Don't claim glass chips on your insurance.

A lot of car dealers and glass chip repair shops will claim that they do free repairs as long as they can bill your insurance. Don't do it. Ask them how much it would be for you out-of-pocket first. Typically it will be something like $20 or £15 for the repair but if you let them do it 'free' and charge your insurance, guess how much the bill is? Most US shops will bill your insurance $120 for a $20 repair. Whilst its filed as a no-fault claim, it is still a claim and it can and will be factored in to your premium at the next renewal. If you have any morale fibre, you'll also realise that that is insurance fraud, although most people choose not to think of it like that. Apart from that, glass chips is not what insurance is for. You should always cover small things like that yourself. It's why you have a deductible on the policy. One other point - now it's properly winter, if you do have a decent sized chip in your windscreen, do go and get it fixed. Winter is the best time for cracked windscreens. Water gets into the chips and then freezes, expanding, and stressing the windscreen. Well - have a Merry Christmas at the end of the week. Next week's entry will probably be automated as I'll still be in a turkey-induced torpor.

Full beams are not a substitute for a blown bulb

Public service announcement : if you have a blown headlight bulb, change it. Using your full beams and fog lights is not a substitute. Replacement bulbs are cheap and it'll take you seconds to do it. Now we're all commuting in the dark every morning and evening, this is particularly irksome. Drivers who could care less about their car, bumble along on autopilot blinding everyone in front of them because they're too bloody lazy to spend less than a tenner to fix a problem on their cars. If I was a police officer I'd pull everyone of these goons over and ticket them. Why? Because driving on full beams in traffic is dangerous - it blinds everyone coming towards you, and anyone in front of you with a rearview mirror. I think the only thing that's worse is drivers with a blown bulb who don't drive on high beams, but also don't bother to fix the bulb. In the dark, it's now difficult to tell if you're looking at a car or a motorbike because there's only one headlight. Either way - don't be lazy. Just fix the damned thing. It's easy to do, just make sure you don't handle the new bulb with your bare hands - wear some cotton or rubber gloves. If you touch the glass on the bulb with your bare skin, the grease you leave behind will cause a hotspot and the bulb will crack and fail. The only exception to this is if you have HID lights - those are a lot pricier to fix because it means either a new arc discharge unit, new control unit, new ballast, or all of the above. But then you knew that when you paid an extra $1000 for them on the car when new, right?

Chevy's problems go from bad to worse with the Volt

Regular readers of my blog will no I'm no big fan of the Chevy Volt, right from the beginning when Chevy kept insisting it was an electric vehicle when it is, in fact, a Hybrid with very little difference (electro-mechanically speaking) from the Toyota Prius. They lied about the whole electric vehicle thing and now I wonder if they bit off more than they could chew. Toyota have been producing the Prius for ages and there are no worries about battery pack fires or leaks. The design is nearly a decade old now. Yet Chevy's all-new Volt has apparently got some design flaw in the battery pack that can allow it to catch fire after an impact. This hasn't happened just once - it's happened several times now and Chevy are so worried about it that two weeks ago they offered to provide free loaner vehicles to owners worried about the battery fire problem. Now they've stepped that up a notch and are offering to flat out buy back the cars from their owners.
So why the sudden change? Why would a company the size of Chevy, not famous for it's customer care, now be offering to buy back cars from owners? My guess - C.Y.A. I think they've discovered some sort of critical design flaw that they know is going to embroil them in a huge lawsuit and they're trying to limit the damage ahead of time by offering the buyback scheme.
Let's face it, GM doesn't have the best reputation with electric or hybrid vehicles, dating back to the whole EV1 fiasco where they forcibly cancelled leases, and literally stole the cars back from their owners to destroy them. If you're interested in that whole nauseating mess, Who Killed The Electric Car is a great documentary on that very topic.

Idiots who get what they deserve.

Happy Thanksgiving to all my American readers, and a short post this week with a treat. Two idiot Corvette owners, overflowing with testosterone, wrecking their cars because they don't know how to drive. Seriously - why do people buy overpowered monstrosities like this and then figure they can drive them simply because they own them? Any hugely powerful RWD like this should come with an training class for the new owners to teach them not to be dicks. Anyway, enjoy the specatular and totally predictable results of two idiots drag racing on a public street in cars they shouldn't have been allowed to own.

People afraid to overtake a police car.

The worst kind of driver is one who is afraid to overtake a police car. It's easy to spot them - they're the ones driving at the exact same speed as the police, but slightly behind them thus blocking all the traffic. Worst of all, if the police car is doing less than the speed limit, and everyone is afraid to pass it, then we're stuck with not only a roadblock, but a slow-moving roadblock at that.
Listen: the police aren't going to arrest you for overtaking them. Most cops are pretty reasonable. As long as you're not driving like a total dick, they won't stop you for doing 70mph on a 65mph freeway (in the US), or 80mph on a 70mph motorway (in England). Just get past them and get on with your journey.
It's always a source of amusement to me to do this because I'll end up on completely clear motorway, and in my mirrors I can see four or five lanes of heavy, clogged-up traffic all jostling for position because they're all afraid to pass the one police car on the inside lane.
This leads to another point of contention: when the police have someone stopped at the side of the road, don't slow down and look. Don't slow down because you're afraid they'll do you for speeding. They won't; they're already busy dealing with another driver. They're not looking at you. And you shouldn't be looking at them. You see cops all the time. Concentrate on driving, eyes forward and just keep going. Because once you turn to look, you'll slow down and then you'll cause a phantom traffic jam, which ultimately will result in an accident.

Forza 4

You'll know from previous posts that I was never a huge fan of Gran Turismo 5, with it's total lack of AI, it's lack of crash damage, its over-complicated interface and sketchy online play. In fact, after years of buying Gran Turismo games, GT5 did such a poor job that I went out and bought an X-Box so I could play Forza 3. Naturally that led to Forza 4 which came out about a month ago, and I've been in racing-driving-game heaven ever since. I adore Forza 4. The physics are great, the visuals are great, the online play is spot-on with the addition of public-private lobbies (where you can determine your own rules). I think all the cars have detailed interiors - at least all the ones I've driven so far have. The whole look and feel of the game is more polished and mature than Forza 3. It's a little disappointing that some of the best tracks (New York) have been removed but I suspect they'll appear as a DLC pack later on. Oddly, some of the older tracks that have long since undergone major revisions in the real world (Silverstone for example) are still represented in their mid-90's layout in Forza 4. That's a bit of an oversight for a game that is so polished in so many other areas. For the same of trying to get over the honeymoon period, I went back and rented a copy of Gran Turismo 5, downloaded all the updates and spent a day trying to play it again. I stick by my original opinions on that one - nice idea but poorly executed. It's just too perfect - it's a great simulation but it's just no fun to play or look at. So back to Forza 4 it is. I can highly recommend it if you're in the market for a top-tier racing game. I'm hoping to get a wheel for Christmas so I can explore it to it's fullest. For now though you'll find me in the online hoppers racing mostly A- and B-class. Look for gamertag biggerPixel - that's me.