MOTOR-BLOG from Coventry

My work colleague Keith mentioned the other day, that the spiralling cost of fuel seems to have slowed traffic down on the roads. I have to agree with him. I was travelling down the M6 tonight, as I do everyweek day night, and was cruising at between 70-75 mph. Usually this sort of speed would have instantly relegated me to the inside lane - only popping out into the middle lane occasionally to pass the lorries. The outside lane was a big no-no.

Not now it seems. I haven’t changed my driving style, but it seems that others have. At 75 I was zipping past 7 series Beemers, VW Passat TDi’s (infernal things) and a syrup of Mondeoey-focusey-golfey sludge that appears to have spread itself out all over our motorway system in recent years.

Ha ha! Guess what you commuters in your dull company cars - I can still travel at these speeds in my Nan’s Peugeot 106 and still return well over 45 MPG without even trying! Little cars are where it is now at folks, so start snapping up all of those sub £400 106, AX, 205 and Citroen ZX’s that currently inhabit the small ads section of local paper now, before they’re all gone…ÂÂ

I’m telling you, you wait for ages for a semblence of summer to appear and when it does it’s ruddy muggy - no good. Plus Germany are at this moment beating Poland in the Euro cup thingy with 20 minutes to go. Come on Poland, you can do it.

We’ve been out and about today and it’s been lovely - but it would have been more lovely if I was out in the Vitesse. It only needs an MoT and some insurance then I’m laughing - even Helen has been missing it, so it’s now up on my priority list. I’ll get some insurance then book it in for a test - but not before I put the SAAB through. I should have MoT’ed it last month, but you know how it is - woulda, coulda, shoulda etc.

I’m a bit worried about the SAAB actually, it’s picked up a clunking noise form the front offside suspension. I’m sure it’s just the bushes, but will this be an MoT failure - or not. I hope not, as even though the price of running it has gawn through the roof I’ve really started to enjoy running it again.

Still, I’ll have to see what happens on the test - roll on Thursday…ÂÂ

Hooray for the truckers! (except the one who was overtaking that other one on the A14 tonight for about 4 miles and held me up of course…) but what can we really do about fuel prices? OK, so driving a few lorries into central London, will balls things up a little bit, but I say MORE, MORE MORE!

The Government has made it ILLEGAL to blockade the petrol depots like happened last time (democracy in action for you) but there must be something else we can do. You may have received the around robin email as I have, which suggests that boycotting certain brands of petrol will help - I think it was BP and Shell, but I may be wrong.

This of course is ridiculous - all this will do is put individual petrol stations out of business (which are run on the whole by individual franchisees making only about 2p profit on each litre of fuel sold), and if they go bust all we’ll be left with is less filling stations and more overpriced flats built on their sites. The email also suggested that we get our fuel from supermarkets instead - madness especially with the amount of profit these organisations make.

So what can we do? Well we can demand that the Government doesn’t charge VAT on top of the tax they already put on fuel. Why don’t they charge VAT on the unit price of fuel and then levy the extra fuel tax on top? OK so it won’t reduce the price massively but it would help. But of course they don’t want that, as high fuel prices are a GREEN measure aren’t they? But that’s rubbish as we all know - despite high fuel prices, demand has not faltered putting pay to the ‘make it expensive and people will find alternative ways of travel’ strain of thought.

I’ve just looked up a standard day return from Coventry to London on the train and it’s £107 (unless you want to leave at stupid times) Rubbish. What’s the cheap green alternative? There isn’t one. All that high fuel prices are doing is making my Nan find it difficult to buy food and pay the bills, rather than stopping people using their cars. Poor people are suffering - people who can afford to buy Porsche Cayenne Turbo’s and other pointless vehicles can afford to pay the extra cost of fuel - poor people cannot.

We must do something about climate change I agree, but we also must do something about racketeering and profiteering Governments too. I’m not suggesting that any other party would do anything differently but we must do something about this situation. When I was in Spain, the petrol cost about as much per litre in Euros as we pay in pounds - so why should we pay as much as we do?

I wouldn’t mind paying more if public transport wasn’t privatised and the extra money went to provide cheap reliable public transport, but of course this is not the case. In Spain the maximum we paid on a bus was 1 Euro, and the train from the airport to Malaga City centre only cost 1 Euro 20 cents. If they can provide cheap, clean, reliable public transport and still charge 30% less for a litre of fuel - then why the hell can’t we?

Some utter bastard has stolen the radio out of my half of my 50% owned Range Rover. Unfortunately, Keith has also had something stolen from his half  - namely a sat-nav, which is obviously much, much worse. Swines.

 At least they didn’t break the windows to get in - the bloody doors don’t lock do they. All this happened when it was parked in our supposedly secure work car park that is reputed to have 24hr security patrols and remotely monitered CCTV. Hmm I have evidence to the contrary in the form of a ripped out lower dashboard…

Well that was a good start to the year wasn’t it? Also, have you noticed that the petrol prices have all gone up again in the last couple of days. Funnily enough, it seems to have coincided with Mondays big ‘everyone back to work after Christmas’ day. I filled up at my preferred station end of last week (BP since you ask) and it was an eye watering 99.9p/litre, as it had been for the two and a half weeks previously over the Christmas break.

Today when I needed to fill up again it was up to 101.09p/litre. I noticed that all of the other stations prices had gone up too. Coincidence is it that the prices have gone up just in time for the commuters to be stung after a long period of price stability? Hmm. I don’t think so.

I was driving a press car today - a Skoda octavia VRS turbo diesel. Very nice too, although the best I could manage out of it was 45mpg - not great for a modern oil burner - and I was driving it like a granny. 60MPH in sixth gear up the A1.

I managed to get over 40 mpg in a VW Phaeton 3.0 V6 Diesel driving similary, and that car is much bigger and heavier, so that gives you an idea of how the Skoda could do better. Mind you, having said that, the lowest figure I got out of the Phaeton was 17.9mpg and I won’t be revealing how fast I was going to achieve this…

I have come to a conclusion though, now I regulary drive brand new luxury cars - in the case of the Phaeton - all £56,000 worth , I now know why people in modern cars drive as they do. The brakes are so good and the cars are so quick that older cars (even within ten years old) really are a world apart. This is both a blessing and a curse. It’s great if you own a new top end motor, but not so good if you don’t. If you drive a classic it’s down right scary how new car drivers treat you. I’ll leave it at that for now…

Helen had a bit of a scare today whilst driving to work - she bagged her first kill. A pretty wood pigeon swooped down in front of her and smacked itself into the top of the windscreen - right in the middle too. Now ‘Lady Vi’ is sporting a rather fetching greasy impact mark and subsequent grease trail right across the roof.

The poor little blighter, I only washed it the other day…ÂÂ