Driving CAN be fun!

Fresh from my bollocking for using the DVLA logo, here's another of my sporadic posts, only this time, it's not through laziness or having nothing remotely decent to write about.

In fact, I haven't been able to get rid of this massive grin on my face for more than a week now.

You see, driving is not fun any more. Rather than the freedom of the open road and spectacular scenery, driving in the UK is, quite plainly, crap.

Congestion, speed cameras, sleeping policemen, bleeping arcade machines at motorway services, road works, traffic wardens, environmentalists, BMW 3-series drivers, traffic lights, highways officers, pointless lane closures, stupid one-way systems, toll roads, government "think-tanks" and a plethora of quangos all conspire to make travelling from A-B as difficult and as hellish as possible.

But there are a few places where you can actually enjoy driving in the UK, and I happened to find one such place last week.

As a belated birthday present, I took to the track at Silverstone for one of those "driving experiences" that you often see advertised in the Boots Christmas catalogue, only they're usually at some decommissioned airfield, not the home of the British Grand Prix.

I quite fancied taking my own motor around there but unfortunately, my insurance company wouldn't let me unless I gave them a big bag of money, so I had to make do with what those chaps at Silverstone offered me:

That happens to be a Lotus Exige S - the S stands for supercharged which evidently turns a very fast car into a very, very fast car.

Still after I'd done with that, they decided to let me lose in one of these:

That is a Ferrari 360 Modena and is, quite simply, outstanding. If you're the sort of bloke that watches Top Gear, you might think that much of the speed is exaggerated by the cameras / editors but it certainly doesn't feel like it when you're behind the wheel of one of these 'supercars'.

Surprisingly, they were both very easy to drive. The difficulty comes in driving them quickly, which seems a silly thing to say but bear with me.

For most of us, the only time we've sat behind the wheel of a car is on a public road. Your head tells you that if you don't slow down for the upcoming corner then you'll end up in the ditch opposite or that if you vear to the opposite side of the road, you'll be taken out by a articulated truck heading in the opposite direction.

It's that mindset and the theory of racing lines anddriving quickly that's the difficult part and there's a hell of a lot more to it than what your Max Power Saxo-driving boy racers certainly think. It was easy reaching 132mph on the Hangar Straight, it wasn't so easy going around the tight right-hand corner at the end of it at 50mph+.

I must give massive credit to the guys at Silverstone who were fantastic and for anyone even considering something like this, then I would fully recommend it. I'm seriously looking at my next free weekend to sign onto the rally driving course and even that may not be my last one!

That depends who you are asking

It's that time of year once again. Time for the car insurance renewal.








Unfortunately, as a sub-23-year old single male, I'm public enemy number one in the eyes of the motor insurance industry as so finding an insurer that will actually honour their advertising claims of "cheap" car insurance is a nigh-on futile task, even with four years without claiming.

But nevertheless, the law requires me to pay for a piece of paper which only has any value in a moment of crass stupidity on my part.

As you can imagine, I'm subject to all the "young driver excesses" that any insurance company feels free to make up on the spot which makes claiming anything a completely pointless exercise. If I do claim, I have to pay the bulk of the costs out of my own pocket anyway and I'll be forced to pay for the rest next year by way of an increased premium. It's a sort of legalised blackmail that works very well in the insurance industry.

But anyway, the renewal note came through with a revised premium of around £381, which wasn't all that bad and around £80 less than last year.

Now in the past as this point, you would go to your local broker and accept any randomly generated number as "his best possible price that he could do if you bought today" or spend a whole afternoon phoning every listing in the Yellow Pages for numbers even more random that you'd be better off asking your newsagent for a 'Luck Dip'.

But the Internet is now here and thanks to other random number generators like Confused and Money Supermarket, I can do it all in one go and, if I'm lucky, pay a hidden middle-man affiliate fee that nobody cares to mention.

A search on both sides revealed a "best price" that was about the same as the renewal but did miss off a few insurers who don't want to be associated with these comparison sites, so I tried those.

One site offered me a "special online price with 10% online discount" of £568, so they were quickly discarded. Another site, who promised to "beat your renewal quote if you have 4 years NCB, even if you aren't very posh" didn't beat my renewal quote. Instead, the tried to triple it.

Resigned to defeat, I tried an online quote with my current insurer and sure enough, I was quoted the "brand new customers only" price of £331. Knowing that I'd have to change the occupation listed on my current documents anyway, I phoned said insurer.

Now I would think that changing my occupation from "care-free, careless student" to "upstanding professional" would have seen a welcome drop, not a £16 increase and so before I knew it, I was passed onto the "Internet quote team" to get the "brand new customers only, but also existing customers if you ask nicely" price.

