On a serious (ish) note, gender bias in TV car advertising really gets me riled. The woman chooses the car, the man pays the bill, does most of the driving, and does it with a smile on his face, poor sap. So much driving, in fact that he only has time to shave once a week.

Spoken as someone who changed a perfectly good car for a troublesome one, just because the C in C didn't like my gear changes or the seat from which she viewed the passing world.

Edited by argybargy on 27/11/2017 at 09:15

That reminds me of a young support engineer who works for one of our suppliers. He was telling us about how he'd had to get red of his 1.6 Focus which 'must have had something wrong with it' as he only got 25mpg. He'd replaced it with a Civic diesel, which he was getting 55mpg which was much better.

I thought but didn't say anything that 55mpg out of a diesel Civic wasn't great, given a mate is averaging about 65 in his. I found out later in the day when he gave me a lift the real reason why ... as we were hammering along the motorway in licence losing territory. At that point, I was even more impressed with the Civic still being really quite economical despite how it was being driven!

Returning to the original post of the eco driving score. Fortunately my car doesn't have one, but in hire cars I have had I found they mostly gave an indication of where it had been driven rather than anything useful. It was really easy to get very high scores driving on the flat, free flowing A roads near me. Go into town though and however much you drive like a Grandad the score goes right down because of the stopping and starting. Another similar much trumpeted device is the so called 'smart' gas and electricity meters, which in effect are just a backwards way of finding out how cold the weather is.