By Isle of Wight Observer
I need to offload my car boot tale of woe, but first, we’ll discuss taxpayers’ remarkably-generous treatment of MPs ejected from office. All get 4 months’ pay, on top of double statutory redundancy on their £91,000 salary. Naturally we’ll pay their rent and bills until November – up to £16,000 and of course unlimited travel. Amusingly, there’s welfare support and coaching for job interviews, presuming someone is willing to employ them. They also get up to £170,000 to ‘wind up’ their office and staff – on top of staff redundancy payments.
With that off my chest, I’ll return to my car. It’s been so awful; it has to go. Actually, thanks to unreliable ferries, dodgy linkspans and extortionate fares, I need two cars. One for the Island, one for the mainland.
The North Island car is a fancy new 4×4 Audi estate and, earlier this year, I drove it to the Alps. Incredibly, the Germans still don’t think you should drive at pedestrian speeds on clear dry motorways. So, on the autobahn, for brief moments we hit 130 mph.
Honestly, modern cars are perfectly safe at that speed, but everything happens very fast. Glancing at incoming phone messages is not advised. Does it seem unfair that, on English motorways, you’d be jailed for going that quickly?
My travel companions seemed impressed by the Audi – but reckoned when we reached the snow-covered mountains, it would grind to a halt. To prove them wrong, I found steeper and steeper mountain roads to demonstrate the car’s extraordinary ability on snow and ice. At one point, I even drove across a piste, weaving through startled skiers. My pals were impressed, if a little embarrassed.
I wasn’t quite as happy, because the Audi is a lemon. It constantly advises that the child lock is defective, or the central locking isn’t working. It even hesitates before allowing me to open the driver’s door. Several times I’ve reported these niggly faults to the dealership, and they’ve failed to resolve them. Last week, it flashed a huge red warning sign, urging me to add oil. When I obeyed that order, greedily, it demanded more. I suspected this was yet another electrical gremlin, but the garage had failed to put the sump plug back properly after a service.
The oil-covered Audi must go because it tediously beeps, flashes and warns of impending doom on every single journey. The supposedly ‘live traffic updates’ it provides are always wrong. They keep taking me straight to the back of the worst possible jams.
Maddeningly, I can’t always open the boot. There’s a button on the key that’s supposed to do it, but I’ve often stood in pouring rain jabbing away, impatiently waiting for it to open or close. Defiantly, it just doesn’t.
In the ’70s, cars had boots you could manually open in half a second. Modern boots can take several minutes before yielding to your key fob thumb commands – time I can ill afford to lose at my age. Is it possible the Germans deliberately build right-hand-drive cars this way – just to annoy us. Punishment for Brexit perhaps?
My new Slovakian-built Land Rover is just as bad. It too flashes, beeps and warns of every speed limit change. Thanks to EU ‘nanny knows best’ laws, lane departure alarms and their accompanying vibrations are also compulsory on new cars. I find them infuriating and unnecessary; I can drive safely without them, but they won’t be silenced. The Land Rover’s transmission gets confused about which gear it’s supposed to be in.
So, I’ve resolved to replace both with cars at least thirty years old. That’s no-tech, not hi-tech. Ideally, I’d like an old Cortina, Vauxhall or Marina estate car. Do you know of any going cheap?