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Where do the Parties Stand on Motoring Issues?

November 27th, 2019 by Rebecca Webb

It won’t have escaped your notice that there’s an General Election looming on the horizon. Politics is a subject that’s guaranteed to divide people – and in some cases cause them to shout at one another (and us). But it’s something that we can’t rightly ignore, especially when the people standing for office are looking to make major changes to the way we all live and work. We’ve all seen the headline-grabbing stuff, but what’s lurking in those manifestos that’ll impact us and our customers specifically? Let’s try to be as impartial as possible as we delve into the sticky, tedious mess of manifesto pledges: The Greens As you might expect, this lot have something of a bone to pick with the automotive industry. They’re calling for a bit more urgency, and say that if we don’t cut our carbon emissions to zero by 2030, environmental calamity is going to be the result. If you’ve seen the title sequence of Terminator 2, then you have a fair idea of what to expect. They’re pledging £100 billion per year toward the project, which will mean that all petrol and diesel vehicles are taken of the road. The Labour Party Labour are…

The Problem with Engine Idling?

November 22nd, 2019 by Rebecca Webb

How would you feel if you were pulled up in your van, waiting for someone, and a stranger knocked on your window and demanded that you turn off your engine? For many, this might seem like an unreasonable demand. But the fact is that air pollution is something that increasing numbers of people are concerned about. And thus this is a confrontation that increasing numbers of people will have. What’s wrong with Engine Idling? According to the Royal College of Physicians, around forty thousand deaths a year are associated with air pollution. When you’re stopped, you’re still causing air pollution, even though you aren’t travelling anywhere. Being as we’re getting close to winter, you might find that it’s a bit of a struggle to get the van fired up when it’s frozen in the morning. Thus, turning off the engine might not seem like much of a tempting prospect. If your engine is consistently struggling to fire up, it might be a sign that there’s a deeper underlying problem. Plus, if you’re stopping in traffic, you might decide against turning off the engine, since you don’t want to get stuck and cause a blockage. Engine idling will also impact your…

Breathalysers to be Mandatory from 2022

November 22nd, 2019 by Rebecca Webb

Buried in all of this month’s political news is the announcement that, from 2022, all new cars sold in Europe will need to be fitted with breath-testing devices. Moreover, existing cars will have until 2024 to get with the program and have the necessary modifications fitted. This is part of the same EU regulations which mandate that speed-limiting software will be installed, too. The aim of this stuff is simple: to reduce the number of road fatalities and severe injuries. If you get behind the driver’s wheel of the car of the future, then it’ll detect that you’ve had one too many and it’ll shut down the engine. According to the European Transport Safety Council, an independent body which has nothing to do with the EU, despite being based in Brussels, the elimination of drink-drivers from the roads would cut collisions by a whopping thirty percent, which would save roughly 25,000 lives across the continent over the course of the next fifteen years. It’s probably a good idea to take predictions like this with a pinch of salt. It’s difficult to say what will happen next year in an industry as dependent on technological change as the motoring industry. Moreover,…

French MPs scrap Breathalyser Law

November 11th, 2019 by Rebecca Webb

Improving road safety is an ongoing struggle for just about every government in the world. Sometimes they intervene, and in the process genuinely help the situation. Sometimes these interventions aren’t quite so successful. Recently, we have the case of the French government, which in 2013 decided to require that foreign motorists carry a breathalyser kit with them. There was going to be an €11 fine for those that failed to comply – but then the incoming president Francois Hollande decided that there wasn’t going to be a fine, but there was going to be a requirement. A crime without punishment isn’t much of a deterrent, and the new rules failed to have much, if any impact, on the way that foreign drivers actually behaved. What are the drink-drive limits in France? The drink-drive limit in France is a measly 0.05%, which compares with 0.08% in England, Northern Ireland and Wales. For younger drivers, it’s even lower, at a measly 0.02% for the first three years on the road (meaning that such drivers are effectively banned from drinking while they’re behind the wheel). If you regularly drive to Scotland, you might already be familiar with this way of doing things: their…

Fuel Theft: Why is it so Easy?

