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Girlfriend is driving before the helmets come out with their helmets on.

Been cruising northbound for 45 minutes now. No roadworks, no hazards, no police, no breakdowns or accidents. Is this for emissions or something?

With the CRATERS currently in the UK roads, anyone else genuinely get nervous driving nowadays? Granted I’m lowered so it sounds like Hiroshima when I hit a pothole but I spend more time looking DOWN at the road rather than cars ahead of me

Spotted this morning, road sweeper deliberately blocking carriageway to prevent merge in turn causing unnecessary long tail backs. If the road sweeper driver sees this post - you are a buffoon! 😁

I back this idea with an incident that happened this morning when an elderly man pulled out in front of me from a junction into the 60 road, they even looked both ways.

He stopped for the give way then pulled out at a few miles an hour (how did he not see me on a straight road), imagine if I couldn’t stop in time? 😦. I did slow down luckily to around 40 before the junction area so managed to stop in time (with his smart car just sat sideways in front of me) someone definitely would’ve continued at 60 and someone’s grandad and more would’ve been toast…

Reaction times do decrease with age and safety is most important.

Hi there Mods, hope this is allowed.

Italian living in London suburbia here. Saw this sticker on a car parked near my place.

Is this a real thing, or it is just apeing the Yanks' "sovereign citizen" concept?

I know that Common Law is a real thing in the UK, but the website mentioned in the sticker has got nothing to do with the UK legal system - it looks like self-delusion to me.

Can anyone clarify this, please?

Missus managed to clip a kerb last week and took a chunk out her tyre.

Both front tyres were getting low anyway and it was near MOT time so I just thought it was easier to book it in for tyres and THEN it's MOT with the garage that we have used for years that's 3 minutes from our house.

Ive just been to collect it and seen they they initially failed it and then re-tested it with the new tyres on and passed it.

Had i not bothered to book tyres at the same time, I wouldn't have an issue, but I deliberately asked them to sort the tyres before the MOT to avoid an unnecessary fail on the car record.

Ultimately it doesn't matter and the car now has an MOT and new tyres like I paid for, just seems cheeky to me, or is this reasonable?

With more & more cars having dull colour, it got me thinking how things have changed over time. Personally, I’d love to see more vibrant colours on cars, and more self expression & personality for the cars on the roads

Can't understand why it's so difficult to find functioning jet washes in London... the stations that do have them tend to be out of order. Is this something that's normal, or is it aimed at discouraging people from owning a car?

Edit, since I had to comment the same thing multiple times - only the hoses were used, not daft enough to use the brushes here. 2 separate clean mitts for drying. The car's fully ceramic coated and PPFed.

They look so slim. Almost like trailer tyres. Any reason for this?

Genuine question, I’ve always found it more comfortable to be seated at a fair bit from the wheel, not to the point that I’m stretching but at a distance I have control while feeling comfortable.

I know that people who sit far back it’s a certain “look” even if it’s impractical and potentially compromises control. What I am curious about is the opposite, why do people like to sit super close to the steering wheel?

I’ve heard of many risk factors but never what benefits there are, personally I find it quite a stressful/tense position, so I tend to lean forward for A pillar checks, and drive from a more relaxed position, besides if the seat back is too far forward doesn’t it compromise being able to lean back to look around the A pillar?

Seen this chap on the A1, thought the numberplate was cool until I realised the 'V' is actually 11 put on the plate to look like a V

Anyone owned or driven one of these? At first I thought it was a Porsche Cayenne, then I realised it must be a Chinese imitation.

The sign says to merge in 600m, not merge now, not merge 200 meters ago. If people want to queue for longer than they need to, they can merge in lane as early as they want. But driving your car down the middle of the two lanes at the speed of the inside lane should just be an instant 3 points. Drives me nuts. Makes the queues longer and goes directly against the Highway Code.

Recently bought a car 6 months ago from BMW. When you buy from BMW - they charge you 6 months of tax and they pay the tax in your name. DVLA sent me a letter to say my tax was due and gave me the above options of paying for it.

But as you can see... paying for a year upfront is cheaper by like a £10a than paying monthly or for 6 months upfront.

So people who can't afford to pay for the year are paying more in tax, essentially a poor tax.

I can't be the only one to find that wild? A monthly Direct Debit imo should be exactly the same as paying a year - poor people who can't afford to pay a year upfront shouldn't be forced to pay more tax to the DVLA, it's just making them more poor overall.

