I have recently changed the engine in my car and it is a passat motor that i have used,my query is do I need the injector pump reprogramming or should I use my original pump from the A4,Thanks Tom. Read more

Tailgating.

At some point during early every journey I glance in the rear view mirror and find it filled with some goon who seems intent on parking in my boot.

Tailgating is ignorant, inconsiderate, dangerous, annoying and just plain damn stupid.

Now, I fully concede to making the odd mistake myself.

Sometimes forget to indicate, lane discipline can be a bit sloppy, pull into a junction before rather than after the driver already there, that sort of thing.

But tailgating? Never.

So the most annoying thing on the roads for me is tailgating.

What is it for you? Read more

"More than 60 cars were seized during a police operation to target travelling criminals in East Yorkshire.

It comes a week after a similar operation around York, the biggest the city has seen, which led to 278 cars being taken off the roads."

Full story here:

tinyurl.com/3shcho
Read more

Looking at the car by car breakdown, there is the following for my Accord:

"Reports of problems with swirl chambers of 2.2iCDTIs at high mileage. Best to have replaced before the 3 year 90k mile end of warranty."

How exactly should I go about getting this done? I've never had much luck with getting things that are actually broken fixed. Surely the dealer will just tell me to get lost if I start asking for something that isn't broken to be replaced?

Any thoughts? Read more

Apologies ? a long one?.I have just renewed the insurance on one of my cars, the one where our au pair is the main driver but I am the owner and policy holder.

We had a claim earlier this year - a burst tyre which resulted in £1200 of bodywork damage. The au pair was driving at the time.

I also picked up 3 points last November for parking opp a solid white line (TS20 DVLA code)

Now, ploughing through three or four comparison sites to get quotes I have mistakenly indicated a different DVLA offence code (MS10, parking in a dangerous position) because I was doing it without my licence to hand to check the code and I genuinely didn't spot the TS20 in the drop- down list so made a guess that MS10 must have been the right one.

Also although I told the insurer that our au pair was driving when the claim occurred, when I got the policy doc through yesterday it showed two claims in March this year, one with the au pair driving and one with a slightly different date with me driving.
I called the insurer as soon as they opened yesterday to clear up these errors. This is the result of me calling the insurer to check a quote over the phone and according to their records i told them during that call that I had made the claim (probably because I didn't understand at that point that is it is the driver rather than the owner and policyhold who makes the claim, which seems quite a logical thing to assume but obviously not...)

After several long calls they came back and said that the renewal would actually be £1800 not £800, principally because they believe that an au pair driving is business use as they consider him to be an employee of ours. I explained that they had been insuring us for the last year on social domestic and commuting (as I have done for the two years previous with other insurers whilst we have had an au pair) even though the policy docs clearly states the main driver is an au pair with no access to other cars and they said that this was a mistake and the policy would have been void in a claim.

During the course of the call I said that other insurers accept au pairs as if they are members of the family and that I felt their view of au pairs as employees was wrong and therefore the price was incorrect and that I would seek alternative prices. The insurer said I had two weeks period of grace during which the policy can be cancelled.

Feeling that I was getting the ?talk to the hand? treatment and having had my confidence in them knocked by the confusion that I had actually had invalid insurance I took out a policy via major high st broker for £1300 effective from 00.01 this morning.

I called the first insurer back yesterday to tell them to cancel but the department had closed at 5pm and the call centre could only pass on a message.

They called me this morning and said I can either accept their £1800 premium or void the insurance but this would mean that on renewal I would have to state that I had had insurance declined.

I think that this is an outrageous way to deal with a policy which had genuine errors from both sides which I sought to correct at the earliest possible opportunity when they became clear. I ended up speaking to someone in underwriting who simply repeated ?you have a choice between taking the policy and voiding it? and would not listen to my argument that this was not actually choice since the first was based on an erroneous belief that au pairs are employees which drove the premium to an unrealistic rate or the second where I get the money back but will face hideous problems on renewal of trying to insure a young driver with a record of insurance refused.

I have spoken to the insurer?s customer complaints department who tell me that they have voided the original policy and they are investigating. I have asked them to make it clear to me that they have taken this decision of their own volition.

I need some advice please on how to argue with a ?computer says no? insurer that is behaving in a more than inflexible way.
Read more