First Vehicle Leasing – Official Blog

I have a grudge against Milton Keynes.

It’s not a very big grudge but it is something I need to get off my chest and now looks like a good time for it to happen.

The reason why the fabled new town in Buckinghamshire came to my mind today is that some research has come out saying that cars there have more chance of having problems with their MoTs. I’ll come back to that in a minute but first I really need to tell you about my grudge.

I once got sent there from my work to carry out some training courses. I drove down from Birmingham Airport on a lovely sunny day. The motorway section of the trip was fine and with the radio pumping out some classic rock life was good. Until I reached Milton Keynes.

I am guessing here that I am not the only person who has spent hours driving aimlessly round the place trying to find somewhere. It really is the most confusing city around and I reckon that I would have found my destination easier in Shanghai or Phnom Penh then in good old MK.

A Clamped Car

My troubles didn’t end there though, did they? After I had rushed through my usual slip shod training course I tried to sneak out at 4pm to enjoy the dining and exercise facilities of the hotel I was staying in. Sadly someone had put a wheel clamp on the hire car I had left in the staff car park.

After asking around I found out that it was the centre manager who had done this because they “didn’t know who it belonged to”. Eh? They have one single visitor in the entire office who logged into the guest book with a car registration number and they didn’t know who the hire car in the car park with the same registration number belonged to? How did they think I had got down from Scotland to Milton Keynes in the first place? Teletransportation?

Anyway, it seems that if you live in MK you are more likely to have your car fail its MOT. So some sort of justice does exist then.

I can proudly say that I have never knowingly jumped a red light in my life. I may have skipped through a few when I didn’t even notice the traffic lights but I don’t believe that makes me a bad person.

Now a piece of research has been released which suggests that a lot of the nation’s cyclists are secret red light jumpers.

The investigation was carried out by the Institute of Advanced Motorcyclists. The headline figure is that 57% of cyclists say that they have passed a red light at least once, while 14% admit to doing this on a regular basis.

1600 people were questioned in the survey and there were some interesting figures which came out following this. Most curious is that in London there are some statistics for red jumping leading to accidents.

It seems that 71% of red light accidents are caused by cars, 13% by motorbikes and just 4% by bikes. It would be interesting to compare the number of people who pass red lights in cars with those who did in on their bikes.

Is It a Big Problem?

I drove abroad for a while and I can confirm that in some countries just about every single motorbike and bike will pass every red light they see as though it was a simply of figment of everyone else’s imagination. Of course, many cars do this in some places as well but I think that it is clear the that UK’s strict laws and CCTV monitoring (among other things) mean that red light jumping is nowhere near as big a problem here as it is in other places.

The problem with this is that you don’t expect it to happen and when it does you are taken by surprise. Let’s hope that car drivers, motorcyclist and bikers all stick to the rules and wait for the lights to change in the future.

Is your house in the countryside? And do you have to take your kids to school every morning, through puddles and ditches? But do you think a Land or Range Rover is for the proletariat?

Then you’ll be happy to learn Lamborghini is working on a solution for you. Their new Urus SUV is going to be a king among mastodons, set to storm the market in 2017 at the soonest. Current consensus is that the sporty tank is going to be powered by a twin-turbo V8, for the simple reason that that takes up less space than the well-known Lambo V10. Funny, feeling the urge to be conservative with space in a humongous SUV.

Particularly because the Urus is going to be sharing its platform – given all of these brands belong to VW AG – with the VW Touareg, Audi Q7, Porsche Cayenne, as well as the new Bentley SUV and some of these aren’t exactly ‘motorically’ disabled (6.0 W12, 5.0 V10 TDI anyone?). On the other hand, the Italian daughters of the Germans have a design philosophy that commands them to make things lighter, seeking better and faster not in bigger engines, but in lower weight. Opting for a V8 with a bunch of bolt-on turbochargers is a lighter solution in itself, but also suggests the Urus will be less obese as a whole, and needing less propulsion as a result.

And that seems to become truth indeed, provided VW AG gives the green light, as the Urus is going to be the most petite of all its brothers and sisters, with ‘only’ 1,800 kilos. That’s what you call a light tank.

If, like me, you’re wondering what the hell the point is of overpowered tanks that can go off-road but will never actually do so: it’s a market with the biggest potential for growth, according to Lambo CEO Stephan Winkelmann, and the Urus is set to double their sales figures. Most of these buggers will be offset in emerging markets, to nouveau riche with a lot of money. Reason enough.

But doubling sales figures is ambitious, considering the Italians sold a total of 1,600 cars, Aventadors and Gallardos, in 2011.

What do you think of the plan to increase the motorway speed limit to 80mph?

Maybe you already do 80mph or – gasp –more on a regular basis. If this is the case then you will want to see what the people at the Road Safety Foundation have to say on the matter.

The official word after an inspection of all 4,350 miles of motorway network in England is that it is “unsuitable” for an 80 mph limit. It seems that only half of the network has crash barriers which can be regarded as being of the standard necessary to protect drivers who lose control. There are also problems it seems with too many trees being too close to the motorway lanes.

