JBJ,
You wouldn't happen to be the chap whose letter was published in HJ's column last Saturday would you? I've never seen HJ get quite so aerated in print before! ;-)
Cheers
Rob
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Try driving where I work - in the south of France. There 90% of the drivers are aggressive half-wits. Bleached blondes are a speciality, usually with a fag (as in burning!) in one hand and a cellphone in the other, makes you wonder what they steer with. White Renault Clio 16v variants, overpowered tin boxes, worst culprit.
Common practices : overtaking on blind bends, no lights at night, tailgating, reversing and three point turns on roundabouts to get back to missed exit, reversing on motorway to missed exit, stopping on hard shoulders to have a pee, or worse ....
Watching one of the 'Police Stop' type programmes one evening with a mate, he suddenly burst out laughing and said that if a French person saw the programme he wouldn't know what was wrong, because to them, it is all 'normal' driving.
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Follow up to this...
The drivers husband turned up at my house last night with £450 in cash to pay for a new bumper cover and paint for my damaged MB.
Turns out he is a local roofing contractor and not 'the sharpest knife in the drawer'. His explanation for his wife driving into the back of me was that, "in the Jeep you don't have to slow down for speed bumps" (rather neglecting the fact that my car was between the front of the Jeep and the speed bump)!
Anyway, what he lacked in intellect was more than compensated for by his physical girth and so I didn't pursue the exchange; just took the money. We left it at that, and he waddled off in reasonably good humour.
Unfortunately the whole incident did nothing to dispel stereotypes about large 4x4's and their owners/drivers....
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"in the Jeep you don't have to slow down for speed bumps"
I have never understood this common type of 4x4 quote.
In my experience, sure they have huge ground clearance and often a wide track, so can straddle 'mound' speed bumps as a truck would, but they are amongst the worst vehicles I've ever travelled in to drive over tradition sleeping policemen.
Whether it is the sheer mass of rotating wheels or not, they all seem to have a horrible vertical 'pitch and jolt', whereas a conventional car will simply thump over the bump in a less dramatic way.
The worst offender at this that I have travelled in is a friend's Jeep Cherokee 2.5D, which tramps and thumps all over the place, and has done from new. A colleague's Ford Explorer was nearly as bad (along with having such a cramped cabin in relation to the size of car, it should be treated as an offence!)
I tend to like Volvos, but even the shiny XC90 that taxi'd me from Gothenburg city centre to the airport last week, was far less comfortable to travel in than my brothers V70 with the same D5 engine (and my V70 with 2.4T). It suffered from the same jolting over bumps just described, and curved motorway slip roads were more of a fifty pence piece afair (a series of joined up straight lines) rather than one sweep. Hitting a bump with just one wheel at a time gave the sensation of the car being twisted and then skitting sideways.
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"in the Jeep you don't have to slow down for speed bumps"
I have never understood this common type of 4x4 quote.
I had to have new bushes etc on the front suspension of a Freelander after only 20K miles and was told by the dealer it was common "due to speed humps".
I cannot agree more about aggressive drivers. I had one this PM when I was doing 40 mph in a 40 limit with a young child in the back and had a young baseball capped moron behind me in an Astra GTE about a foot from my bumper whilst on a mobile.
If I were rich enough I would have a fleet of 10 Mondeos or Vectras where I could simply slam my breaks on, causing the inevitable and say I had braked for a cat/dog. Moron pays up every time.
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Did you actually get any insurance details from her at the time? Just wondering if they were keen to pay cash because she wasn't actually insured at all....
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Send 'em to the Philippines. Our boys'd run rings round 'em.
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I've never seen HJ get quite so aerated in print before! ;-)
Just read it on the interweb. I'd not really thought of that before. It does seem silly having a bumper for cushioning impact then sticking a solid lump of metal out further. Mind you, it's not exactly easy to take my towbar off, though I've seen one that can be removed from a Golf in the blink of an eye with some magic in the boot.
I've never hit anyone with it of course, and if somebody wants to impale their radiator on it that's up to them I suppose.
GJD
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