m4rkw

Hi Adrian

If the steering wheel is off to the left the car will indeed veer to the left. This is normal. Most roads have camber such that the highest point is the centre of the road so the car will naturally drift left and you may find the steering wheel needs to be held slightly to the right in order to drive in a straight line. This is also normal.

Mark

You're right it's not a huge difference

• -5.9% in wet braking
• -3.7% in wet handling (average speed)
• -0.8% in wet circle
• -0.9% in straight aquaplaning
• -17.4% in curve aquaplaning

The Michelins are better in the dry but again not by a lot. They do wear 20% faster though apparently. I got about 45k miles out of my 4season gen2's and they're still on 3mm of tread.

Source: https://toptirereview.com/goodyear-vector-4seasons-gen-3-vs-michelin-cross-climate-2/

Ethanol carries 33% less energy than petrol so you'll lose 3.3% of mileage compared to E0 fuel. The difference between E5 and E10 should be about half that, so I guess around 1.65%?

I'm unconvinced of the environmental benefits since cars will just burn more fuel to compensate for the energy loss.

I'd be surprised if it was a programmable option because there's no inconvenience at all in having it activate from 20mph so there's no reason anyone would choose for it to only engage from 30 if it could engage from 20.

Ehhh spoke too soon. The Michelins apparently do much worse in the wet than the Goodyears, their only real advantage is snow grip which is a tiny fraction of their overall usage. So I guess I'll stick with the Goodyears even though they're £25 a corner more. 

Something similar happened near where I live in Morden - the limit on the A298 (a two-lane dual carriageway) was dropped from 40 to 20mph sometime within the last year. It felt very silly at the time because nobody was adhering to the new limit, minimum speed driven there was 30 and most people just carried on driving at 40. It didn't feel appropriate, but I suspect the intention was emissions rather than safety as there are a lot of houses along that road. I don't know when or why but it was then revised to 30 a month or two ago.

I don't know what the emissions difference is between 20 and 30 but it may be significant, if you lived near such a road with young children (and especially if you didn't drive) you'd probably be strongly in favour of a lower limit.

A code-reader may give a clue as to what's wrong, failing that I'd suggest taking it somewhere for diagnostics even if you plan to fix it yourself.

I always just get the bog-standard Bosch wipers from Halfords and haven't experienced any noise.

Seasons greetings all!

On holiday in Scotland and suffered a puncture, nail in the tyre so no chance of a repair. I've been a fan of Goodyear tyres for a long time but they suffer from one critical issue - tyre places don't tend to keep them in stock. Luckily I was able to find a local garage that had them in the right size for fitting the next day - I got very lucky. All the big tyre places didn't have them.

While getting it fitted the guy mentioned that my fronts were a bit low on tread, so I've arranged to get new fronts as well before driving home. Going with Michelins this time as they seem to be more readily available should something like this happen again. I think this will now be the primary factor I use when choosing tyres. Also these CrossClimate 2's were rated best all-season tyres of 2022 so probably pretty decent as well.

All the best,
Mark

On 12/11/2022 at 10:52 PM, Hughyosifov said:

Drove it to lexus shop and the guy said that its the bolts that holds the dash to the frame has to be insulated and they need to take the whole dash out in order to do that. The price for the job was pretty heavy so i am wondering if somebody had the same problem and eventually how did they fix it? Is there any shortcuts or cheaper way. Thanks in advance

Will they guarantee that this work will resolve the problem? If so then they're probably correct that that's where the noise is coming from. If not then it could be elsewhere.

Not sure whether I'm just not old enough yet but at 39 and wearing contact lens I actually find driving at night much less stressful. Changing lanes on the motorway is much easier at night because headlights make cars in the lanes next to you more visible, and in general there's a lot less traffic at night.

Definitely skip. I paid £78 for a regas at Toyotec which includes the decontamination of the system.

I would recommend taking it to a trusted technician and ask them to diagnose the problem. Even if you end up fixing it yourself, it doesn't pay to guess with cars because you'll run out of money before you run out of guesses.

The system is supposed to be serviced and cleaned every 2 years but people rarely bother until something stops working.

When I've run quotes in the past the voluntary excess didn't make much difference to the cost of the policy.

28 minutes ago, Haylands said:

What's the point of fully comp insurance if you are not going to claim...??

Depends on the circumstances and like you say whether the car is worth anything

Two panels undented and sprayed for cash is ballpark £500 I reckon, depreciation due to the cat marker plus insurance excess and possibility of a higher premium I would guess would be more than that but who knows.

Then again I banged the rear of mine once being stupid at a petrol station with music up too loud and just got it fixed for cash and it's obvious looking at it that it's been repainted. I don't really care though 🙂

I definitely won't buy another car with a moon roof, completely pointless. The times it can actually be used are few and far between, adds a ton of weight, prevents the use of roof bars and load carrying on the roof.

That sucks though, any CCTV around so you can try to catch the scrote?

Looks like just scratches and a small dent? I don't think I'd have bothered claiming for that

2 hours ago, b4u2 said:

amazing how some japanese cars just seem to go on and on like last forever.

This. My car had no service history at all when I got it, and I remember laughing when Louis told me that if I did the maintenance I'd get tired of looking at it before I had a major problem. Four and a half years later I'm starting to see what he meant, there's no way I can justify spending money on a new car when this one is so good and so reliable but worth next to nothing second hand.

I did some more reading and I think it's a fundamental limitation of FM itself

TBH this is all academic really, it would take a lot to make me part with my RX. Even if the transmission failed I'd probably just fix it rather than change car.

15 minutes ago, DavidCM said:

Try a Mazda 6 estate.

Cheers I'll look at them.

48 minutes ago, Spottedlaurel said:

This one is a 2014, would it be OK for you? Cheap tax apparently, and quite nice spec with leather and Alcantara (the one thing I did like about my petrol version): https://www.autotrader.co.uk/car-details/202207017359569

The reason for 2015+ is diesels have to be euro6 for the ULEZ which is likely going to spread to my area at some point.