Strangely, crash barriers and trees are among the things I never look at while I am driving on the motorway (my own reflection in the rear view mirror and my feet are a couple of the others). However, I am going to take the Road Safety Foundation investigation as being proof that we are lacking in crash barriers but overly endowed with trees along the nation’s motorways.

Does It Make a Difference?

Having said that, aren’t these crash barriers also a tiny bit important at 70 mph as well? I am not really sure that a difference of 10 mph is enough to make a huge difference when your car hurtles off the road and smacks into a crash barrier. It seems that some of the crash barriers have been left unrepaired following old accidents.

The idea of the rise in the speed limit comes with the theory that cars are now safer than ever before. This is something you won’t find me arguing with but the safety levels of the motorways themselves clearly need to be taken into account as well.

The president of the AA is called Edmund King and he said that “some stretches of motorway” are better suited to an 80 mph limit than others.

No, an F30 is not a baby brother of the Ferrari F40 and F50. It’s a BMW.

It’s like this. BMW has been giving the cars in its model portfolio standardised names so customers and drivers can easily recognise their segmentation. For a long time BMW offered a 3-Series, a 5-Series and a 7-Series. Nowadays there are 1-Series and 6-Series as well, as well as a bunch of terrain and sporty variations on these. Where other carmakers have made use of the term ‘Mark’ or ‘Mk’ to designate generations of a model, BMW has used E-codes for decades.

BMW is now at the sixth generation of the 3-Series and has consecutively gone through the E21, E30, E36, E46 and E90 since the introduction of the first ‘Dreier’ in 1975. Other models have used a lot of the numbers  in between and it seems they now ran out of E-numbers. The new 5-Series is the F10, the new 1-Series the F20 and, you’ve guessed it, the new 3-Series is the F30. The sixth generation of the BMW 3-Series was launched as a saloon earlier this year. I’m a great admirer of its looks, but I’ve spilled tears about the loss of the six-cylinder engine in the 328i.

I’ll repeat myself, at the expense of sounding fanatic and conservative: a proper BMW should be fitted with a straight six. The sexy-sounding and smooth-running engines have been a part of BMW heritage for ages and have been continually developed to become a sublime product and a joy for those motorists fortunate to run one. Unfortunately they spit out too much CO2 for EU standards and so they’re a dying breed, excepting in the top-of-the-food-chain motorisations of BMW’s line-up.

Anyway, I will not bore you further with my sadness and pain. I wanted to share some good news about the F30 instead: it was given some firm hindquarters. In other words, BMW has announced the coming of the Touring – that’s BMW-speak for wagon or station. They are some nice buttocks as well! Dads married to mums that demand space and volume for diaper transportation purposes will be pleased they can soon resort to the sporty brand from Bavaria again. In fact, with 495 litres it’s a bit bigger than its competitors with the four rings and the star.

The F30 Touring will be introduced in September, at which time customers will have a pick from three engines, one gasoline and two diesels: the 328i, 320d and 330d respectively.

Only the latter is a six cylinder, but unfortunately it’s a diesel. A smooth ‘sixy’ petrol version is not in the pipeline yet.

Perhaps you caught this in automotive news recently: General Motors and PSA, the company that supplies the world with Peugeots and Citroens, have announced a serious collaboration.

You’re not paying close attention if you haven’t noticed yet: carmakers globally, except perhaps in China, have been going through hard times. In the US the market is slowly picking up again, but Europe currently is the world’s weakest car market. Demand seems to have found a new balance at lower volumes, while the industry sees their reduced sales combined with large overcapacity in their plants. Consequently the word is that there are more manufacturers than the market has room for.

The automotive industry is already a hugely consolidated industry; brands which you may think to have an own identity are in fact part of a large portfolio of brands run by a big mummy-company. Just think of Volkswagen (VW, Audi, Skoda, Seat, Lamborghini, Bugatti, Porsche, Bentley and, outside of passenger cars, also Scania and Ducati), General Motors (Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, Corvette, GMC, Holden and Opel/Vauxhall) and Renault-Nissan (Renault, Nissan, Infiniti, Renault Samsung, Dacia and Lada) and you’ve got some of the most extreme examples of this. Now it seems further consolidation is the only way to go for some of the financially challenged European producers and that’s precisely why PSA and GM in Europe have decided to join forces.

Mind you, they’re not joining up into one company, but they have agreed to collaborate in key areas, meaning they’ll share platforms and engineering, and now, as yesterday’s news revealed, also production. The new Citroen C5, which is still a long time ahead of release – 2016 is mentioned – is apparently going to be built in an Opel factory. At the basis of that decision is the agreement that the PSA and GM mid-range models, the C5, 508 and Insignia, are all going to share the same GM platform in the future.

At the same time the two groups’ smaller cars, like the Corsa, C3 and 208 are going to make use of PSA technology. Cars will more and more be like sneakers. Different styling, but underneath it’s all the same. I find that a pity, as brands lose character and become boring uniformity.

Particularly, although it already wasn’t very prevalent in Citroen’s most recent models anymore, that lovely rolling French suspension will definitely be out the window.