November 11th, 2019 by Rebecca Webb

If you’re like most people, you’ve gassed your motor up hundreds of times without once even considering the idea of getting straight back in and driving away without paying. And yet that’s what thousands of people do, often completely brazenly. They’re right to be brazen about it – according to recent research by Crown Oil, an incredible 99% of fuel thieves are never caught, let alone prosecuted. So, all of those scary-looking stickers you might have seen warning that the police will come for you if you don’t pay – it turns out they’re not quite as effective as you might think. How reliable is this data? The research relies on the police’s own figures. A total of forty-five police forces were sent freedom of information requests, and twenty-three of them replied. In the last year, there have been 25,614 fuel thefts across the UK. In practice, the figure is probably much higher – some fuel thefts are never reported, because the petrol station operators (understandably) don’t think the police are going to be able to track down the culprits. Aren’t things getting better? You might think that technological advancements have made the situation better. And you’d be right –…

Councils ask for power to deal with reckless Lorry Drivers

November 11th, 2019 by Rebecca Webb

You might recall the incident earlier this year where a lorry driver tried to drive under a low bridge in Middlesbrough and ended up smashing into the bottom of it. The road had to be cleared, causing a great deal of frustration for everyone who wanted to drive along it at the time, and a great deal of expense for the taxpayer. This wasn’t a one-off incident; it happened four times in a matter of weeks, at the same bridge! It seems this isn’t a problem unique the Middlesbrough; all across the land, lorries are avoiding the sensible routes and trying to take short-cuts through town. We’ve all, at one point or another, been stuck behind a lorry driver who didn’t really know what they were doing. In some narrow, historical areas, a lorry in the wrong place can cause absolute pandemonium. The problem usually occurs when a sat-nav guides the hapless lorry driver in the wrong direction. But there has not yet been a sat-nav invented that can restore the damage inflicted when a lorry reverses into a signpost. The Local Government Authority has been making rather loud noises about how much it disapproves of the situation. Late last…

Hands-free Phones: just how Dangerous are They?

October 8th, 2019 by Rebecca Webb

Since 2003, we’ve all been banned from using our phones while driving. Picking up a phone and placing it next to your head means that you can’t steer the vehicle and change gears. The same goes for texting, tweeting, and scrolling through Instagram: they’re all insanely dangerous activities if you’re at the helm of several tons of metal. In the wake of this law, we’ve all made the switch to hands-free mobile. Most modern cars come with the function built right into the dashboard. It’s convenient, it’s easy, and many of us couldn’t function without it. But recent evidence has given us all cause to doubt this thinking. A Commons Transport Select Committee (one of those groups which talk endlessly about what the law should be before it actually becomes law) met last month to scratch their chins about the issue. They heard plenty of experts share their dim view of the practice. One expert, in fact, told them that talking hands-free caused “essentially the same” level of distraction as being at the drink-drive limit. You can read the committee’s report here, if that’s the sort of thing that interests you. Now, this might seem totally bonkers, so let’s see…

Saudi Oil attacks: what do they mean for the price of fuel?

October 8th, 2019 by Rebecca Webb

In this blog, we’re going to take a look at commodities markets and how they’re effected by enormous fireballs. It’s usually a bit tricky to see exactly how the goings-on on the other side of the planet will affect our day-to-day lives in Britain, but where recent events in Saudi Arabia are concerned, this doesn’t really apply. When five percent of the global oil supply gets wiped out overnight, it’s not hard to work out that the price of crude oil is going to go up, and so too is the fuel that we use to fill up our diesel-powered vans. Aramco is the state-owned oil company in Saudi Arabia. It’s responsible for 10% of the world’s oil production, and is the reason the country is so fabulously wealthy. You might, with the benefit of hindsight, wonder whether they might have used some of this enormous wealth to stop someone flying over with a drone and blowing up millions of dollars-worth of black gold – needless to say this is an episode that might persuade us all to take security that little bit more seriously. The facility that was attacked, Abqaiq, is where almost three-quarters of the country’s oil goes…

Which Songs Make You Drive Dangerously?

