I would appreciate any comments about oil consumption on this car.

I have had the car since new (200 miles on the clock) and for the past 18000 miles it has just travelled around Wokingham with the odd trip to Europe. There was some oil usage but now I am using the car for business (about 2000 miles per month) the oil consumption now appears to be high. I have run the engine in so I am assuming that the problem could be the engine design?.

Any thoughts would be appreciated. Read more

Her in doors fancies an A160 she's seen at the local MB dealer.

I think these are over priced and she would be better off with a normal estate - say a Focus.

Has anyone out there had any A class experience? Read more

I discovered that the boot is leaking on my VW Passat 2.0 SE (New model) a couple of days ago. The vehicle is only four months old. It is going back to the dealer on Tuesday. Has anyone else had this problem? Read more

A friend of mine has a W-reg Toyota MR2 which she purchased from new (has covered approx. 15,000 miles). She has noticed that both the front tyres (Bridgestone I think) are wearing in a strange manner. The tread blocks on the outer and inner edge are approximately 2-3 mm lower than the adjacent central blocks.
She took the car to her local garage (independent) and he said that she should take the car to the Toyota dealership because, in his experience, he had not encountered this type of problem before (he said it was not the tracking).
She then took the car to the Toyota dealership and they performed a 4-wheel alignment test and discovered that the front wheels were out of alignment.

However, although the dealership have done this, she is still worried that there may still be an underlying problem because of the nature of the wear on the tyres.
I always believed that if your front wheels were out of alignment you would experience a feathered edge when rubbing your hands across the tread and that the wear on the tread blocks would be gradual, whereas in this case it's only the outer and inner blocks that are distinctively lower.

I would be grateful if anybody had any ideas regarding this problem.

Many thanks,
Jason

P.S. The front tyre pressures when checked after the visit to Toyota were approx. 2psi over on one side and 5psi over on the other. Read more

Can someone enlighten me on what vehicles are prohibited (under normal road conditions and circumstances) from using the right hand most lane on motorways? (ie lane three/four near the crash barrier)

The reason for asking is that there appears to be a lot of what I thought were large goods vehicles using this lane, and travelling at 70+ speeds along with all the reps and car driving punters.

I am not talking R-tics here, but very large vans (sorry not an expert on makes/models) but much bigger than any transit variants but smaller than a removal van.

I just find in disconcerting when in heavy traffic moving at 60+ mph one of these vehicles wobbles out into this lane when I didn't expect it to as I thought they were precluded from using it.

[I have to say I am wise to this now and watch out for them]

Thanks

Tim (and sorry if this has been asked before) Read more