December 2006
I am (almost) ashamed to admit in these hallowed qurtersthat I have no great interest in cars or driving (cough, splutte, choke) mainly becaue up until now I have never had to do much.
All of a suddenm, a job change means a regular two to two-and-a-half hour commute each way. 75% of this is on motorway and 24% on good fast dual carriageway.
I "think" that one of the most tiring aspects of driving is the noise. This is particulalry true of 'straight road' driving where the ride, cornering ability and so foirth plays a much smaller factor in the equation.
Given that I am not taking supercars here - would anyone care to venture a few thoughts as to a suitable beast for the job. Of course a Roller would probably fit the bill, but I have to make some concessions to price and economy please!
Colleagues have suggested everything from Mercedes 220CD to Skoda Oktavia. That is a wide gap in recommendations!
Perhaps you folk would like to make some altrernative suggestions!
Cheers
GC Read more
My new car (well, had it nearly a year, so not that new now) has 18inch wheels with pirelli p-sero nero low profile tyres. They seem to be extremely sensitive to kerb damage - I've had to replace 4 tyres due to them having deep cuts in the side-wall. My last car (same model) had 17inch wheels with pirelli p-zero asimetrico tyres, and I don't remember having to replace any of them due to splits. Are these tyres particularly sensitive - would another make be better? At nearly £150 a time, this isn't cheap...... Read more
If you live in the sticks like I do kerbs are unfortunately few and far between. I'm trying to get the local highways department to install a kerb along the edge of the grass verge outside my house to deter people from driving over it. At the moment they can (and do) do it without a second thought to their alloys!
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L\'escargot.
Many HGVs have 1 or more axles that they can raise, presumably to save tyre wear when running empty. Do these lower automatically when the vehicle is loaded or is it up to the driver to do it manually? I 've seen some flatbeds loaded with goods, for example steel, with an axle still raised. Are the operators saving money improperly, as this will increase the axle loading which is what does the damage to the roads, or does the system keep the vehicle within its axle limits? Read more
The biggest cause of jacknifing is when the rear axle of a tractor unit locks up under braking. Having a mid-lifting axle down will stabilise such a situation, and make a jack-knife less likely.
ABS on the tractor unit helps the situation, but, if the rear axle of a tractor unit loses traction under braking, a jack-knife is the very rapid result. Breaking traction under acceleration is a more benign situation, and can usually be cured by lifting off the throttle a bit, which is an easier thing to do than lift off the brakes during an emergency.
At the design stage, it's quite a juggling act to set the braking distribution on an artic - although load sensing valves can help adjust the braking ration depending upon the loading condition, there are always some combinations of tractor unit and trailer, loading conditions and braking regimes which leave very small margins against lock-up.
Lift axles are always specified to save tyre wear - how drivers choose to use them on the road is another matter!
When the 38 tonne rules were first brought in during the 80's, the artics in my father's fleet remained at 32 tonnes. My father argued that as our trucks spent a fair amount of time on-site the extra axle on a tri-axle trailer would scrub tyres even more quickly than the twin axle trailers we used, and owing to the relatively poor rates we were earning on these routes, the extra money per tonne would probably be wiped out by extra tyre costs. Perhaps we should have investigated lift axles - they weren't quite as popular then, because most suspensions were steel as opposed to the almost universal air suspensions in use today.
Number_Cruncher
As promised a review of my Leon at 5,500 miles and 4 months
For comparison, my previous car was a Toledo 110 TDi (old, non-PD lump) and my wife?s car is an Octavia 2.0 TDi with the 140bhp engine.
Overall I?m very pleased with the car. It still looks distinctive in a way the Golf never will without being so boy-racer-ish it attracts the wrong kind of attention. The engine has gradually loosened up and is now very free-revving being keen to rev right to 4500 rpm limit and surprisingly pleasant in the 3k+ rpm region in a way my last car never was. Torque does come in with a shove, and it has less torque in 1st than my last car, more tiresome therefore to drive in traffic, as you can?t just lift the clutch to pull away so easily. Need to be above 1500 rpm really, whereas in the 140bhp engine, the torque definitely comes in better from lower revs (neither as good as my old 110 though!)
The performance is (ahem) enthusiastic and the front end grip surprisingly good ? I enjoy driving this car fast on B roads in a way I never have in any other car. It inspires confidence and feels faster than it is. 3rd gear is absolutely stonking.
Kept a check on consumption manually for the first 1500 miles and found the trip meter was never more than 0.5mpg out so stopped bothering with the calculations. I have definitely used the performance more than I anticipated, probably because of the free-revving nature and excellent gearchange. I cruise at 85 on motorway/dual carriageway wear possible, this makes up about 50% of my driving. Climate control never turned off. The average has bearly changed since I got the car: the trip meter now reads 39.8mpg (wifes Octavia estate with 140bhp engine has given 44mpg over last 3500 miles for comparison)
Pros:
Nothing has gone wrong: no squeaks, rattles or annoying glitches. Have put in ¾ litre oil so far.
Performance.
Fuel consumption (I don?t think close to 40mpg is bad, considering the way I drive it)
Very comfortable and supportive sports front seats
Gadget count.
Space (first time I?ve ever driven a car that I didn?t need the seat all the way back: I?m 6?4?)
Looks
Annoyances:
Lack of torque below 1500 rpm
Ride is firm as many have said: great when pressing on and inspiring confidence, less good on poorly surfaced dual carriageway/motorway. Fine for me on well surfaced fast roads. Mine is on the standard 17? rims with Pirelli P-Zeros.
