Remember how I bought a car for £250? Here’s the next update!
I made these cup holders by recycling some cylindrical containers (they used to have Timmy’s Pro Fibre supplement in), which I painted gold:
Once they’re finished I’m going to drill holes in the plastic around the dashboard and screw them to it with small screws. No car should be without cupholders in this day and age, and mine has literally none!
I was left stunned after former Top Gear presenters, Clarkson Hammond and May’s new car show came out today. The first episode of their new show, called ‘The Grand Tour’ (I saw what you did with the title, Jeremy Clarkson), made its debut on Amazon Prime today. We took out a free trial of Prime (get yours here) to see how good it was.
Here’s the (spoiler free) as-it-happened review and commentary of my unfiltered but occasionally sarcastic thoughts on how this first episode of The Grand Tour went (and because I don’t work for a nameless TV show, I even mention the words ‘top’ and ‘gear’):
Final comments: I really liked The Grand Tour. I think this will be my new favourite car show. I particularly liked the presenters, the cars, the settings, the lighting, the humour, the international focus, the races and all the stunning visuals and incidental music. It’s better than any car show I have previously watched, and I have watched a lot of car shows because as you know, I am passionate about cars (I even owned one once or twice!!!!!).
What did you think? Have you seen The Grand Tour yet? Are you going to? I am so excited to see more of this show, I can’t wait!
I spotted a point on my map* that said “Blackadder” near the Whiteadder river, so I went on another adventure in my car because I had to see this for myself. It was 2012 and I was on my way back from Edinburgh heading south.
Being, of course, a huge fan of Rowan Atkinson and Tony Robinson’s comedy show “Blackadder” I had to take a detour and see for myself that this was a real place. I wanted a photo of the sign that said “Welcome to Blackadder.”
I followed the route on the map (see also, my article on how to buy a good road atlas) until I reached the Whiteadder River, along with a signpost for the village of Whiteadder.
After driving around the open farmland of Northumberland for an hour, I spotted this handwritten signpost that said Blackadder Mains is this way (in Scots English, “Mains” isn’t part of the town/village name, it’s a short way of saying “town center” or “village center”). I was hopeful that there’d be some shops or whatnot that I could photograph, along with the “Welcome To Blackadder” sign I wanted to see.
I turned down the road thinking it must be past the two farm buildings I could see. Wrong. Turns out, despite what the mapmakers must have found hilariously funny, Blackadder isn’t really a village. It’s a hamlet at best, but probably actually a farm. There were a couple of buildings side by side and that was it. One of the buildings was a barn. The best part? When I stopped to take a picture, I discovered that visitors to Blackadder are so rare that the people here came out of their buildings to demand to know what I was doing. And asked me to leave before I could get a photo. There was definitely not a sign saying “Welcome to Blackadder.”
So the moral of the story is that maps are not better than Sat-Nav, despite what techno-luddites (usually trying to look good in front of old people) might tell you, they have their flaws. One of them being that generally the cartographers haven’t visited every place on the map and can’t always guarantee that the information is correct. I would imagine that Blackadder is only marked on the map because otherwise there would have been a big empty space, and mapmakers detest empty spaces on maps, they don’t want people thinking they didn’t do their job properly. Google maps, on the other hand, offers you a satellite view of your destination so you can check that you’re really going where you think you are going, and if you’ve got half a brain you’re not going to mindlessly follow the “turn left” instructions on a sat-nav any more than you would with a paper map. Maps can be useful, but sat-nav is more helpful.
I also don’t think places should have signs saying “Mains” if they don’t have at least one shop (or, y’know, three houses) because it’s misleading. Maybe that’s why the sign was written in marker pen. What it probably should have said was “Blackadder Farm.” At the end of the day, however, it’s sort of funny that this is the place that bears the same name as the scheming weasel of a man from the popular comedy series.
If you want to visit a nice place in this area, go to Berwick Upon Tweed. They have petrol stations and other modern conveniences such as shops that are closed on a Sunday and closed after 5 on a weekday, and they also have car parking. There is a nice river and they’re not too far from Lindisfarne (which I will write about soon) which is a great day out in and of itself.
*A map is a piece of paper that behaves like the screen of a Sat-Nav. For advice on choosing sheet maps, check out this article
This is a review of We Buy Any Car, discussing why I sold one car privately and scrapped the other car after trying to use We Buy Any Car.
I am writing this on my website because We Buy Any Car has fiddled it so that you have to post an invoice number to review them on Trustpilot (the allegedly trustworthy review site). Of course the problem with that is that only the people who will actually agree that the service was OK enough for them to sell their car are people who will get an invoice number.
Basically, We Buy Any Car is a car-buying website with aggressive advertising and tactics which claims to to buy your car regardless of the condition it is in. Obviously we all know they’re going to give you a price below market value, this review isn’t so much concerned with that as HOW they arrive at it and the lack of transparency, coupled with the fact they’re fiddling their reviews to make themselves look good. I tried to use them in 2014 and again last summer and both times I found their whole set-up to be absolutely shocking.
Firstly there’s the fact they claim they guarantee to honour the price they quoted, if the car is in the condition you say it is. Of course, when the guy actually inspects your car, he makes up a bunch of crap that’s allegedly wrong with your car that is untrue, so you can either accept a vastly lowered price (after being promised a quick and easy sale) or have to advertise your car privately.
My 2006 VW Golf was originally valued by We Buy Any Car at £1850. In late 2014, £1850 was about 60% of the market value of my car, but I wanted a quick sale so thought I’d take that. Despite being female I’m not an idiot when it comes to cars, and I knew full well that my car was worth over £2000 so £1850 was pretty much as low as I was prepared to go but I was lured in by their promises of a quick easy hassle free sale (all lies). When it came to it, We Buy Any Car weren’t actually worth the time of day because, despite claiming they won’t haggle over the price, they really, really were doing and it wasted half a day of my life plus the time online in the first place and the fact I had to wait a week to even get that far because they were fully booked. That’s a week I could have been selling my car. If I hadn’t been 100% confident in my self-defence abilities, I could easily have felt intimidated enough by the way they were treating me to accept their offer (they were being very intimidating with the way they spoke to me and were trying to make me feel like I didn’t know my own car).
