DG97

I’d agree with that. I used to put winter tyres on - about £280 for a set of 4 plus £80 each year to swap winter to summer and vice versa. We maybe had snow on one or two days where they did genuinely help out. At around 4-5 degrees, I don’t see a significant performance decrease of good quality summer tyres to warrant the cost in our climate anymore. If anything I feel that being that tiny bit more cautious does me more wonders than a set of winter treads 🙂

I noticed Sync maps can be quite slow too if you haven’t used your car a for a little while. I don’t think the cold temps do it many favours either. good to see your speed has improved though!

Putting an LED or a HID is currently illegal if put into a halogen housing. That’s the official standing anyway. If you have a projector housing, it’s less “obvious” that it’s an aftermarket mod and i don’t think a tonne of MOT testers would fail it just for this alone. It’s a very common mod but you’re always taking a risk you might need to revert back. Is it better than a 150%+ halogen? Hard to say as a lot of it is to do with how you “see” it. When I had mine, I didn’t think the beam reached any further. I did think it was a bit brighter than a standard halogen - I think quite a lot of the “upgraded” halogens are a bit of a con for the price difference with marginal difference. If you’re to pay £20-30 for a premium halogen, you might as well go Autobeam Led with a sale, spend £50-£60 and see how you feel.

I think this would be more expensive than we imagine. The bulbs are “sealed” into the unit so unlike in the halogen setup where you have a rubber cover you take off, this is not the case with the led projector variant. I imagine the bulb unit itself is fairly cheap but as it is sealed in, it almost certainly won’t be available as a stand-alone and you’d have to buy the headlight unit itself. I’d invest in a pair of autobeam ones and get them fitted. I had a set myself and was quite happy. Wait around until discount codes are active. More often than not there’s at least 10% sales on or even 25% for special occasions. With Black Friday around the corner, my guess would be there’ll be some discounts then

It's definitely a bizzare one! The legendary T5 engine is a four cylinder nowadays as well so not much to do with the 5 pot people rave about. I'd heard on an interview somewhere that Volvo are quite happy with the phase out of diesels on some of their models. The S60 launched and has continued with no diesels and they said that actually that's because the US and China is the target market with Europe getting a taste too but, as the US or China aren't that fussed about a diesel option, it makes no sense to offer it even in Europe.

To be fair, Volvo’s line up sort of made sense until recently when they introduced mild hybrid engines and badged them as B4, B5 etc, so you no longer get a T4,T5 or D4 or D5 engine, both diesel and petrol mild hybrids are badged as a B so it’s just confusing as you can’t tell the difference at first glance. I’m also unsure on the use of a B do badge an engine, makes it sound as if it’s bi-fuel with a cheap LPG conversion or something

The pics you’ve provided will be handy to a fair few people down the line I think! Hope the fitment goes well and that ultimately, you never need to use any of the recordings 🙂

My local Ford dealership has admittedly been polite pretty much all of the time but general level of service was disappointing. They’ve had the car in a few times for various jobs, mainly positive end result apart from one or two visits which ended up with nothing being fixed or no specific diagnosis given. However, quite a few times odd stuff happened, When trying to book a car in for an additional oil service, I was told it’s not needed and despite explaining that I wanted to do it as an extra, I actually ended up having to go elsewhere which all things considered was absolutely ridiculous. I wanted to buy a spare wheel to replace the kit, waited for a fair while before a call back to find that the set was significantly more expensive that what the former Ford parts website wanted for the alloy. Ford parts was about £50, dealer wanted £90 for the exact same part. I then enquired about the cost of another oil/oil filter change, this was about a month and a half - still waiting on the promised call back! You very often had to dig deep into a conversation to find out what the true issue was and what was done to resolve it and with all due respect to the people at service reception, you sometimes got the feeling they read off the job card without actually knowing what the hell it is they’ve just said. Now I know Fords are popular and this dealer does have large catchment area but based on the level of service, I felt I was a customer that didn’t really matter as they’d have people go there anyway so very much a case of if I said “I will take my business elsewhere”, they’d simply shrug it off as “yep,ok”

I’ve heard something about it being integrated but haven’t actually seen an implementation. Personally not sure I see the point, surely the only real need for a recording would be in the event of an accident at which point you’d download it anyway rather than view it on the screen

I imagine it’s a fairly standard dashcam branded as a Ford product. Going via the app isn’t anything new I suppose, thinkware dash cams go through their app too. At £268, I’d get as much info as possible as that’s a high price at which there is significant choice from other dashcam brands

I don’t personally know the advantages or disadvantages but as above, gear oil unlikely to do much harm anyway but if it gives a specific instruction to fill an x amount of oil, why not just put that in and you’ve then stuck by exactly what is says on the tin?

The genuine mats are well worth the purchase. Had a set on mine, great fit and very good quality

Always good to prep, especially seals to help extend their lifetime. Saying that, we don’t exactly get soviet-Russia style winters over here so I tend to think quite a lot of prep that people do nowadays is a bit overkill

In short, no there’s not much you can really do on the 1.25. It’s a non-turbo so any potential power gains are unlikely to be noticeable and trying to get more power out of it would just be a nightmare, so would engine swaps etc. My fair opinion would be to just stick it out and save for a more powerful car

I’ve came across this that could potentially do a job as a hard wire kit? https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/333729970117