flotsam

NO IT HASN'T

That stupid cow Patricia Hewitt has called time too early and has probably scuppered the deal!

As for BMW screwing up the company, that's not true. In the 1970s Rover was the third largest manufacturer IN THE WORLD. The unions sabotaged cars on the production line.

No investment was put into new cars. It all went instead into wages for lefty layabouts. The V8 was a GM reject which the BL MD spotted on a rubbish tip. Since Rover didn't do research, it bought the engine and plonked it into everything from the SD1 to Land Rovers.

The cars haven't changed in decades. No new technology NOTHING. The 75 is 7 years old in design and one commentator has said the other models are 15 years old making them "classic cars". The K-series engine is over 20 years old!!!!!

Toyota, in contrast, spends billions on research deisgn engineering and development!

Honda gave some technology to Rover but that was years ago.

BMW gave the lefties a job for life and it cost them billions almost bankrupting BMW. They even gave Rover a £500m loan when they ditched it. IT'S THE LEFTIES WHO ARE TO BLAME! This stupid government is killing businesses too. They're either collapsing or doing a runner abroad!

I've been using Smooth Hound for years. It lists hotels and B&Bs and is essential if you're staying in London.

From next year the government are going to ban radar and laser detectors whilst allowing GPS based systems.

That's assuming they'll still be in power.

This is the latest attack on the motorist along with the higher fuel duty planned for September. Prescott has put a bus lane on the M4, Livingstone has imposed a congestion charge. Fuel duty is already 80% and the most expensive in Europe despite having the lowest oil costs. They'll also be bringing in more mobile speed detector vans rather than the fixed ones which makes the GPS system less useful.

Yet the trains use more fuel, even when all the seats are taken, than a car . . . any car. The Tories have also pointed out that they've put speed cameras in places where there are relatively fewer accidents and are intent on collecting fines more than anything else.

You don't live near a Rover factory do you?

Of course, if they made some decent cars instead of trying to force-feed car buyers some old rope. . .

Don't Lexus leave certain things out of the handbook on purpose?

I've just recieved a flyer from Lexus saying:

"The largest motoring survey of 2004 - the BBC Top Gear magazine Motoring Survey - again recognised Lexus as the Top Manufacturer for Quality, Reliability and Customer Care. This is the third consecutive year that Lexus has won this award.

The BBC Top Gear magazine award completes a hat-trick of customer satisfaction awards for Lexus in 2004, with Lexus having also achieved 1st place, Gold Award, in the J.D. Power and Associates UK Customer Satisfaction study™ and Best Manufacturer in the Auto Express Driver Power Survey earlier this year."

Apparently 37,000 filled in questionnaires so it's strange they now want email feedback.

My LS may be dull but I wouldn't say that about the IS. Prettier than anything BMW have on offer and great handling.

Before Sat Nav, you spent half an hour with a map trying to memorise the route.

Then you'd get lost and have to stop every few miles. Then yo'd get on the motorway and drive with the map on the steering wheel and trying to find the road you want at 60mph with everyone over taking you. Then you'd get to the town you want and drive around for ages going round and around the same streets looking for the place you want.

Then same again on the way home.

There's a kit you can buy where you stick a pad on the windscreen and then attach a syringe with a filler in it. I bought one years ago. There's also a professional service to do the same thing.

Wouldn't touch Dell with a barge pole.

I ordered one for my sister and they had all sors of probs. When I had a look at the thing, there was no reset button no software discs for drivers etc. and the internal hardware didn't fit the interface sockets properly. When she called the support the crooks tried to sell her additional hard disks to "speed up" the machine.

For myself, I build my own PC so I get to choose hard disk size, memeory size, processor, motherboard and video card. Dabs do kits and are usually far better priced than Dell. MicroDirect I've had no poblems with over the years and sometimes some very low prices.

Lexus is all about quality as defined by the Japanese.

When you buy a product and it doesn't perform as it should it's annoying. The older marques started out as being more about opulence than outright quality but they've had to adapt improve this.

Toyota have been making some of the best luxury cars for ages but have never sold them abroad. The earlier Lexus LS was designed to compete with Mercedes S-class and Lexus pinched a lot of the design cues as well as matching their equipment levels to the S-class primarily for the American market.

The Lexus brand was set apart from the Toyota brand because of the brand-snobbery with cars. Mercedes is a well respected brand but it is in the bottom ten for reliability these days. Jaguar are more about a nicely padded sofa on wheels. The reliability is pretty bad and they skimp on the components. The Rolls/Bentley/Maybach are all about opulence but aren't really practical, commercially viable cars. Early Rolls' used to have a tool kit and set of spares in the boot so wasn't really about reliability in those days. Toyota has now adopted a lot of the Lexus technology.