An example of the things they found “wrong” with my VW Golf:
1. The man was sitting in my car on a blazing hot summer’s day, running my engine and wasting my petrol, so he could sit in front of my air conditioning for over 40 minutes and cover my driver seat in disgusting sweat, while someone on the phone was telling me that my car didn’t have air conditioning.
2. They found scratches and dents on the car that didn’t exist. For example, on the driver door they claimed there was a scratch when it was actually a smudge from the man’s own dirty fingers.
3. The “it’s time for a service” light was on. I had disclosed this. They said this meant the car had an imminent engine failure. It actually means that the car needed its annual service. The picture of the engine, of course, being the “engine failure” light, not the picture of the spanner. Despite the fact I had disclosed this, they decided to further reduce the price because of it.
4. They said my car hadn’t had a cam-belt change, despite the fact I was waving the receipt for it in their faces the entire time and it was also written into the service book for 80,000 miles (which is early on a Golf), having just hit 100,000 miles (hence the picture of the spanner).
5. They said I hadn’t disclosed the one piece of damage to the car, despite the fact that I’d printed out the form I’d filled in and could clearly prove that I had, in fact, disclosed that dent. Then they said that the dent meant the car needed a total respray and used it to further reduce the price.
They amended their quote to £1050, but because I stood my ground and argued with them for over half an hour, I got it up to £1675, proving how little confidence they really had in the “issues” they found with my car. I walked away from that “deal” and sold my car privately, so I don’t have an invoice number for We Buy Any Car, so I can’t add my review to Trustpilot. While measures like this are intended to prevent spammers and fake reviews, all it’s doing in the case of We Buy Any Car is skewing the reviews so that nobody gets to hear the bad stuff. I just reviewed my car insurance on Trustpilot and they didn’t want an invoice number (or other proof) for that. In the end, I got £2000 for my VW Golf from a private buyer via Gumtree, which produced a lot of time wasters but did get my car sold quickly. If I’d held out for full market value, I think I would have got it but I was in a hurry to get the car off my driveway so I could park my new one.
The second time I dealt with We Buy Any Car, they actually refused to buy my 2004 Citroen Xsara Picasso just before Christmas, no reason given. It didn’t start, didn’t work, but had a very clean interior and no damage to the outside. I got the £20 scrappage instead. So “We Buy Any Car” is also false advertising, and I now have 2 bad experiences with a company and no invoice number to write a review on Trustpilot.
The fact of the matter is, We Buy Any Car are misusing spam measures on online review sites to try and improve their poor image. Most of the customer experience takes place BEFORE you accept their offer to buy your car. I would bet that 50%, possibly more, of the customers of this company don’t actually complete the sale due to their shocking tactics. The beauty of this scam, then, is that you can either be ripped off for hundreds of pounds so you can write a review on an “independent” review site, and tell other people about your experience (not to mention giving We Buy Any Car more money when they resell your car to a dealer at profit) or, technically, you’re not a verifiable customer, because no money has changed hands.
The fact that Trust Pilot is complicit in enabling We Buy Any Car to mute legitimate reviewers casts doubt on the trustworthiness of its other reviews. Are they really representative of the customer experience? Having an invoice number is no guarantee of legitimacy anyway – you can’t prove that companies are not just taking customers’ invoice numbers themselves and getting their staff to write glowing reviews, so requesting an invoice number is no guarantee of authentic reviews.
So the real questions are: Is Trust Pilot really that trustworthy as a review site? and, why does Trading Standards only intervene if you’ve bought something that’s not fit for purpose? They wouldn’t get involved even if you take the obviously dodgy deal being offered by companies such as We Buy Any Car? because you accepted the money after being browbeaten into it by their staff, to avoid having to start the whole car selling process again from scratch.
I think Trust Pilot need to make it harder for companies like this one to falsely skew their results when the rest of the internet will tell you how crap We Buy Any Car is, and I think the law needs to change so that companies like this have to operate in a more transparent way.
I really loved my Citroen Xsara Picasso as a campervan, especially because you can pretty much do anything to kit it out, and not worry about wrecking it. In December, the famously unreliable French mechanical engineering let me down when the Picasso’s gearbox and engine broke so I had to give it to the scrap merchant for £20, and I bought a Rover 75 because it was cheap. Some plans I’d had for this summer for the Picasso were to put vents in the sides (by drilling holes in the non-petrol side) and to fix the storage situation.
I want to talk today about why I did my car camper conversion the way I did it, why I will probably not buy another Citroen Xsara Picasso to camperify (it was great for what I wanted but it does have a lot of limitations) and I also want to go through some of the considerations you need to think about whilst planning your camper conversion.
When I bought the Citroen Xsara Picasso to convert back in 2014, nobody had done such a thing before and the only mentions of it on the internet were people joking about what a stupid idea it was. I feel proud that I started something that (it turns out) so many people are interested in doing, and I am glad that my posts about how I converted the Citroen Xsara Picasso and my review of the Picasso are helping other people achieve their dream of having a car camper. This did mean though that when I did mine, there was absolutely no information specific to the Citroen Xsara Picasso to give me any idea about how to go about converting it. I took inspiration and ideas mainly from Toyota Previa Delica Lucida conversions, obviously the Citroen Xsara Picasso is much smaller and there’s a limit on how much space 2 human beings (6’2″ and 5’6″ respectively) need. If you are 5’4″ or under, you can convert a Citroen Xsara Picasso and have acres of space because your clothes, shoes, sleeping area etc all take up less space. Even in the most practical Previa Delica Lucida conversion that I’d admired and used as guidance, the tallest occupant was 5’8″, so perhaps car camper conversion is a sport more suited to shortarses rather than longshanks. We had great times in it, although in hindsight I think we would have had a better shot at a more complex conversion in a Previa Delica Lucida (a Toyota’s a Toyota).
