all.

The SMMT suggests that there are 37.7 million vehicles on our roads but I agree with Mike Rutherford who writes for Auto Express that if you take into account drivers on our roads driving cars that are unregistered and the many more foreign trucks delivering bits from Europe massively outnumbering the number of our trucks in Europe we probably have over 40 million vehicles on our roads?

We are not only running out of space but the roads we have are a disgrace with potholes big enough to drop an elephant into without it touching the sides. I know there are many other things to worry about but if we don’t get our roads in good repair and build new, wider roads the whole of our road transport system will come to a standstill. Having travelled on the M25 last week I think it already has! By Graham Hill

I mentioned that the EU were about to announce a suite of safety features to be standard on all new cars from 202. I finally have the list which experts suggest will save 7,300 road deaths each year and avoid 38,900 serious injuries.

Here they are with brief explanations:

Advanced Emergency Braking: Also known as Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB), this system applies the brakes automatically if the driver fails to take evasive action.

Alcohol Interlock Pre-Wiring:  Alcohol Interlocks prevent a car from starting until a ‘clean’ breath sample has been provided. From 2021 new cars must be pre-wired for ‘Alcolocks’, allowing them to be fitted to cars of repeat drink drivers.

Drowsiness & Inattention Detection:  Scans drivers’ faces for signs of fatigue or inattention. And sounds warning alerts if either is detected.

Event (Accident) Data Recorder: Logs telematics data in the event of a collision, allowing authorities to work out how a crash occurred.

Emergency Stop Signal: Flashes hazard warning lights if heavy braking is applied, to warn following traffic.

Better Seatbelts:  Tougher standards for seatbelts in  full-width frontal impact tests together with softer deceleration in the event of a collision. Improved pre-tensioners or seatbelt airbags could achieve this.

Safer Windscreens: Crash tests will assess a larger area of the windscreen, because cyclists tend to hit windscreens higher up than pedestrians.

Intelligent Speed Assistance: Comprises traffic sign recognition and a speed limiter with the prevailing speed limit setting the car’s limiter – although drivers will be able to override the system.

Lane Keeping Assist: Gently steers a car back into its lane if it strays across white lines without indicating.

Extra Side-Impact Protection: Collisions involving tall, narrow objects, such as telegraph poles, can cause devastating damage, so from 2021 new cars will be strengthened to improve the ‘pole side impact’ protection they offer.

Reversing Camera or Detection System: From 2021, all new cars must either have rear parking sensors or a reversing camera to help prevent ‘back up’ accidents.

By Graham Hill