Japan is basically a communist state where there is low unemployment but they work all day and have graduates as lift attendents. Japan is most probably the hardest working nation of all where employee and employer are for life (at least they used to be). Toyota spend more on design and engineering than most and Lexus takes it one step further adhering to quality control standards particularly strictly.

These days luxury cars are all about the latest gadgetry and safety gear too. The top of the range LS or Merc-S or BMW-7 show-case their latest improvements which won't be seen in other cars yet.

Lexus was probably the reason why Mercedes revived the old Mayback marque. Mercedes were the main target for Lexus and they seem to have succeeded in trouncing Mercedes. The latest S-class has had a lot of cost cutting as well as lower reliability yet is still consderably more expensive than the equivalent Lexus.

Personally, I bought mine because Quentin Wilson said he had one, it had over 100,000 miles on it and was still "eerily quiet".

Clarkson's copying a trick used in Autocar for the LS400. They measured the car's 0-60 time as being 6.7s but in the comparison table of all the specs with the BMW-7/Merc-S/Rolls/Jag, Autocar quoted 260bhp rather than 280bhp and 269lbft instead of 293lbft and yet they have these correct figures in the text. In other words they used the spec off the earlier model. In the table they even used the gear ratios from the earlier model which DIDN'T HAVE A FIVE SPEED BOX!

Clarkson's quoting an earlier model too. It's all made to be obvious suggesting there's some pressure being applied. But misquoting the stats is definitely slander and no longer just a tongue-in-cheek joke.

If Clarkson has to sell other cars, he should concentrate on their strong points not outright slander.

Clarkson does a Top Gear Magazine for new cars as well as a separate one for used cars.

In the new cars mag he gives the LS430 11/20 despite his colleague in the Times singling this car out above the Rolls/BMW-7/Merc-S competition as being particularly refined. The best score for any Lexus is 12/20. In comparison he gives the mini 16/20. All other mags give a higher rating than Clarkson.

In the used car mag he claims the LS400 MkIV can only achieve 0-60 in 8.3s instead of the official 6.9s. He gives the Mini the official figure of 7.4 and I know I've left a mini Cooper in my dust which was bugging my back-side and which then left me alone AND I WASN'T IN SPORT MODE! I've owned a VW Scirocco where the quoted time was 8.3s and I know my LS400 is quicker.

This isn't just Clarkson being too stupid as he was with not knowing that torque is the more important figure in 0-60 times.

This has now gone beyond a joke and Clarkson should definitely be sued for slander. It's alright saying that Lexuses don't break down and then the Hamster saying "I wish they would" but when Clarkson tells outright lies he's crossed a legal line and is committing an offence above and beyond being fat, stupid and incapable of driving a car.

I would have thought traction control would show up on snow and ice as a cut in power.

More likely is ABS when braking. You should get a judder as the ABS comes on and off rapidly.

VCS was shown on "Tonight with Trevor McDoughnut".

The reporter drove at 50mph and had to do a quick left-right maneouvre. He then switched it off and tried again and he lost control with the back end swerving round.

Mine's a 2000 MkIV with only 24,000 on the clock!!! Absolutely mint condition. I changed the alloys just as the warranty was running out and followed the detailaing guides on this website. The paint work is still good enough to not need polishing (only washing and waxing).

It's not for sale.

I haven't seen many other MkIVs second hand either. Guess they're quite rare. The handling is a big improvement on the earlier MkII which I test-drove and found was a bit spongy.

With MkIV you get the HID headlights, gas dampers, sat-nav, folding wing mirrors (the car measures 80" across with them folded garages start at about 82" wide), 0-60 under 7s, top speed limited at 155, 280bhp/293Lbft etc.

The US justice system is a pile of :tsktsk: !

Martha Stewart was jailed having committed no crime.

Lawyers careers do very well if they bag a high profile case.

There are also a lot of innocents in Jail in America because of daft ideas such as plea bargaining, where you plead guilty for a lighter sentence.

"The World's Greatest Conspiracys" programme shows that the pictures were faked, if not the whole trip.

There are two pictures which are supposed to be a couple of kilometres apart, yet the programme superimposed one picture on the other and the only differences were the props in the foreground.

Without any atmosphere, the flag appears to flutter.

Cross hairs supposedly etched onto the camera's optics show some were obscured by the props in the photos.

Also the shadows in the pictures are divergent when the only source of light was the Sun which is 93m miles away. Also pictures show the astronauts well lit even in shadows.

Also the rocket motors were too quiet on descent.

There was no dust on the LIM foot pads and no crater where the rocket motors would have been blasting.

The programme clams that the Russians never went to the Moon because the radiation outside the Earth's magnetic field is lethal.

The profits from this would have been huge.

grip & low noise is more important than wear.

the spare is a dunlop z8 & is new.