The main stumbling block I came up against (I did everything myself) was we were just too tall for this vehicle to be our ideal camper conversion. Yes, you can fill the back of a Citroen Xsara Picasso with a wooden framed bed, a nicely-coloured fitted “kitchen” unit etc, but you won’t actually have enough headroom to use this stuff because human beings bend at the middle to sit up. I measured us. I need 83cm to be able to sit up in a vehicle, and my husband needed 91cm. Since my husband is 6 foot 2 inches tall, we needed that length to sleep in, so the Picasso was not long enough for us to add a kitchen unit at the back (so you can cook with the boot open) either. From a ventilation and safety point of view, there was absolutely no point in fitting a kitchen but again if you’re short or single you won’t have this problem, you can kitchen away.
Add to that, when you’re not actually camping (which is most of the time, unless you’re retired or a full-time traveller, in which case you probably aren’t going to convert a Picasso when you could drive one of those hulking great motorhomes or a large wheel base Transit at 20 miles an hour around the Derbyshire Dales), having a kitchen unit in a Picasso is generally stupid for most people. It adds weight and stops you from a) carrying people in your people carrier when you want to and b) using it as a van to transport large items.
The main thing I really loved about the Picasso was its sheer versatility. There was the time I gave a ride to three people with a sick cat they found on the street, who needed to get it to a vet’s across town. There was the time when my dad died 400 miles away and, because his sister has Narcissistic Personality Disorder and thought it was all about her, I had to clear his flat in the dark on a Bank Holiday (when all the van rental places were shut), and if I hadn’t had the Citroen Xsara Picasso I would not have been able to save my antique 1920s wardrobe (four foot wide, six foot long, two foot six inches deep) from my bedroom, the only thing my dad ever bought me; it would have been taken to landfill by the council instead (we crammed it in on its side and filled it with mementos, photos etc that we salvaged). There were the (countless) times I needed to take garden waste to the tip, the time my husband decided to take 500 bricks off someone’s hands (thanks Freecycle), all the large pieces of wood we transported home for furniture projects, that all made the ability to have a completely empty loading area an absolute essential. To put it into perspective, last week we bought some new fence panels and had to walk home with them because the Rover 75 blatantly couldn’t fit them inside or on top. If we’d still had the Picasso, we could have either attached them to the roof with rope through the windows (put a big towel on your roof, nothing gets scratched) or maybe even crammed them into the back diagonally with the boot open to get them home. If we’d put fixed furniture in the Picasso, its storage space and passenger capacity would have been more limited.
I’d like to add something about effort vs benefit because a lot of people lose sight of this when they’re spending 6 months to a year converting a vehicle (during which time they don’t go anywhere on holiday in it). Allowing for the possibility that there are people in the world small enough to fit in the vehicle afterwards, it still takes a lot of effort to build a bed/storage unit and a kitchen/storage unit because you have to custom size it all to the vehicle and it has to be safely attached somehow so you don’t kill everyone in the vehicle in a crash.
Unless you very specifically want that exact vehicle for many years to come, you are putting a lot of work into making custom camper furniture for a car that you probably won’t be cooking in very often, or storing camping equipment in, compared to the number of times you will drive it to work (in our case we had it for 15 months, August 2014 to November 2015, and used it for four different long-distance holidays, where we slept in it for more than two nights apiece. We would have used it for more trips but I was a bit preoccupied with my parents both dying last year).
I decided that since we bought the Picasso as an experiment in the fusion between Bangernomics and Campernomics, and that it was only going to run to its next MOT, there was no point in going to that much expense, effort, and time, to do something to a vehicle that was going to be scrapped in a year. I did want to work out how to put air vents into it before I scrapped it, but I was very ill at the time, in and out of hospital, so that never happened (2015 was a shit year. But I did buy the plastic air vents from Homebase and find out how to do it, although there’s no schematics for the Picasso to confirm that I wouldn’t have drilled through a wire or something).
I also wanted to put a roof rack on top, but when I tried to get one fitted on the day I had to clear my just-died dad’s flat, Halfords Edinburgh kept me waiting for ages then said it was too late in the day and that I should come back tomorrow. The store was empty of customers the whole time. I got let down at a time when something terrible was happening, so I didn’t bother going back. I’ll spend my money elsewhere, thanks.
Other important considerations are a) the law b) visibility c) weight distribution/fuel consumption and d) access to and from doors.
a) I have talked about international window tinting laws for driving around the world previously. They haven’t changed, and they do also apply to any obstructions to visibility. I drove my car camper to Rome and this year I’m going to drive (whatever vehicle I end up with by July) to Spain. For me, putting anything in the back of the Picasso that would affect visibility is a hard “no.” Additionally, there’s no point making a camper that sleeps more people than it seats with a seat belt. Where are these extra people going to come from? How are you all going to breathe?
b) Visibility. The positioning of those front driver pillars (and the fact that there’s two of them) is really stupid. The car looks lovely from the outside but from the inside? Really hard to see where you’re going. In the blazing sun in Italy, the reflection from the top of the dashboard made it virtually impossible to see out of the front window. The heat was over 40 degrees celsius and my car’s fans were blowing even hotter than the ambient air because my car was a scrapper. If I hadn’t been able to see clearly out of my back and side windows, I would have had an accident. That means the only place to put a fixed kitchen/storage unit would have been behind the driver’s seat (where I can’t see anyway) and it would have had to come no higher than the window for aforementioned legal reasons.
c) The petrol tank is on the driver’s side, then it goes under the vehicle on that same side. It takes 40 litres. If there’s a fixed heavy piece of furniture behind the driver, that’s another 10-30 kilograms of weight on the same side. An uneven load distribution, being driven around in the same place all the time, in addition to anyone or anything else you put in the car, is going to affect the car mechanically.
d) I wanted all the doors to be openable and to permit access to the vehicle. This meant I wasn’t limited about how/where I parked and there were two examples of this being invaluable: firstly, when I couldn’t stop vomiting on my first day in the Highlands in August 2015, I was *really* glad of this because I could just open the door, do my vomiting, close the door, without having to disturb my husband who was trying to get to sleep. Secondly, when we came across an unexpected nudist beach in Belgium, we were able to park the car and change into swimwear whilst avoiding getting our shoes in the back of the car by opening the door behind the driver seat.
