We currently have a Peugeot 406 estate. Since children are getting ever taller (daughter about 5'7" with long legs, son on course to be a six footer), we need a car with plenty of front and rear legroom. My husband is 6' tall with long body and shorter legs, whilst I am 5'8" with 34" inside leg measurement. We also sometimes carry my mother, who is 6' tall. To allow my daugher enough legroom we have had to move the front passenger seat forward and this is giving me problems with not enough leg room. Can anyone recommend an estate with plenty of space? The 407SW doesn't have as much room as the 406 and is not really a loadcarrying estate in the same way. All we seem to have found is the Mondeo, but have not yet all sat in it. Any other suggestions?
I have a Honda Civic which has far more room for all, but it doesn't have the boot/estate space. The Honda Accord tourer is much less roomy inside, as well as being ugly and dark inside! Read more

The airbag light stays on in a W-reg 1.6 Civic.

Is this a known fault like a poorly contacting plug and, if so, anyone know where it is?

If it is just a case of flicking off a plastic cover on the steering column and waggling the plug to clean the contacts, I might offer to have a go. But if it is more than that I don't really want to get involved.

Any good suggestions for the Redhill/Gatwick area where it could be taken?

Being only 5ft 2", and sitting close to the wheel, the owner tells me she has been told by one source she might be better off ignoring the light! But even if this were good advice, I can see problems at MOT time.

Any thoughts?
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Has anyone experienced a similar problem to this.
I recently noticed that my 75 Club SE Auto 99/V 52000 miles, owned since new, was giving higher than normal revs between gear changes, initially between 1st and 2nd and now between all changes. This only happens once the engine has warmed up and not on every gear change, sometimes not doing it for a complete journey.
My main dealer who has carried out all servicing, claims never to have had this problem before with a 75. They have been dealing with the problem for a week and have kept me informed of their discussions with the Rover factory. I am now advised it is a new gearbox needed with all the associated electonic management system to be replaced.
I am advised the cost of this work is £4500 and the residual value with the work complete is apparently less than that.
Anyone have any views on this or know of a gearbox specialist in the West Sussex/Surrey area.
Help! Read more

"Kung Hei Fat Choy" to all BR-ers!

And may the Year of The Rooster bring all of us a golden egg : or at least freedom from snapped timing belts, excessive licence points, over-zealous jobs-worths in parking warden uniforms, supermarket shopping trolleys and aggressive soccer mums in SUV's -- feel free to add your own irritations........

January here in the tropics traffic-wise was dominated by the campaign to get jaywalkers off the street and on to the sidewalk in this vast city of ours. The Philippines does not have a bus-stop culture, you simply flag anything down and it stops anywhere, wherever, regardless. Can be disturbing when you are following it in the fast lane at 80kph and it doesn't have working brake lights. Ally this to the Filipino disposition which regards any and every law, rule and regulation as a challenge to be circumvented by whatever means and you have serious congestion. Nowhere more than here is any form of policy or legislation honoured more in the breach than in the observance.

And so it was that the great and the good in the form of Metro Manila Development Corp head Mr Bayani Fernando decreed that trucks would ply the streets, fitted with long bamboo poles on the end of which would hang wet rags. The idea being that pedestrians who lurked in the road waiting for buses and being a menace to traffic would get an earful of damp calico and retreat to the pavements after a short sharp lesson in discipline. He even promised clean water would be used.

In Asia's only functioning democracy that brought forth immediately and predictably a storm of protest. Human rights activists naturally being the first and loudest.. But, as Mr Fernando pointed out quite reasonably, first there would be loudspeaker trucks preceding the wet rag ones to warn offenders, and secondly, as he put it very crisply, any human standing in a roadway reserved for vehicular traffic has expressly forfeited any rights he might have had in any case.

However, after a few days of implementing this scheme, it was observed that, while the wet rags on their poles certainly kept the crowds on the pavement, once the rag trucks had passed, the crowds simply reverted to their former habits. Collective surprise at this was expressed by the authorities, whose forward thinking skills do lack a certain 'je ne sais quoi' in this and other areas, to be frank.

So, buses emblazoned "Prison Bus" were then tasked with following the wet rag trucks to apprehend offenders who persisted in jaywalking and haul them off to the pokey for the afternoon. Avoiding being loaded on one of these was simple enough of course -- a few coins bought them out of trouble. So that plan failed.

So it was clear within a few days that the scheme was foundering. But this was not all. Metro Manila is a vast conurbation made up of many "cities", the mayors of each being empowered to impose their own scale of traffic fines, set their own road rules and so on. Some mayors, mindful of those who elected them and the "cash flow" which accompanies their position (let's just say 10% of any or all contracts they award for starters) decided to arrest the wet rag truck drivers and impound their vehicles. Sort of like the Metropolitan Police arresting the Thames Valley chaps....

For days the newspaper columns were full of irate letters; the balance of payments deficit, the exchange rate woes, the New People's Communist Army and the oil price increases were forgotten. Even the launch of the new Mazda 3 was upstaged. (Pity, it's a great looker).

As of the time of writing, when I go home every night all 3 of the 4 lanes of the motorway are dominated by jaywalkers and buses parked at weird angles picking them up, just as before. So we are back to SNAFU in the Land Of Nearly Right (as the expats call it) but the laughs were worth it.

But I feel Award of The Month must go to the pump attendant at the gleaming new gas station with air-conditioned mini-mart where I stopped, hopelessly lost in a remote part of Northern Luzon on my Harley 3 days ago, with a grumpy Growlette back-riding on a 400km run and complaining she had discovered her tailbone for the first time.. In that part of the world there is only one road and if you are not on it you are seriously lost. On asking the eager youth the name of the place where I was, he proudly drew himself up to his full 4 foot 10 in his nice crisp uniform and announced with the smile he must have been taught to deliver to idiot foreigners like me -- "you are at de Shell Gas Station Sir".

Yeah, yeah, I know -- if you don't like the answer, don't ask the question.

....but the beer is cold and cheap, the women are beautiful and petrol is still 26p a litre, so what to do?

Growler out
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Firefox is my default browser which as many will know has Google as the built in search engine.
Perhaps unreasonably, it annoys me considerably that when searching Google, I am automatically connected to google.es. I know that Google's own preferences may be set to search for reults in a particular language, but very often I want to search google.com .I guess the language option is set by a cookie,but I regularly clean out cookies as a matter of habit. Even if I manually insert the .com in the address bar it changes to the Spanish address, (yes I am in Spain with a Spanish fixed I.P address), on activating the search.
Does any one know how to ensure that ALL Google searches to to the .com site?
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Roger. (Costa del Sol, España) Read more