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D8z are grippy and quiet. You might want to consider tyre rotation too. If you wear them out evenly, you might get a discount if you buy a set at a time.

im happy really, one less grip on the automotive industry by the Germans :)

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Isn't Daimler Chrysler America's third largest car manufacturer after GM and Ford?

I've just purchased a MK 1 on a "J" plate with 142k on the clock and the magic carpet ride is so true.....so i would expect it to feel better on a later model.

:D

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I've got a very low mileage MkIV. I also tested a MkIII (possibly MkII can't remember which one). The MkIII was a lot more floaty. MkIV should go round corners a lot quicker than you expect and still be very stable. I wouldn't expect passengers to be thrown around.

Driving around a car park (ie slowly) with the window down it should be totally silent. On a motorway I can hear a slight wind-rush that's all. When I first bought it I used to put the gear in neutral and forget to put it back in drive but couldn't hear the engine when revved.

no there will be no  tooth fairy visit for him, swolen face fairy maybe! 

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So yoiu didn't see "Tonight with Trevor McDoughnut" then?

Four scenarios of an intruder in the house. The most dubious is where the intruder gets past the homeowner carrying some of his possessions, but the homeowner chases after him with a golf club, catches up with him as he's leaving his garden and kills him with a blow to the head. There was a senior cop on the show and I was flabbergasted when he said it was OK! Can't see the difference between this and the Fred Barras case except for the loot he was carrying.

You're obviously one of these softies who show burglars the menu and reserve wine list.

<abuse removed>

i think clarkson is great!

and we all make mistakes from time to time...

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Yes! But you wouldn't expect a doctor to not know the difference between an arse and an elbow.

Also luxury cars have the engines usually tuned for torque for effortless drivability whereas the Honda S2000 has a high revving low torque engine for thrashing about.

This is basically matches what I said. More torque (or rather torque at lower engine speeds) makes for relaxed driving whereas high revving engines can usually produce more power (which is what you want for thrashing about).

Well no.

Different engine configurations can produce more torque rather than a shift in the torque peak. They can also produce flatter (but usually lower) torque curves. I was talking about engine torque which is what the torque figures actually refer to. You seem to have gearbox fixation and seem to be missing the point completel and making the same mistake as Clarkson.

Also, I believe the specificaitons of the engine torque are at the engine end of the gearbox. Obviously, the gear box would change the amount of torque available at the wheels.

Confirmation that fat, balding, flatulent Clarkson doesn't even understand the basics about cars. In a drag race between the Vanquish S and the Ferrari 575 he says:

"I've got 5 more bhp than Coogan in the Ferrari but I'm carrying an extra 100Kg and it's the weight that's costing me this race"

But it's the torque that gives you the push to accelerate not the bhp which is more a determinant of the top speed. Clarkson is talking rubbish and can't even drive as quickly as Simon "Pop Idol" Cowell!

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Power is the product of torque and speed of rotation. Acceleration is affected by both the amount of power being transferred through the wheels and the mass of the vehicle being accelerated (as well as other factors such as air resistance).

There are two ways of making an engine more powerful:

1- Increase the torque it produces at a particular rpm.

2- Increase the maximum speed it can spin at (i.e. raise its rev-limit).

Whether the power is produced by lots of torque at a low engine speed or lots of engine speed with a low torque has no bearing on the power or torque at the wheels since different gear ratios can increase torque at the cost of speed or vice-versa. It will however have an effect on driving style. Most "relaxed" road users would prefer driving at low engine speeds (since it's quieter and will wear the engine less) so would benefit from a higher torque. "Enthusiastic" or racing drivers, on the other hand, won't care so much about such things so can benefit more from high-revving engines.

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I think it's a bit more complicated than that. Different engines as well as the gear ratios are important. I think I'm right in saying 2-valve engines, for example have more torque but less BHP than the equivalent 4-valve. Also luxury cars have the engines usually tuned for torque for effortless drivability whereas the Honda S2000 has a high revving low torque engine for thrashing about.

Whatever. The Stig seems to be a stand in for Clarkson's lack of driving abiilty, so I always feel cheated when Clarkson tries to drive a car on its limit. Like the Lotus which he couldn't get to slide but which one of the Lotus guys had to show him how.

Turtle Wax Color Magic works in the same way as boot polish to fill in the most minor of scratches; those swirl marks. That's why it stains your polishing cloth.

The Autoglym polish (like all polishes) has a fine abrasive to take the edge off the swirl scratches so they're less pronounced. My cars over 4 years old and still doesn't need this yet. I must be doing something right.

I've used the Autoglym gloss which just puts a protective barrier on top. The good thing is it's supposed to be left on for half an hour or so before polishing. So I always put the car in the garage to avoid dust before polishing it off. That way it spends less time outside if it's about to rain. There's no white residue and it doesn't stain the polishing cloth either.

There's full sections on cleaning, polishing and waxing your car. You'll probably find it under "Detailing".