Another thing to be aware of is cabin fever, especially on a long trip to Europe or further afield. You will want to be able to go to sleep with more than two inches between yourself and the person next to you.
I think when looking at converting a Citroen Xsara Picasso, or any other smaller vehicle, into a campervan, it’s important to keep perspective of the best possible function and use of the vehicle, rather than being able to go “ooh ooh look at me it looks like a real caravan inside I designed it to be popular on PINTEREST” (seriously, why do people do this) whilst compromising on the most important things in any vehicle you sleep in – bed length and comfort, privacy and safe air flow.
Things I didn’t like about the Citroen Xsara Picasso:
1. There’s nowhere to put a freaking drink on the driver’s side, and seemingly nowhere to attach a place to put a drink because every surface is curvy and “futuristic” (from the Picasso’s design vision in the late ’90s).
2. Ours was petrol. I liked the 1.6 litre engine, but I disliked the really tiny petrol tank that was NOT designed for long distance journeys, and I really disliked having nowhere (in the curvy futuristic exterior of the vehichle) to store a jerry can. Add to that, some countries don’t allow you to carry petrol but everywhere lets you take diesel. You don’t want to sleep in the vicinity of a petrol can (I’ve done this, it’s horrible) leaking fumes everywhere, so it has to go outside the vehicle, but there’s nowhere on the Picasso to put it. This means you’re forced to fill where you can, which means sometimes you’re pushing the car to the petrol pump, and always you have the knowledge that you didn’t get a good price on fuel. It just wasn’t big enough to carry the weight of the vehicle a reasonable distance between filling stations across Europe when we didn’t have a Sat-Nav or toll money so relied on seeing a petrol station sign. We were well into the red several times in Germany and Italy and it was stressful…. [descends into angry rant about stupid size of petrol tank for what’s effectively a really heavy metal shed on a Xsara chassis/wheelbase]
3. The lights on the Picasso we had just never worked properly. By the time I scrapped it, one headlight would not even do a side light let alone anything else and the suspension was terrible. Yes, you can fix these things, but there’s only so many times you can get it “fixed” before you just want a different car.
4. The spare wheel being under the boot seems like a great idea but it reduces the ground clearance – which in general was not shockingly bad (not quite as bad as a lowrider) but wasn’t fantastic either.
5. The fans blowing air didn’t work at all and the temperature control didn’t work, so when the ambient temperature was hot, the car was hot, and when the ambient temperature was cold, the car was cold. You may remember cars of the 80’s often had this problem, and this might make you think “who cares?” but when it’s 40 degrees in Rome when you wake up and sub zero in the Alps when you go to sleep, it really is pleasant to have some sort of controllable warm/cold air coming into the car.
6. The off road capabilities were less than impressive, the cruising speed was sub-par which especially pissed me off in Germany where I wanted to be going at over 90 mph and was stuck at 75, and the brakes were nowhere near as good as on the VW Golf. Adding weight of a full-on camper conversion to make it look like a Citroen Romahome on the inside will ONLY make this worse.
7. The petrol tank size. Can I rant about this even more?
I did a hell of a lot of research into a lot of different vehicles before I bought the Picasso, and it was the perfect car to get some experience of campering with. If you’ve never converted a vehicle and you’re not tall and you don’t buy a £600 category-C write off, you’ll probably have many happy years in this. As for me, I am hoping that this summer I can buy a Land Rover to convert, so I’ve got a vehicle that’s a) wide enough for actual luggage storage and b) has 4 wheel drive capacity for when we’re campervanning in the snow or end up off-road both of which happened in the Highlands and in Austria. I want to take it to the Sahara (amongst other places), after all, and a Picasso was never going to be appropriate for that. I also like the fact the Landie has a flat roof with excellent potential for luggage storage.
Wow so it’s awards season and I’ve been nominated for The Creative Blogger Award by Brandie at TheStripedCoyote. Thank you so much I am delighted!
Rules
5 Facts About Me (some of which I probably shouldn’t tell you but I’m going to anyway):
And I’m nominating:
Laura at Laura Living Life
Ellen at Travelling the World Solo
POSH at Look at Her Hair
Megan at Megan’s Beauty Blog
HighHeelsAndABackpack at HighHeelsAndABackpack
I look forward to finding out more about you all!
Ever wondered whether driving in Europe is different to driving at home? Are you planning a trip that will involve you driving in Europe? This article is an explanation of everything you need to know to drive safely in Europe (including the UK), broken down into key aspects so you can drive safely and confidently on your next European Road Trip. This is very comprehensive but I’ve written it as concisely as possible from both my own experiences and research I’ve done to check current driving laws around Europe; I have this article saved to my computer to print out to take with me whenever I drive in Europe. Feel free to do the same.
Contents:
Side of the Road,
Roundabouts,
Multi-Lane Roads,
Indicators and Overtaking,
Smoking in Vehicles,
Things You Need In Your Car,
Tolls and taxes,
Speed Limits,
Carrying Hazardous/Dangerous Items in Your Vehicle,
Further Reading.
1. In Malta, Cyprus Ireland and the UK (excluding Gibraltar), you drive on the left.
2. Everywhere else you drive on the right.
Roundabouts are often used instead of traffic lights where roads intersect each other.
