I recently bought a Honda Jazz and I am very happy with it except for the driving seat. Within a short time of driving, I get pain between the shoulder blades, at the top of the spine and in the neck. I have tried lumbar cushions, wedge cushions, adjusting the height - all to no avail. The situation is now so bad, I am considering selling the car. Have driven my sister's Vauxhall Astra without any problems - it is a much firmer seat. Can anyone offer some advice?

Lynda Read more

I've had the misfortune of being involved in a 3 car shunt - I stopped, car behind me stopped too, but the thrid car did not, well, not until he hit car 2 pushing it into the rear my car.

So now the plastic bumper is reshaped, tailgate bent and won't lock, and the metal around the spare under the boot damaged so spare cannot be removed.

Car is going in for repairs at insurer approved bodyshop, - I'll have the use of a courtesy car for about 2 weeks.

When it returns, can I have confidence the accident safety aspect of the car will be up to the standard it was before?

If not can I require the car be written off?

Any comments from readers will be much appreciated. Read more

Just back from the family holidays in Florida. I was dreading driving on the other side of the road.

Hired a cavernous 3.7l Durango, which costs about US$ 27k new, an astonishing equivalent of £13.5k. But in my opinion, it was not as sophisticated a drive as Japaneese or European cars. After 1200 odd miles there were loads of paint chips on the edges of doors and considering that the doors did not touch any wall or other car, I can only assume poor finish coupled with daytime heat.

Rear visibility for lane changing etc was appalling. It also achieved under 20mpg ? I know a US gallon is less than a UK gallon. Petrol was US$2.65 per gallon! (tax makes up the majority of the difference). There did seem to be many more petrol stations than we have here so perhaps their retailers make more per gallon than our retailers do.

What really hit me though was how polite other drivers were over there. Now I appreciate that tourists are a feature of the roads there, but I only got tooted at once when I failed to turn right on a red light (what a good idea). BTW it was only a short beep not one of those long blasts that you get here. I probably deserved far more than one toot, given that it was my first experience of driving on the right and all of those strange signs including flashing amber traffic lights late at night (go through with caution).

American drivers do not appear to stop on amber, which is quite nerve racking when you do and cars whiz past you on either side and the ones behind you switch lanes and keep on going. You soon learn to do as you see.

Freeways flowed smoothly and drivers tended to stick to the posted speed limits. (I was surprised to see some 70 mph limits as I though that the maximum speed was 55 mph.) The roads appeared most congested on a Sunday but even then they flowed freely. Police cruisers were a frequent sight.

There were some toll roads and the maximum toll that we paid was US$1.75 totalling about US$6 for a 150 mile round trip.

What did cause some problems was the lack of services on the freeways. Petrol and food tended to be off a junction, these were sign posted but necessitated leaving the freeway and finding a way back. Sometimes the posted services were not there!

Slip roads appeared shorter than their UK counterparts and lanes merged frequently. We do this bit better here.

Around Orlando and Kissimmee I used several urban highways, usually two lane, but some three and four lane ones. What really surprised me was that crossing the carriageways is encouraged (quite nerve-racking) with none of the roundabouts that we get here. Many entrances were T-junctions, allowing no room to speed up to join the flow of traffic. To be fair many exits had very small off slip roads. Crash barriers were not always present.

There were some major road works going on in the area that we stayed in but these were carried out at night, probably because of the stifling daytime heat as opposed to helping traffic flow. At each junction on the dual carriageway that leaded to our resort there was a worker controlling traffic and these were interspersed with big police cruisers.

A really good idea was the doubling of speeding fines when workers were present and speed sensors showing your current speed (there should have been more).

All in all, quite a pleasant experience.
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Has anyone used the Meguirs Quik Clay products - and if so I would be grateful of your feedback. Good or Bad ? Read more

So much for car security...

www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/24/car_cypher_crack/

"Cryptographic researchers have identified a practical attack against the KeeLoq car anti-theft cypher. KeeLoq serves as the cryptographic underpinning of several car anti-theft mechanisms distributed by Microchip Technology.

The technology is used in a wide variety of car remote controls from manufacturers including Chrysler, Daewoo, Fiat, General Motors, Honda, Jaguar, Toyota, Volvo, and Volkswagen.

Each device has a unique key that has up to 18 billion billion combinations, though in practice a much lower key space is used. Nonetheless, the hardware-dedicated block cypher used in KeeLoq was thought to be secure.

But a team of security researchers from Belgium and Israel has developed a technique to identify the key in less than a day. The technique requires close proximity to an intended mark's key for about an hour, during which time the key is "probed". Data from this operation is then analysed for clues that allow the researchers to identify the unique key associated with a device."

So watch out for iffy types with laptops while you're in the barbers

Subject line changed to reflect the talking point - PU

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