October 8th, 2019 by Rebecca Webb

We read with interest the findings of the good people over at the South China University of Technology, who’ve been hard at work discovering which songs are most likely to encourage erratic driving. Their results aren’t terribly surprising: loud aggressive music makes you drive more aggressively; soft passive music makes you drive more passively. What did the Researchers Do? The study crammed participants into a driving simulator, and had them drive along a six-lane motorway for twenty minutes. Some of the drivers were asked to listen to slower, softer music, like Toto. Others were asked to listen to hard and fast music, like Green Day. The latter group changed lanes twice as often as the former, and drove on average 5mph faster. Therefore loud music makes you a dangerous driver. So far, so obvious. Reasons to be Sceptical But is this really a fair experiment? This is, after all, a simulation, and we behave differently when we know that what we’re doing isn’t real. When we’re playing Grand Theft Auto V and ‘Moves Like Jagger’ comes on, we might well decide to pull a handbrake turn over the central reservation; that does not necessarily mean we’ll do so in real…

Clean Air Zones in Leeds: What you Need to Know

August 30th, 2019 by Rebecca Webb

The imminent arrival of clean air zones is setting off something of a wave of panic among our customer base. But we’re pretty sanguine about the matter. There are a few misconceptions around the issue, which we thought we’d take the time to clarify. The idea behind a CAZ is simple – if you drive a vehicle which puts out the wrong amount of CO2 (and other unpleasant pollutants), then you’ll be asked to pay to get into the city centre. This will eat into the operating costs of the nation’s polluting vehicles. Thus, over time, the air in city centres will become just as fresh and invigorating as that of a remote mountainside. In the UK, this sort of change has been a long time coming. In 2015, the Supreme Court ordered ministers to do something about inner-city pollution: “The new government, whatever its political complexion, should be left in no doubt as to the need for immediate action to address this issue” said the justices at the time, unanimous in their displeasure. Naturally, ‘immediate’ means quite a different thing in the world of politics than it does elsewhere. And so, four years later, we’ve seen a new ultra-low…

What are these French Clean Air Laws About?

August 30th, 2019 by Rebecca Webb

If you spend any amount of time driving on the continent, whether it’s for business or pleasure, then the chances are that you’ll need to worry about France’s clean air laws. These require action on the part of visiting motorists. In response to mounting concern about air pollution the powers-that-be in France have decided to introduce a new ‘clean air’ sticker system, known as ‘Crit’Air’. The system divides all vehicles into six colour-coded categories, allowing French motorists to see at a glance how much pollution they’re spewing out of their tailpipes. What do the stickers mean? Put simply, the lower the number on your sticker, the better. ‘5’ is the highest; vehicles bearing this number are effectively banned from major cities, including Paris, Grenoble, Strasbourg and Lyon. ‘0’ is the lowest, and is largely reserved for electric cars. Where do I get a sticker? With anything like this, you’ll need to be aware of online scammers. Take a look through the Google search and you’ll find plenty of websites hurrying to set up shop and con British motorists out of their bank details. The official site is here. Note that you’ll need to leave plenty of time for the sticker…

What’s with all of these Potholes?

August 30th, 2019 by Rebecca Webb

It seems an unassailable a fact of geography that potholes will be forever gaping from our roads, and that British motorists will be forever complaining about them. In the latest episode in a long-running series, a House of Commons Committee report to the government provided a no-holds-barred takedown of the state of British streets. According to the authors, led by the Labour MP for Nottingham South, Lilian Greenwood, local roads are the ‘arteries of prosperous and vibrant villages, towns and cities’. What’s more, these arteries are beset by a ‘plague of potholes’ which are ‘a major headache for everyone’. Leaving mixed medical metaphors to one side, the report isn’t shy about the scale of the problem. Neither is it shy about the cause of it: money, or rather, a lack of money. Funding has fallen by a quarter since the Conservatives came into power in 2010. During that time, according to the RAC, we’ve had a sustained annual increase in the number of motorists. And, given that funding for local roads is not ring-fenced, most of it’s been diverted to other worthy causes like social care. Who pays for local roads? The motorways and main roads which connect British towns…

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