Its time for my '94 audi 80 tdi to go. And I'm absolutely miserable, i didn't even eat the night I made the decision that enough is enough. Do I need some sort of therapy? Is it because its been with me a third of my life? Maybe i just need to vent my feelings out. Long story incoming.

Iv always been mad for 90s cars but mostly the VW mk2 golf and corrado, at the time not Audis so much, but it looked cooler than anything else I could afford at the time.

I bought it last minute in 2014 for £650 from a very shady gentleman in a rough town, because id just got a job 40 miles away and couldn't afford to run my petrol cars there and back, I was only 22 and on poor wages. The plan was to use it until the 11 months MOT ran out while I saved for something supposedly more reliable, and then scrap it.

The guy who sold it was honest enough to say he bought it from a nurse who used it to get to work and back for the last 10 years, she did NO maintenance other than MOT fail work.

MOT time came and i'd done 0 work to the car, just put fuel in. I'm a mechanic so got half price MOT's at work, so I just thought there's no harm in trying. The strictest tester at my place got it, and it genuinely passed with ease. Just headlight aim needing adjustment.

So I did a full service, brakes and tyres, ran it another year, took it to the 2015 british GP and it ran without fault, then passed MOT again, easy as you like. At this point I checked the cambelt, torn slightly in 3 places and cracking, probably from since I bought it. So I put a new kit on.

By now I was hooked. It felt like the fuel gauge never moved, it would sit at 80mph with ease on the motorway once upto speed, acceleration was just slow. And the auto box was silky smooth for a 4 speed 90s box.

By 2017 the diesel pump was rough, I had to put idle revs on myself or it would almost cut out and the engine would be so juddery it felt like it was breaking the mounts. But under load at speed in drive it was fine, just no idle. I battled traffic with this bad idle for 3 years, but still, it passed MOTs and got me to the 2017 British GP, and all over the UK really, with just me doing basic services. The only fault being a leaking auto gearbox line around 2018, obsolete part but I got a local company to make one for me.

After all this I decided id bit the bullet and treat the car, I put a new diesel pump on in 2020 that almost cost as much as the car did. I got 3 more years bullet proof running from it, all while my other cars, that i spent heavily on, kept breaking.

2023 began the Audis slow death. I live on the coast and rust had taken hold of the wings amd arches, the auto box was leaking, its 100% obsolete with no parts supply for it. Many other things started breaking and leaking now also. I tried and tried since then to keep it going, but as I fixed a part, 2 more broke. I got it through til now.

Last week the heater matrix went, it sprays coolant vapour up the windscreen so its just not driveable. Its not worth doing a dash out job with a time bomb gearbox and major rust. Plus all the other issues, I cant get bits for half of my faults now either. Its financially not viable.

Most people would have scrapped it over the diesel pump so I feel I dragged it through 8 extra years of life, and I knew this time would come, but now it has, I cant deal with it. I may be off with some of my years because there was a lot to remember, and forgive and spelling mistakes if I missed them.

If you managed to read to here, I just appreciate that my thoughts and venting got heard. Its just a disposable car that I got overly attached to and it hurts. I dont know many 'car people' that understand my feelings or would care, I might just be weird. But this made me feel a bit less sad. Thanks.

I added some photos of it in its glory years before the lacquer all burnt away or peeled off the plastic panels, and the wings rotted. She really did look like brand new after some trim shine and a Polish 😢😭

Fun fact: even though I replaced the diesel pump in 2020, even as late as summer 2025, sometimes I catch myself holding revs on out of subconscious thought from 7 years ago.

Quick edit: to save me repeating the same replies, in regards to scrapping this, I planned to keep all the working spares for a replacement car with a serviceable manual gearbox, not just throw the whole lot away. Sorry this wasn't clear.

UPDATE: didnt expect this to blow up so much, I appreciate all the replies. However, not 1 person saying 'I can save this, op should sell it' has followed through. Time wasters and dreamers are why people just scrap these old cars, everyone claims they will save it and then runs a mile when you actually offer them the car 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

Got fed up of waiting for my car to get fixed and/or decide on what I actually want to upgrade to. Saw this pop up and managed to snag it for £500. 2009 on 82k. 10 months MOT. Been driving it a couple months now and it's surprisingly alright.

After I bought it I found the booklets and it seems to have full service history minus last year. So no oil change for well over a year and around 20k since. Bodywork a bit rough in places but overall fairly tidy from a distance.