Where you drive on the left (in the UK etc):
Go around the roundabout in a clockwise manner. Always give way to oncoming traffic from the right hand side and ignore traffic on the left (unless it’s cutting you up in which case peep your horn at them to warn them of your presence). You can imagine most roundabouts as a complicated type of crossroads, and some of them have traffic lights on them as well. You indicate as you approach the roundabout to inform people that you are either not getting off the roundabout yet (indicate right, for right turns or straight ahead) or you indicate to inform people that you are getting off the roundabout at the very next exit (indicate left, for the very next left turn). If it’s busy and you are in the wrong lane, people will cut you up as you try to get off the roundabout so always check mirrors and blind spot before changing direction unexpectedly and position your car so other road users know you’re changing roundabout lanes before you pull out.
Where you drive on the right (in France etc):
Go around the roundabout in an anti-clockwise manner. Always give way to oncoming traffic from the left hand side and ignore traffic on the right (unless they’re cutting you up in which case slow down). To indicate, do so whilst you are on the roundabout (or two or three cars away from joining it) and indicate left (staying on the roundabout) or right (getting off the roundabout), EXCEPT in Slovenia where you only indicate to show when you’re leaving the roundabout. If it’s busy and you are in the wrong lane be aware people will cut you up as you try to get off the roundabout, so check your mirrors and blind spot before changing lane unexpectedly, and position your car so other road users know you’re changing roundabout lanes before you pull out.
Where you drive on the left (UK, Ireland etc):
Stay in the left hand lane until you need to overtake someone. If you are on a motorway (3 lanes or more) you may see big blue signs showing that the road is going to split into two new roads. When this is happening, pick the lane that follows the correct blue sign to where you are going. If in doubt, keeping right at a fork is usually to stay on the road you’re currently on. As soon as you are on the new road or as soon as you have passed the fork or new road split, return to the left hand lane if it’s safe to do so.
When overtaking, it’s good practice to pull back over to the left after you’ve overtaken, however, because other people don’t always do this, and because people don’t leave a sensible amount of space between themselves and the cars in front, it can sometimes be more efficient to stay in the right hand lane if you know you need to overtake again soon, because it can be very difficult to rejoin overtaking traffic once you’ve had to slow down. If you see a police car, pull into the left hand lane because it is now illegal to just drive in an overtaking lane (which is every lane apart from the left lane), although nothing’s changed in terms of how people drive because UK police don’t appear to be enforcing this OR the new law against tailgating.
In Ireland, there are a lot of elderly drivers but people seem to be more mellow and courteous on the road, so I always pull back to the left after overtaking although not everyone does. Ireland doesn’t seem to have the same horrific traffic congestion as the UK does, probably because people drive with courtesy and are more tolerant of mistakes (such as being in the wrong lane).
Where you drive on the right (France, Germany etc):
Stay in the right hand lane until you need to overtake someone. If you are on an Autoroute or Autobahn or Autostrada (freeway, motorway), the left hand lane is the overtaking lane. If you need to overtake someone, check your mirrors (especially in Germany where there’s no upper speed limits on some routes) and only pull out where there’s no-one approaching at speed – if someone’s passing you at 150 miles an hour and you’re pulling out at 60, it’s not going to end well for anyone. When you are done overtaking, pull back in, and remember to overtake EACH VEHICLE INDIVIDUALLY. In the UK people have a tendency to stay in the overtaking lane when they shouldn’t, because they can see another car ahead that they will want to overtake in a couple of minutes – in Europe, this can get you pulled over by the police, but not before a VW Kamper has tailgated you for a couple of miles flashing his lights at you to draw your attention to the fact that you’re in the wrong lane. Once you’re done overtaking, get out of the overtaking lane.
Near some European cities such as Florence (and Glasgow), there are now moments when you will either get corralled through the city on a motorway that avoids all the junctions, or you will be moved onto a motorway that HAS all the junctions. It is critically important here that you are aware a) how long you will be on a no-junction motorway and b) whether you will miss your exit. We didn’t understand the signs because the with-junctions motorway was signposted with suburbs of Florence (which should have been closer than our exit), and the without-junctions motorway was signposted with Milan, which was a VERY long way away compared to where our exit was. We were trying to get to Verona. We chose the Milan motorway, thinking the other was a ring road type system around Florence. Big mistake. We were shuttled 50km north of our starting point, all the time in slow moving traffic in 40 degree (Celsius) heat, with no air conditioning and a thick fog of petrol fumes surrounding us; we had realized as we passed the exit to the other motorway that we were on the wrong road. We then spent three hours in bumper-to-bumper traffic crawling until we FINALLY reached the first exit off this road which was far, far beyond the exit we had needed. For the first forty minutes on the shuttle road, our road was directly alongside the road we should have taken, and there was no way to get to it. We had to turn around at the first exit 50km later, and then we had to sit through another two hours of traffic to get back to the place where we could turn around again to choose the correct road because it wasn’t reachable from the other side of the road. Many road signs in Italy make no sense and I would highly recommend you get a sat nav as well as a paper road map if you intend to drive in Italy (and don’t rely on the Google sat nav on your phone because a) you’ll wear your battery down by charging it and using it at the same time and b) it’s dependent on you getting a phone signal as well as a GPS one). The moral of the story here is to be aware of these shuttle roads (I don’t know if they have a fancy name) if you plan to drive anywhere in Europe.
In every European country, you must not overtake a school bus while it is stopped to let passengers on or off. In the former Eastern Bloc countries (such as Serbia) you may not overtake any buses that are stopped. Use your common sense – if the rest of the traffic has overtaken the bus, or if the bus is clearly stopped for a lunch break, it’s probably safe to overtake if you take care and do so slowly, so you don’t hit any pedestrians crossing in front of the bus.
On autoroutes/autobahns (motorways, freeways) some nationalities continue to indicate even after they’ve maneuvered, until they have pulled back into the right hand (non-overtaking) lane. This might seem strange to people who have driven in the UK where many high end cars (BMWs, Audis, Mercedes etc) don’t actually appear to be fitted with indicators since their drivers just pull out without warning. It is not compulsory to indicate with the expressive gusto of drivers from Luxembourg, but it is compulsory to use the correct indicators to inform other traffic that you are changing lane or turning.
