Thursday, 30. September 2010
The gap is starting to open up between petrol and diesel at the pumps again, pushing drivers towards petrol cars. There is also continued concern that people that take diesels fitted with particulate filters, as all new diesel cars have to have fitted, do not understand that they need to run the car at over 50mph for at least 20 minutes in one session per month in order to create the chemical reaction that clears out the filter. If this isn’t done the filter clogs and needs to be replaced costing hundreds of Read more
Thursday, 30. September 2010
Auto Express has launched a campaign to force manufacturers to disclose known problems with their cars. At the moment the manufacturers only have to make public known safety faults that are subject to recall. For all other problems, such as reliability issues, these do not have to be made public. The AA, RAC and Retail Motor Industry Federation have all joined with Auto Express to put pressure on manufacturers to make public their technical service bulletins – the documents that detail the Read more
Saturday, 25. September 2010
Graham Hill’s gadget of the week is unfortunately only available on Ford cars but I have to say it seems like quite a good idea. It’s called a MirrorNavi and is essentially a sat nav built into the mirror – more like an extension to the left of the mirror with a 3.5” colour touch screen. It has no visible wires and can be installed into your car in an hour for £299 + labour. It will help to reduce clutter, according to Ford and Read more
Thursday, 16. September 2010
My gadget of the week is a tool. It’s made by Dremel and is simply called the 8200 multitool. It’s a cordless electric battery operated tool that can cut, sand, grind and carve. It is claimed to have twice the speed of its rivals and has reduced weight due to the size and weight of its smaller lithium battery that takes around an hour to charge and can hold that charge, according to Dremel, for up to 2 years. The increased Read more
Wednesday, 15. September 2010
Beware of service intervals. As most people know service intervals have been extending and it’s not uncommon for cars to have 18,000 or 20,000 mile service intervals. If you are a low mileage user this could suggest that if you had a car for 3 years, covering around 6,000 or less miles per annum, you wouldn’t have to carry out a single service to retain the car’s warranty. But this is unlikely to be the case as most Read more
Tuesday, 14. September 2010
Moving on to legitimate parking fines, it turns out that local authorities may follow the Westminster council lead and name and shame the worst culprits for not paying their fines. It seems that some of the worst culprits are the very wealthy and Westminster has taken the unprecedented step of announcing the worst offenders on it’s website. It would seem that many of those that refuse to pay the fines are Arab Read more
Saturday, 11. September 2010
The renowned Graham Hill in depth car review this week focuses on yet another dopey car, although you may find it gorgeous. Yet another major sports car manufacturer has stuck their badge on the front of a city car. This week it’s the recently revived Lotus. I don’t care that it is a hybrid powered car that will return 100mpg it simply looks dopey! Now I know that all manufacturers have had to introduce some low Read more
Wednesday, 1. September 2010
The warranty arguments are starting to build – exactly as I predicted. Warranty Direct, one of the largest providers of aftermarket warranty insurance, first of all complained that Kia and Hyundai’s new extended warranty adverts did not make it clear that the warranty had a 100,000 mile ceiling, the same as the widely promoted Vauxhall ‘Lifetime’ warranty. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) agreed Read more
Monday, 23. August 2010
Graham Hill’s in depth review of a new car this week is of the latest Morgan. Yep they are still being made and boy you should see the latest coupe design. They have certainly moved on from the days when the car was built with a wooden chassis. They have continued the old style of having a +2 four seater. The new model is called an Eva GT and comes with a bonded aluminium chassis so no worries about woodworm Read more
Friday, 20. August 2010
Auto Express have announced their New Car awards for 2010. Over 47 pages they have listed all their major award winners. The overall car was a bit of a shock as it was the Skoda Yeti. Some of the more interesting best cars were as follows: Read more