The annoying thing though, is that for all these various names in the motor insurance industry, they are, on the whole, the same company. Three insurers I obtained quotes from (including the one I went with), were all the same insurer once you get past the marketing yet offered three prices ranging from £331 to nigh-on £1000. For others, the difference was even greater and those that claim to "specialise in younger drivers" were amongst the worst of the bunch.

Never mind eh, there's always next year.

Welcome to America

The United States of America: Land of democracy, choice and freedom of expression.








That is of course, provided that you aren't a homosexual democrat living in Alabama who isn't partial to Country & Western or Nascar, as proved by the BBC's brilliant Top Gear programme.



Now for a bit of partiality, Jeremy Clarkson is to Anglo-American relations what Margret Thatcher was to trade unions. The programme has told us time and time again that the Americans can't build cars. They can't go around corners, they have stupid buttons in stupid places and their interiors are made of of plastic thinner than tissue paper.
Add to that the multitude of jokes about fat people and gun-wielding manics, and you can see that Clarkson and Co are hardly the greatest diplomats.

So when they drive around the deep south with $1000 cars emblazoned with offensive slogans, they got exactly the reaction they wanted. They made the locals look like the inbred, small minded fools that so many movies portray them to be and the producers made a very good programme whilst doing it.

Sunday's episode was perhaps the funniest Top Gear ever broadcast. The programme is often criticsed from various quarters, those who complain they only show an interest in £120,000+ super cars, the tree huggers who dislike anything more technologically advanced than an Amish butter churner and those who claim the show is obsessed with speed, concerns that reared their head again after presenter Richard Hammonds miraculous escape from a 280mph crash in York.

For 50 minutes, the show was basically three lads mucking about with cars and having a good laugh, which is probably the main appeal of Top Gear. Yes it has a role as a consumer focused programme and does cover plenty of "normal" cars in it's programming, but it's that 'laddish' approach that makes the programme so original and is the very reason why 5-6m people watch it every week.

But despite the jokes and pranks, the drive through a completely destroyed New Orleans, fully 12 months after Katrina had blown though, saw the shows serious side and it was a fitting touch to give their cars away to the less fortunate.

Yes, the show has it's critics. The presenters might prefer to test drive an Aston Martin rather than a Hyundai Accent, yes they might not like speed cameras but it's still a thoroughly enjoyable programme and long may it continue.

Let's have a debate

Transport Minister Douglas Alexander has today decided that we need a 'debate' on the proposed idea of road charging.




The idea is simple: Every car in the UK will have a tracking device. It will know what roads you drive on, when you drive on them and, it will know how fast you are going.
You are then sent a bill every month based on the mileage you do in that month. The 'clever' bit though is that you will pay more per mile for using congested roads at congested times. Drive down a country lane a 2:00am on Sunday morning and you'll pay about 4 pence a mile. Drive on the M621 at 8:30am on Monday morning and you'll pay £1.40 for sitting in traffic.

OK it's not a simple idea at all, it's a stupidly complicated idea and most of the revenue will be lost in administration costs, but our glorious leaders think that it will cut congestion and fix the hole in the o-zone layer.

Now quite what Douglas Alexander thinks he'll achieve by having this 'debate' I'm not entirely sure. Call me naive, I'd say that having more than one million signatures on a Downing Street petition against the idea is probably enough to gauge public opinion.

You could argue that the whole idea is a non-issue anyway. I mean with 14m motorists in the UK, no political party in their right mind would alienate about 50% of the electorate. That assumes our political party leaders are in a fit state of mind however.

Road charging isn't that uncommon already. Most major river crossings are now toll roads, the imaginatively named M6Toll is one as is all of Central London. We've got two in Yorkshire, the well-known Humber Bridge, which costs £2.60 to use, and the not very well known Aldwark Bridge, which costs bugger all because nobody knows where Aldwark is.

The most likely way of charging motorists to use the roads will eventually be congestion charges like those in London and Leeds has got that covered as well, or at least, we used to.

As part of the "Supertram deal", Leeds put itself forward to pilot the trial for congestion charges. As a result cameras and detecting equipment was erected on all major routes in South Leeds, tracking every number plate that entered the city with volunteer vehicles also having RFID sensors fitted in them.
Whilst it was merely a trail, HM tax collector could easily start sending out bills to West Yorkshire's motorists, just with the flick of a switch.
Anyway, when the Supertram idea was chucked in the waste paper bin and when the council realised that about £45m had been wasted, the cameras came down in a defiant two-fingered salute back to Westminster.

Of course, I could all go on about how road charging wouldn't be so bad if we all had an alternative to driving but I don't want to be responsible for blocking the blogger server.