Some interior trim plasticky ? particularly the door cards, and I wish they had made the bit where your elbow sits fabric covered ? very hard to rest your arm on!
Rear view mirror very large!
Windscreen wipes ? clap hands type and I love the way they park vertically, but they are set up for left hand drive, so there is a streak down the drivers side rather than passengers.
Read more
Avant - I will post a report on the Octavia as soon as I get a chance to do it properly. I always find these backroom user reports very useful, so thought I would add my twopenneth worth!
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tyro,
Should have added a smiley I'll do it now :-)
Halfords' own brand 10W/40 semi-synthetic is £9.49 for 5 litres in the sale - is this a good price and a decent product? Read more
Useful price comparison page for oil at the major French hypermarkets:
www.quiestlemoinscher.com/recherche.asp?motcle=hui...r
The eldest offspring has a 3 month old Acer laptop (after the 3 1/2 year old Dell Inspiron expired).
Until now the CD/DVD drive worked fine for all the usual computing stuff and over Christmas it was used to playback a couple of DVD films. All was OK until around the third film when the playback started to judder - by this I mean it at first appears to run slow, but a careful look and listen shows it stops and starts. We've checked other DVDs which now juddder too, but other uses of the drive like CD back ups and reading data are OK.
Music CDs judder too.
Any ideas, please? Nothing that we know of changed to the system between a film playing properly and the same DVD not so doing.
Is it a shortage of some sort of memory?
We tried to go back to a recovery point - but there wasn't one to use! Read more
>explaining the problem it will be replaced without quibble for this
"known issue".
Frankly I would have my money back. It obviously sounds
very flakey. Support does not sound much better
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TourVanMan TM < Ex RF >
A trawl of the web over the hols shows it is not just this product that has problems but rather pretty well all those that use the same licenced software engine that I'm not about to name. (actually this begs the question "aesthetics aside, is there actually a best product since they all have the same brain and many will be used - like ours - with line out feed to another amplifier and speakers?").
As an aside; if I'm honest, the only reason I could set it up and get it working in the first place was because I know what I'm doing with a wireless enabled broadband connection and so knew where to look for primary and secondary DNS server IP addresses, the WEP key, and the like; my father aside, nobody else in my family would have had a clue what to do, and IMO this technology is still firmly in geek land; until we have a "synch" button on a wireless router and another "synch" button on something to connect with it (ie equivalent to how my wireless mouse & keyboard connect with their radio bub), consumer addons using 802.11 technology will never be plug and play.
Rant over, when it worked it was terrific ("tuning" just like a normal radio) so I am prepared to give it another crack of the whip.
hi this is a tough one i think ive being scammed on a car . brought car in early nov person i brought off did not give me log book. been in touch with the dvla they told me had no record of me owning the car and previous owner keeps insiting they have told dvla dont know what to do as need log book to tax car thks.
{Subject header given a more meaningful title, than simply 'help' - DD} Read more
....that reminds me
I sent off my V5 for the Celica in September for a change of address, and haven't had it back yet.
I guess it got sucked into the blackhole at the DVLA.
(Perhaps BBCs "Torchwood" should have been set in Swansea rather than Cardiff - the DVLA seems to be either staffed by aliens, or is at the centre of the Bermuda triangle!).
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Colin-E
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Hello all,
My yr 2000 1.8 Almera is developing a death rattle on start up. If I raise the revs slowly the noise is absent, but a quick blip generates the new noise. It's the chain side of the engine, and disappears by about 2500 rpm.
Sometimes it's briefly present at idle. The engine gets fully synth evre 9K with nissan filters, and it's done 66K now.
My thoughts are that the chain has stretched and the tensioner can't keep up. Looking at the diagrams in a Nissan CD the slack and tensioned sides run very close together near the crank sprocket and they could be touching as the tensioner is failing to hold right tension in the longer chain. This might be my imagination, I dont know if they are actually that close. Any thoughts?.
It's a dam nuisance at this time of year as I try to work on the car in the summer.
Ps I dont post at work anymore, so I may be a while in replying
Regards Read more
I thought I had the dreaded timing chain stretch too but the engine rattle also turned out to be the aux drive belts and it's now sorted for £40.
Hi
Both the front and back screenwash squirters have stopped working at the same time on our X-reg Citroen Picasso. I think the pumps/motors might not be working because I can't hear any noise at all when pulling/twisting the controls, whereas usually you hear the little hum or whine. The squirters are not blocked externally as far as I can tell and the reservoir is full of screenwash. We tried to look for the fuse, but in the manual there is no fuse relating to the washers.
Any ideas welcome,
Thanks. Read more
It could be something as simple as a build up of sludge in bottom of reservoir/pump inlet. Jamming pump. Can happen if you mix incompatible screen washes. To avoid dismantling try flushing the contain vigorously with a hose (if it s not banned!). Last time I cleared one in my mk4 Fiesta I used a footpump to pressurise back towards the reservoir. However this is high risk as it may split pipe or joints.
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pmh (was peter)
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More humble than a few of the suggestions here but my (new shape) Megane 1.9 dci 120 is impressively quiet on the mway - the gearing is so high that engine noise is virtually nil, road noise is low (don't get the low profile optional alloys). Wind noise is the worst disturbance at speed but somehow I find that less wearing than road noise. The engine's a bit gruff at low speeds but not unduly so. I'm replacing it with a C5 this week which I think betters it, but none of the other cars I test drove improved on the Megane in this respect - the Octavia was especially disappointing as tyre noise was very bad. I think the Superb would be a good bet, but I ddin't want a saloon.