On roundabouts in Slovenia, you do not indicate when entering a roundabout, you only indicate to show that you are leaving the roundabout.
It is now illegal to smoke in any vehicle where children are passengers in the UK. It might be illegal to NOT smoke in any vehicle in Montenegro (joking; the UK one is true though).
Some things are needed everywhere in Europe, other things are needed only in one country. In general, the Eastern European countries require you to take more stuff than Western Europe. As far as enforcement goes, unless you get stopped by the police and your vehicle checked for some reason, you shouldn’t really have any problems, so if you’re a flexible good driver (as opposed to one who inflexibly follows every letter of the highway code regardless of situation) you will probably never need to prove these items are in your car.
The UK:
A spare wheel.
Most countries in Europe, including France, Germany, Austria, Spain and Scandinavia:
Warning triangle (always 2 in Spain, 2 in some other countries IF you’re towing a caravan)
Hi-Viz vest
First aid kit
Spare bulbs
A spare wheel
A bumper sticker showing which country you have driven from (eg. GB sticker) unless your registration plate states a country code on it.
Countries where it gets very cold and snowy, including Austria, Scandinavia and most of the former Eastern Bloc:
Your vehicle MUST be fitted with winter tyres, usually between October and March. Check each country’s requirement on the AA website before taking your vehicle.
Countries where it is very hot:
In Spain, most window tinting is illegal.
In most hot countries you are not allowed to carry spare petrol, but you are generally allowed to carry diesel.
Former Soviet-Bloc countries (Czech, Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania, Former Yugoslavia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Estonia, Albania, Moldova, Montenegro, but not Greece):
These are the countries which will often check at the border whether your car has all the correct items, so if you’re travelling to or through any of the former USSR countries, you need to tick all the boxes because they still have a culture of bureaucracy at border checkpoints.
Spare bulbs,
Spare wheel (this must be the same size as the wheels fitted to the vehicle),
First Aid Kit,
Reflective Jacket,
Tow rope and tow bar (or loop e.g. on the Citroen Xsara Picasso),
Warning triangle (two if towing something),
Winter Tyres between November and April (with a minimum tread of 4mm, or 6mm in Ukraine),
Additionally, in all of the former Soviet Bloc countries, you must get the border control officer to certify in writing any damage to your car (dents and scrapes etc) before you enter the country, otherwise you may have serious problems when you try to leave. This is to prevent people from having accidents in these countries then fleeing without prosecution.
It is NOT compulsory to adjust your headlights from a left hand drive to right hand drive country (or vice versa) the laws all state that you must not DAZZLE oncoming traffic. Often this means a headlight adjustment but the law is clear it’s the dazzling that’s the problem, so dip your headlights enough and you will actually probably do a better job at not dazzling traffic than those people who incorrectly use the headlight adjustment stickers.
Tolls:
Most freeway type roads (autostrada, autoroute etc) charge a toll. The exceptions are Germany’s autobahns, which are currently free, and the countries which require you to pay road tax or a vignette. Tolls in Italy are generally fairly reasonable (usually under E5 every 50-100 miles-ish) and tolls in France are utterly arbitrary (we paid E16 to drive 25 miles at one point and E3 to drive another 40 miles). This is where buying a roadmap comes in handy – the one I had detailed which roads were toll and which were not, along with the location of the toll booths, so we knew which roads to avoid in France after getting robbed by a toll booth. The map doesn’t tell you how much the tolls are, but most toll motorways have a non-toll smaller road running next to it which will take you longer, but won’t cost as much in tolls (whether this increases your fuel consumption is another matter).
On trying to enter Eastern European countries, I’ve heard of some drivers being charged a car washing fine for an official to throw a bucket of water over their car because it was too dirty to continue. This was apparently in Slovenia, although it is definitely illegal to drive an unwashed car in Romania so budget for a car wash every so often. Then you won’t get charged a E150 fee to enter any of these countries.
Car Tax or Vignettes:
The countries which charge longer term for you to use their roads are:
Austria (the road from Italy to Innsbruck still costs E9 on top of the vignette) which requires a relatively cheap vignette (pronounced vin-yet) which you can buy at petrol stations approaching the Austrian border (say: “eine vignette fur Osterreich bitte” to the clerk then how long you want it for. “Funfzig tage” is fifteen days and “dreizig tage” gets you thirty days, sorry about my spelling for any native speakers).
Switzerland requires a vignette that in 2016 costs 40CHF (one Swiss Franc is usually worth roughly the same as the Canadian dollar on the exchange rate) and runs from 1st January to 31st December. If you are travelling during January or December you might get ripped off. They don’t do smaller units of tax in Switzerland. According to the Swiss government website, non-EU citizens can buy Swiss road tax online here although I’d get it when approaching the Swiss border to be sure it arrives (and because that exchange rate on that website is very badly messed up).
The UK has a very complicated vehicle taxation and roadworthiness system that I’m not going to go into, because if you’re only there for less than 28 days you can ignore it completely and if you’re there for longer you can consult the British DVLA.
Speed limits are signposted very clearly everywhere in Europe, it’s really easy to follow the speed limit and we found there was a way to change the mileometer on the Picasso so it showed the speed in kph. Germany has very clear speed limits except on the Autobahn, where there is no upper speed limit, only a suggested speed limit in adverse weather conditions. This teaches you to look at the state of the road, the congestion, the road surface (e.g. is it icy, wet or dry) and use your own judgement. If you lack this judgement, or if you’re a new driver, stick to 70-80 miles per hour and you’ll generally not be out of place amongst the traffic. Remember, it’s illegal to take a slow moving vehicle on a motorway or freeway in most European countries so you MUST make an effort to keep up with the slowest moving flow of traffic on the road.
Check the individual country’s requirement as it ranges from 100% legal to hold it whilst driving (swords in Poland) to 99.9% illegal to have it in the car (guns in Britain). Each country has it’s own definition of what is hazardous or dangerous, just to complicate matters even more.
