Maintaining your car

How to perform simple tyre care

Child inspecting tyre© Falken

While the overall number of road accidents is falling, tyre-related crashes are on the up. Tyre industry experts agree that an important contributor is the lack of maintenance by drivers. Spot checks show the vast majority of tyres are under-inflated by around 15 to 20 per cent. According to tyre giant Continental, this can reduce a tyre’s life by a quarter and increase fuel consumption by 5 per cent. Yet tyre maintenance is remarkably simple and tyres that are correctly inflated are less susceptible to punctures and give improved handling and road holding. Here are some top tips from Steve Howat, general manager for technical services at Continental, on how to look after your car’s tyres.

Buy a tyre pressure gauge

Continue reading →

James Foxall Leave a comment

Performance ‘chips’ for cars: are they worth it?

Superchips performance graph© Superchips

Gone are the days of taking an engine to pieces and tinkering with oily bits of metal to extract more performance. Now a wide number of specialist companies can reprogram your engine’s Electronic Control Unit. It’s a process commonly known as ‘chipping’. And companies that do it frequently claim the procedure can result in improved performance, with as much as 30 per cent more power and 10 per cent more fuel economy. It typically costs around £200, but is it money well spent?

How it works

Continue reading →

James Foxall 1 Comment

How to wash Sahara dust off your car

Cleaning carpandara / Shutterstock

Getting rid of the Saharan dust that periodically blows up from Africa is vital to the future value of your car.

Dust is bad news for a car’s paintwork. Not only does it dull the finish of your once immaculate motor, it can also be very abrasive, causing millions of minute scratches to the surface it’s sitting on. And the duller and less appealing a car’s bodywork is, the less it will be worth when it’s time to sell it.

Cleaning a car involves slightly more than giving it a wipe over with a wet rag. We’ve taken advice from car care experts Autoglym to give you four simple steps that will enable you to return your dust-covered paintwork to its former glory…

Step 1: the first rinse

Continue reading →

James Foxall Leave a comment

Home checks to help pass the annual MOT test

Exhaust MoT failureLike a check-up at the dentist, your car’s annual MOT test comes round quicker than you expect and can be a painful experience. It can also be more expensive than many drivers anticipate.

Last year, a staggering 40 per cent of the 26.9m cars that took the annual MOT failed. That’s more than 10 million vehicles. Of those, more than 3.5m were pulled up for having dodgy lights, something that could easily have been checked by owners before the test.

Here are the most common reasons for MOT failure (in 2012/2103) and a guide to carrying out your own pre-MOT test to minimise the chances, aggravation and cost of flunking.

Lighting and signalling: 18.7% of fails

Continue reading →

James Foxall 3 Comments