Category Archives: Cars

Stuff about the cars

Cars, Current Affairs, Movies & TV

“If you had access to a car like this, would you take it back right away?�

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One of the reports on Watchdog tonight made several national news bulletins, the story of Pink Meet & Greet, an airport valet parking service.

Now I have to say, that my opinions of what valet parking attendants could get up to were partly formed by the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off where Ferris borrows his friends father’s prized 1961 Ferrari and leaves it at a car park in central Chicago. He tips the attendants and asks them to take special care of the car, and then as Ferris and his friends are walking out of one door, the prized Ferrari goes out the other. You next see the car in the scene pictured above, going in slow-motion above the camera to the title music of Star Wars, and at regular points until they collect the Ferrari from the car park, you see the two attendants having a fantastic time driving around the city.

You’d think that this wouldn’t be the case, but to be frank, this is pretty well what the meet and greet company reported on tonight seemed to be doing with the cars they were being given. Although the company carefully quoted the distance to and from the compound – 32 miles, that gave plenty of opportunity to try out the cars – and in other cases the cars didn’t make it the 16 miles to the compound anyway.

One woman returned to find £4000 worth of damage to her £30,000 Audi, along with a bag of cannabis in the ash tray, and a CD in the glove-box. The company said the damage had been caused when the driver slipped on ice – however when Sussex Police came after her for failing to stop after an accident it transpired that the accident had been more serious. Another customer thought his car had been safely locked away in a secure compound. When he returned, he was contacted by Sussex Trading Standards, who told him that his car had been left parked on an industrial estate all week.

The programme left a car with the company, and fitted it with a tracker, that monitored the speed and location of the car when it was left for a week. During the week it was left parked on the roadside, and round the back of a local supermarket, and broke the speed limit eight times during the week, on two occasions doing over 100mph.

Following on from the report, a viewer contacted the programme with details of problems with another of the meet and greet companies, where his Mercedes had been used for a wedding whilst he was away – the company had left confetti under some of the mats…

So, to quote Ferris – “If you had access to a car like this, would you take it back right away?â€? – it seems that with some of the drivers at this meet and greet firm in particular, the answer is probably the same as Ferris…

Bueller originally uploaded by wayoutwest.

Cars, Politics

Another Day, Another Letter Bomb

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So after the excitement around here yesterday when Vantis over the road received a bomb – apparently intended for one of their clients, Speed Check Services – attention is now focused on Swansea, where now the DVLA has now received a letter bomb, certainly indicating a motoring connection between the three bombs so far. There is also discussion about whether a bomb received by a man in Folkstone at the weekend is somehow connected too.

Quite what whoever is doing it is hoping to achieve by this I don’t know, since it’s hardly likely to make the government or the Police change their policies with regards to the motorist, any more than any other sort of terrorist campaign does. If anything it will only harden opinions against the perpetrators.

Apparently the bomb yesterday was addressed to someone specific, maybe going after people the bomber perceives as key players. However as with most organisations, the post doesn’t get to the addressee unopened – when I worked at SSE, all my post would be pre-opened and checked before it made it to my desk – even parcels from Amazon! As a result, it’s the post room staff who get injured, nobody else. Certainly, at this point in time, I’d be expecting post room workers working for anyone associated in some way with motoring enforcement will be feeling decidedly nervous…

Cars

Replacement Stick

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Replaced Gear Stick

So before dawn this morning I was up and off to Ridgeway VW to have them replace the entire gear stick due to the broken bit of trim on the top. On the phone the service agent had said that the job would take about an hour, but it was best to leave an hour and a half just in case they had problems, or were busy. They had slots at 7am or 8am – not surprisingly with it being a Saturday I opted for the slightly later 8am slot!

When I arrived, there was one person already sat in the waiting area, and another car just being taken in, but aside from that it was pretty quiet. The car was moved by a technician almost immediately, so I sat down with a drink and some reading material ready for my wait.

However, barely had I finished browsing the brochure for the new Eos, and just started on an extreme level Sudoku puzzle on Sudoku Rules Extreme (usually takes me between 20 and 50 minutes to do) than the same technician was coming in to give me back my keys having done the job. When I mentioned that I had been told an hour for the job, he said that they usually leave an hour in case they have problems, but the actual job should only involve unclipping the trim and swapping over the stick. In total it took about twenty minutes to do. The only visible indication that anything has been done is that the new gear stick has a black plastic collar under the ball on the top, rather than the silvery chrome collar the old one had – not anything you’d notice unless you were looking, and certainly not anything that would affect the operation. The only reason I paid any attention to it was because they explicitly asked for the old broken top, and with the speed of the changeover compared to the estimate I was wondering whether they’d patched up the old one!

Cars, Computers/Technology, Web/Internet

This Site is NOTHING to do with the DVLA!

1 Comment

Today was one of those days when you feel you’ve slipped into a parallel world where everybody is totally barmy. One of my more popular postings was this page about my experiences with the DVLA online vehicle registration page. It’s had a steady stream of slightly odd comments, however the one today really took the biscuit:

I sold the vehicle registration mark K108PKR over two years ago, and informed your office at the time, so I don’t have either a current licence disk or the vehicle which was a green citroen bx.Can you please advise what action I now need to take with this licence application

Reading that comment, it looked for all the world like he thinks that I’m the DVLA. Quite how he has come to that conclusion I don’t know, however looking back at the previous odd comments, a lot of them make much more sense if you assume that the commenter’s think this is the DVLA. Anyway, I’ve changed the title of the post from ‘DVLA Online Vehicle Registration’ to ‘My DVLA Online Vehicle Registration Experiences’ so hopefully that will solve the problem, although I’m still at a loss to understand how anyone could confuse my blog site with the DVLA…

Cars, Movies & TV

Richard Hammond

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It looks like we’re not alone in being shocked by the news of the accident that Richard Hammond, presenter of Top Gear suffered yesterday whilst filming for the show. Aside from the obvious abscence when the new series starts, we hope that the accident isn’t used as excuse to change the programme. I’m sure the BBC took all the proper precautions, but even with everything in place, accidents happen. But that debate is for the future. For the moment we’d just like to wish Richard a speedy and full recovery.