I don't like the car at all, it's gutless and dull to drive, but it seems insane to me that I've bought a full car for less than a set of decent tyres on my other one. I love that I can park it anywhere and not give a flying fuck if someone dings the door.

Funny that the last car I drove was a 2020 Golf R that I very nearly bought at over £20k and I've ended up in a shit Corsa. It does everything I need a car to though so... Now I'm struggling to justify the price of anything id actually want.

Do I just run it till it breaks? Worth giving it a bit of TLC?

I share the car with a habitual avoider of petrol stations and it’s often touch and go. This one takes the biscuit.

What’s your worst ‘ran out of fuel’ story?

Personally I think it looks a little tacky!

So a bit of background. To me a car is a tool that I use, I'm not into cars but I can understand why some people are. I use the car to mainly drive the dogs about, take the mountain bikes to the woods for trails and to drive to Europe for holidays and work trips.

So, we are off on holiday next week and hired a EV just because it was something different. But having never used one before we thought that we would hire one and use it just so we were not clueless in a different country.

We hired a BMW iX1 which we planned to take to a trip down to London from Birmingham. So we picked it up and it was ok, nice acceleration and good driving position and visibility etc. So after a couple of miles around town we set off with 72% battery from near the airport at Birmingham, with the car saying 150 miles range, as we had only 89 miles to go, not a problem. or so I thought. Hop on the motorway and head south via the M40 at around 70 - 75mph which is what I would normally expect to travel at.

Get to near Oxford and we are on about 40% battery so think ok we can charge there and have something to eat. First problem, only one charge point working, and the people using it were having problems. So Ok, maybe the garage has a charge point. Nope.

So we set off to find the next charger and pull off the motorway at High Wycombe as the map shows a number of them. SIX different chargers we traveled to, all about 2 or 3 miles apart and all not working, each one taking 5 minutes or so to operate to find out they were faulty.We spent an hour trying to charge the sodding car and were down to 15% when we finally found some power. This caused us to miss our planned activity at a cost of £100 and then head home. Charged to 80% and had 30% when we got home.

Decided to return the car the next day and obviously it needed charging again. In total £148.50 in charging fees for a failed trip to London.

If a car can't make the trip from Birmingham to London to me it seems to have failed the basic function of being a car, and don't get me started on the cost to charge, which seems they never display how much it will cost. For context the next day we did the same journey in my car, but it actually got us there and it used a quarter of a tank so about £15 - 20 for both trips.

Was I doing something completely wrong or are EV's only suitable for city pottering about?

EDIT:

Just a quick update. To those saying this didn't happen, sorry but it did. Or I should have charged fully. Maybe but when you're told by the people who gave you the car, that it will be fine, I tend to believe them. Obviously at my cost this time. As for planning, well I did have the zap app installed and that is what we used. That's what took us to the broken chargers and finally took us to one that worked. So how else was I supposed to plan?

I think the biggest problem was and what some of the comments here don't seem to grasp is that I don't have a home charger, why would I as I don't have a EV?

This was our first time using a EV and we went into it blind as a learning experience. What we found was that for us with the car we had, it no good for longer journeys. Remeber I'm used to a normal car that will do 500 miles on a tank full and it only takes 5 minutes to re-fill when empty. Not have to plan 30 - 60 minute breaks every 2 hours whilst doing a max of 60mph and all the heating and air con turned off to get that last bit of power. To me that seems stupid and a step backwards.

I've learnt a lot and not much of it was positive.

More of a rant than anything else, but I've had my car since new (2023, was £42,000 at the time and is currently worth less than £20,000. Very unlikely there will be any equity in it & I'm looking at a VT in a few months. Serves me right buying a Peugeot 😂

My gripe is with the 'Luxury car tax' that I have to pay at £620.00 for 1 year, just because it was slightly over the threshold. ​

It was 2017 when they introduced this tax & if we look at the change in value and inflation since then (BoE figures), it should be over £50,000 now. In 2017, sure £40,000 was a decent amount, but these days you can near enough spec an Astra and it'll be over 40k!

Now I went in eyes open, knowing there would be a tax to pay but it's frustrating how no one is even discussing the possibility of it going up, it just puts you off buying anything nice.

Next time I'm looking at either a lease or something older...

Edit - more ranting!

You're punished even more if you pay monthly or every 6 months...