You may also want to check out these other articles I’ve written to help you drive in Europe and beyond:
Buying petrol in Europe
International Window Tinting Laws Around the World
Travel Money Guide a helpful article explaining how to access your money and what sort of money to take when travelling in Europe, including answering questions about working in Europe, using credit cards and ATM machines. Essential reading if you’re planning a European road trip or driving in Europe.
Coming soon: Driving with your pets in Europe, and pet-transport laws.
So today, despite being barely able to stand, I had planned to go to the nearby Big City and look at cars at 2 used car lots. Then we saw a totally inappropriate vehicle that was being sold at the car place nearest my house, that was nothing like what we’d wanted, that nevertheless was £20 less than the cheapest ones we’d got lined up at Big City and not only that, we could save the train fare, making this car £50 less than the others in real terms (and £150 less than the ones we’d been most likely to actually buy).
My car budget was in the region of £500.
I really wanted a Land Rover but I couldn’t afford a whole one, so I could only pay for half, which would get me … a Rover.
I saw this Monster for £575. The Rover 75:
Here’s a rear view:
Did I mention that because many of these cars were sold to elitist fascist dictators high ranking members of the government, it’s not uncommon for them to be reinforced to be bullet and bomb proof. Which of course improves the Kerbweight which means you can tow a larger caravan with it.
Because that’s how towing laws work.
Seriously, I test drove this, then I test drove a Vauxhall (Opel) Corsa for comparison (because I know where I am with a Corsa, I’ve owned 3 and had a 4th on long term lease while my VW Golf needed repairs), then I thought about the two cars for several long minutes.
The Corsa had a smaller engine at 1.2 litres, therefore tax would be at least half and I’d look forward to a refund on this year’s insurance premium. The Corsa had all the usual things a Corsa should have, everything was in decent nick, it had done 31,000 fewer miles than the Rover. The Corsa was previously owned by the sister of a mechanic. The Rover apparently had “a couple of receipts” for its service history.
The Corsa’s boot wasn’t wet and filled with sand residue, which strongly implied someone had perhaps committed suicide in the Rover, since the back seats were also soaking despite a dearth of rust, implying an acute watering rather than chronic leakage.
The Corsa was fresh in today, the Rover’s been sitting on the lot for a while.
The Corsa was a manual and was easy to drive, it doesn’t need a cam belt change because it has a cam chain which means (in theory) it never needs changing.
Vauxhall Corsas are bountiful in the UK as are their parts, their manufacturer is based in Luton and parts are easily substituted without damaging the vehicle, I can do most repair work on a Corsa by myself. The (also British) manufacturers of the Rover went bust.
The Corsa had manual transmission but the Rover was an automatic, we all know if the transmission fails on an automatic, you can’t tow it and the car can quickly become scrap.
The Rover’s door mirrors weren’t working, the Corsa’s worked fine. The Rover had a tape player where the Corsa had a CD player.
So of course I bought the Rover.
I believe there’s a Banana Republic Dictator somewhere waiting to get his car back. It’s stupidly, inappropriately large, it’s basically a rebadged Jaguar and when I’ve seen these on the road, I actually thought they were Jaguars.
It looks like the horn should play something stately, perhaps the Liberty Bell March (popularized by Monty Python’s Flying Circus for irony, but that probably doesn’t stop particular people getting their flags out when they hear it). It should be leading a ticker tape parade.
Instead it’s currently parked outside my 3 bedroom semi on a council/ex-council estate where the people over the road recently sold their L-reg Nissan for £100 as a “good runner” (well, the people that bought it agreed once they’d push started it) and they used the profits to buy 16 more hours of weed (and an electric card to play loud music for the duration).
At least it’ll keep next door’s BMW company, you know, the sort of BMW that screams “I’m A Respectable Businessman Who’s At Home A Lot During The Day, Not A Drug Dealer, Nope, That Smell And All Those People Coming And Going Are Businessmen Too.”
The thing about this Rover, is that it had soul, where the Corsa felt like driving a cheap mass produced transport method, the Rover felt like I was experiencing a brief and now-extinguished piece of British motoring history.
I can’t explain it, I certainly couldn’t justify the extra £130 that my insurance company hit me with, and when I fill ‘er up my credit card will cry tears of blood because, five miles down the road, I’ll be filling ‘er up again as all the carefree Corsas overtake me on their way to wherever people drive them to.
Comparing the Rover to the Corsa is like trying to compare a fine steak dinner at Claridge’s to a Big Mac. There’s nothing wrong with a Big Mac per se and they’re certainly more popular, as shown by the number of Corsa drivers queueing at any British drive thru, but if the Rover driver took the fast food option, you know they’d have a jar of English Mustard ready in the cup holder to give their meat patty some refinement and taste.
The Rover has gravitas, it has pomp, it has style and panache. I don’t know why this car manufacturer died a death and I think it’s a tragedy to the British motor industry, but this car looks, feels, drives and has the optional extras of a Jaguar from the same year.
I understand why they’re so cheap now – Rover went bust in 2005, one of the first pre-recession victims, and horror stories about availability of parts, poor build quality, unreliability and, of course, worst of all (and they whisper this one in case there’s any of *them* around), the people who made it spoke with a Brummie accent.
As someone who pronounces “cook, book and look” as “cuuuk” “buuuk” and “luuuk” (a la Scottish and Staffordshire people) under stress, I must say that’s shocking. Everyone who makes cars should speak with a Home Counties accent. Hell, everyone per se should speak with that fake British accent that American actors feel so compelled to put on, the one that sounds like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins, which is to say, no British person ever spoke like that.
The car should have little flags on the bonnet and I would like a chauffer uniform so I can transport my passenger. I’d love to dress one of the rabbits up in a shirt, collar and tie and get them to wave out of the window.
The back of the front seats appear to have plastic tray-like compartments in them. I think that’s where the Ferrero Rocher’s supposed to go.
