This weekend at Brooklands they had a special celebration and there were hundreds of very old model cars, very enjoyable to watch, just a couple of observations.
The tyres were much narrower than cars of today, and with improved technology, would they take longer from 40mph to stop than say a ford escort, if so they they be restricted to doing lower than the advertised max speed ? Read more

I'm going to need to cart a lot more stuff around shortly and don't really want to get a bigger car than what i use already for long journeys ( X Type estate)....

can anyone recommend a brand of roof box..........and/or advise if there's an optimum speed you should travel at when one is fitted...if you were to assume that on the odd occasion the speed limit might be broken, possibly?
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We have a four year old Honda CRV which has been a great car and would be for another six years I guess.

The problem is we need a 6th seat for occassional accomodation of a young child.

The boot area is plenty big enough, in fact bigger than most 7-seaters we have looked at, so the question is:

Do you know of any firms that will fit a legal fold-up seat or seats in the luggage area? Read more

Hi all,

Planning to do Stoke to M11/M25 intersection on Friday leaving Stoke at 4pm. Not the best time I know but which is better ?

via A50 then onto the M1 at Derby or
via M6/M6 Toll/M1 ?

Cheers

Rich Read more

Well it was a shock for me anyway. I guess it had to happen that a confirmed petrol head such as myself would end up being issued a rental car that seems like the absolute antithesis of fun motoring. But it was late at San Francisco Airport and I didn?t want to wait.

Actually first impressions were quite good. In the car park I was confronted with Priuses as far as the eye can see, all in a very bright shade of metallic red which suits the futuristic styling. I?ve never seen so many Priuses and I later learned that there is a tax incentive here for hybrid vehicles. I found mine, operated the small, well designed electronic key module and climbed in, noticing that the door closed with a very solid clunk, reminiscent of a VW if not quite a Merc. The driving seat is comfortable even though Toyota have clearly gone out of their way to find the least attractive interior fabric imaginable, presumably thinking the target customers generally want to adopt a sack cloth and ashes approach to life. There is more perceived space up front than many SUVs I?ve experienced and the dashboard is stunning its weirdness. Then the big problem was, how do you start this thing? 10 minutes of fiddling and swearing revealed that you have to put the key module in a hidden slot, then simultaneously press the brake pedal hard and touch the ?Start? button on the dashboard. Should have been obvious I guess. Put the tiny shifter thingy on the dashboard into ?D? and off we went.

There are 2 big surprises when you move off from rest the first time in a Prius. One is the unexpected shove in the back from the acceleration. The other is that it?s virtually silent. Or at least it is until you push the pedal too far and the petrol engine starts up. That?s not to say the engine is noisy, it just interrupts the eerie silence of pure electric power (especially in a multi-storey car park).

Onto the broken blacktop of US 101. There is always a lot of traffic around San Francisco irrelevant of the time of day. You sit high up in a Prius, which helps self confidence when driving an underpowered eco car in a sea of nose to tail SUVs. Actually it isn?t that underpowered. Pulling onto the highway it was easy to reach the speed of the rest of the traffic. The petrol engine sometimes sounds strained as the revs bear no direct relationship to the road speed, but it?s never intrusive and the rest of the car is very quiet with almost no wind noise even up to 85 mph. The car is also very stable, has excellent brakes, and handles in a very neutral fashion, probably helped by a low centre of gravity with the NiMH batteries mounted low over the rear axle. The ride appears as good as any other mid sized car and I was not being knocked off line by pot holes which happens in various US sheds. Actually, I realised, a Prius is not only relaxing but also (gulp) fun to drive.

Time to take stock of the interior. There is a digital speedo, lots of idiot lights, including one that tells you when the air-con is switched on and one that says ?Ready? for no apparent reason. A large touch sensitive screen dominates the middle of the dashboard and controls pretty much all of the minor functions such as air-con and stereo, sort of like a miniature i-Drive, and there appear to be no controls instantly recognisable from other cars. I eventually discovered that these controls are on the steering wheel. You read that correctly, the air-con controls are on the steering wheel. Underneath the screen in typical Toyota fashion is an ugly LED digital clock which looks like it came from a 70s Corolla. Two additional functions on the screen are an ?energy transfer? display and a fuel consumption meter. The former shows which energy source is doing what, whether the car is consuming or regenerating energy and what the state of the battery is. The latter shows the fuel consumption in 15 minute time intervals together with little tokens which you win when you manage to regenerate more than 50 kW of power. I found both screens huge fun and massively distracting, but in Northern California no-one wastes much time watching the road anyway. There is something strangely fulfilling about coasting downhill with the shift lever thingy in the ?B? setting and seeing the battery in the display turn green as you fill up the last charge bar. I also found myself trying to accelerate in such a way as to keep the petrol engine from cutting in for as long as possible for no other reason than liking the feeling of silent forwards motion. I discovered this is particular fun in supermarket car parks as people don?t hear the car approaching.

I realised I was starting to like this car although it?s far from perfect. Being designed for the US market there are more annoying chimes and alarms than in a Tamagotchi factory and more idiot proof functions than any other car I can remember driving (e.g. it bleeps like a 40 ton truck when reversing and some radio functions are disabled when the car is moving). It also sometimes makes odd noises when the petrol engine engages and disengages itself, the amount of servo assistance to the steering changes for no apparent reason and the shape affects visibility and makes it a nightmare to park. I?m also not such how much fun driving would be with a discharged battery, though it seemed to charge quickly enough when I wasn?t continually performing full throttle starts from traffic lights.

At the end of my 2 day rental the Prius had achieved 42 mpg (US) average according to the trip computer, when I filled up it was actually a bit less than that, so approaching diesel economy without the rattles and turbo lag. Plus, with the screen and the electric mode there is an incentive even for someone as pathologically lead footed as me to drive economically.

Apart from the apparent economy benefits, I can?t help feeling that Toyota is underselling the hybrid concept by marketing it to tree huggers. There are so few cars that offer a genuinely different driving experience these days. In fact I felt a sense of anticlimax back in Pittsburgh when I picked up a conventionally powered Volvo S40. Maybe Toyota should beef up the suspension, put in a slightly bigger electric motor, a six cylinder engine and market it as a fun product. Oh, hang on they do ? it?s called the Lexus GS450h. That must be really something! Read more