I can see why government officials had them.
The automatic transmission is beautiful and far more comfortable than the Peugueot 605 which was officially my first ownership of a car (I was 15, but my mother had to do some tax avoidance; I drove it once, on private land), but which used to jump forward every time it changed up or down the ratios. Since the Picasso’s cause of death was a total gearbox failure on a dangerous junction at rush hour while I was pregnant and having severe hyperemesis, necessitating me to force the car to continue to safety at the expense of the engine which was too damaged by what I forced the drive shaft to do, I no longer believe that there’s any advantage to a cheap old manual car over a good, newer automatic at the same price now but which retailed for a lot more brand new, because in EITHER type, it’s bloody expensive to repair anything to do with the transmission so why not go automatic? And with a top speed of 121mph compared to 96mph, the Rover might actually get taken to the Nurburgring when it thaws out next year, if the car still works by then, to have a go at setting a time.
The steering is stately and glorious, despite this being the longest car I’ve ever driven, and having never driven a car with an arse longer than the back window (I’ve had hatchbacks and my Picasso, which is really a big hatchback), the parking was actually smooth like a good glass of Port, and it didn’t hit my house or the neighbours car despite them having blocked my drive. The steering is divine, compared to the Picasso which handled like a drunk sailor, seeming to perpetually stagger side to side whilst actually travelling forwards.
You could get the Rover 75 with a V6 or V8 engine. One day, I’d love a V8 (although I’d probably never get anything done again, because I’d just have the bonnet up and be staring at it in rapt adoration whilst asking someone to rev it for me over and over). In the meantime, I won’t be surprised if Augusto Pinochet decides to drop by for tea. I still wouldn’t let him in the house. I’ve just vacuumed those carpets. Actually even if I hadn’t, it’s the principle of the thing.
I’ve applied to join the owners club as their buyers guide was invaluable and their site is a wealth of information.
So at least something good has happened this week, although I am afraid to jinx it and will need to drive the car some more before I’m happy that it’s going to be a reliable motor. It’s put to rest a stress I’ve been carrying about vehicular failure for the past 6 months. I *knew* I should have got rid of the Picasso before I went to Aberdeen. Now I just need a job to pay off the car I just put on my credit card, and to pick a master’s course to apply for. And people wonder why I did some of the jobs I did in the past. I’ve been considering it again. But I swore I’d got out. That I’d make something of myself. That I’d go straight. Then I phoned an agency yesterday and booked for an interview next week.
I swore I’d left it behind me.
I just don’t want to teach high school science again.
I leave you with the following public service announcement from Alexei Sayle:
And I can confirm that there’s life in Peckham, but reports are mixed as to whether it’s intelligent or not.
Am driving to Edinburgh today to collect my father’s personal effects. Last night was Motley Crue and Alice Cooper (5 hours driving on the motorway, SO worth it). I will write it (and Bob Dylan) up when I get back. Edinburgh’s a 9-10 hour round trip in reasonable traffic.
The roads are pretty foggy. I don’t want to be on motorways in this weather. I think it’s easier to drive in fog at night when the daylight doesn’t obscure the headlights. Ick.
I want to be at home with my bunnies and my tea.
It’s Anything Can Happen Thursday, and I want to show you my favourite cars. These are all cars that, for me, defined an era. Cars that make me go all wobbly inside and reach for my purse to check for loose change when I see them on Auto Trader.
First up is the iconic Jaguar E type, a beautiful vehicle that was a triumph of design:
Then there was this:
The Lotus Elan was an instant hit, thanks to it’s role as one of the two cars on The Avengers (nothing to do with the superhero characters, these were kick ass detectives) during the golden age of that show – Diana Rigg and Patrick MacNee (ok, Honor Blackman fans, I’m ready for your hatemail, because I firmly believe Emma was cooler than Cathy). If anyone has one of these and doesn’t want it, I will gladly take it off your hands, this is at the very, very top of my list of dream cars, but sadly I can’t afford it.
Then Austin made a car that could be parked outside tiny 2 up 2 down terraced houses. It also featured in a rather daring film, where some cockney gentlemen (such as Michael Caine) proved that you could park several of these in a lorry, in The Italian Job and then everyone wanted one. Presumably lots of people had parking spaces in haulage vehicles:
When Rover took over and re-badged it in the 1990s, it didn’t look any different, but the badge means a lot to car collectors. And clowns. This is the mini that you could be amused watching clowns get out of, because there’s not much space:
Let’s take it back to the ’70’s and look at a triumph of car design: It was named after a well known airplane used by the British Royal Air Force during the second world war – and it’s body design resembles a plane chassis. Put some wings on this baby and the Triumph Spitfire would be airborne:
And here’s what’s under the hood, from the days when you could actually feel a thrill by looking under the bonnet of a car:
But if you want a sports car for an eighties action TV series featuring someone resembling a young David Hasselhoff, you need something a bit more ridiculous. Undersized, underpowered, under warranty … these are not words that describe our next car, the Lotus Esprit, which looks not unlike the DeLorien because pointy angular cars were a bit of a thing for a while:
By 1989, however, it had had a remake and looked even more stunning than before:
Around the same time, this unassuming, more mainstream car was on the road:
What a stunner, the Ford Escort Cabriolet has it all. A year later, it got a facelift:
While all things must come to an end, these cars don’t have to yet – they’re all for sale on Auto Trader (which is where I got all of today’s photos, unless otherwise stated) although they’ll obviously set you back a fair bit – that Jaguar E type is going for £89,000, the Mini is £2,500 and everything else is somewhere in between!!! I think they’ve all got a fair bit of mileage in them yet, although I think I need something more practical and spacious for my next car camper conversion. Or something with more than four seats. This VW Devon looked like it fitted the bill:
But it appears to be missing something:
I wanted something that wasn’t lacking large chunks of the chassis, so I’m probably going to go for something like this Toyota Lucida (but this one is now sold):
Which one is your favourite? Let me know in the comments.
