Tips & Guides

Recall work is free for the life of the car, whoever owns it and whatever the warranty says, but the notice goes to whoever the register believes owns it. One Belgian Car-Pass document in eight reports an open recall, and 877,401 vehicles on Dutch plates carry one that has never been reported as repaired. Three minutes with your VIN closes the gap.

A wheel out by half a degree scrubs about nine metres sideways for every kilometre you drive, which is why toe rather than camber is the angle that destroys tyres. The wear pattern tells you which angle is wrong, a free tyre swap tells you whether the pull is geometry at all, and the EU roadworthiness directive lists the alignment check as one that is not essential.

European diesel is blended for the local climate, and the pump never tells you which grade you got. A tank filled in southern Spain is rated for a Spanish winter, and it is still that fuel when you park it in the Alps. Fill in the cold country before a mountain leg, and never try to thin a modern diesel with petrol.

Nine and three takes one second to adopt and it is the last free safety change left in your car. A driver's airbag leaves its cover at between 160 and 320 km/h and the whole event is over in twenty to thirty milliseconds, which is why hands held high on the rim end up in your own face and thumbs hooked through the spokes end up in a surgeon's case report. Set the seat for at least 25 cm between your sternum and the airbag, move your hands to nine and three, and lay your thumbs along the rim.

A plug-in hybrid can be the cleanest or the thirstiest car in your street, and the deciding habit is free. On-board data from 981,035 European plug-in hybrids shows private owners driving 45 to 49 percent of their kilometres on electricity and company cars 11 to 18 percent, against the 70 to 85 percent the type approval assumed. Plug in every evening, then hold the battery back for the town instead of emptying it on the motorway.

An electric car showing 90 percent on the dashboard can be every bit as immobile as one showing nothing. Everything that wakes the car up runs on an ordinary 12-volt battery, and the high-voltage pack cannot help until that battery has enough left in it to close the contactors. European breakdown data puts the 12-volt battery behind slightly more than half of all callouts to electric cars. Find your jump points, your manual door release and your emergency key blade before the morning you need them.

Recirculation is the fastest air quality improvement available to a driver, and it expires. On full recirculation the share of outside fine particles that reaches the cabin drops to roughly a tenth, but cabin CO2 passes 2,500 ppm within 15 to 20 minutes with two people aboard, and within about five with four. Use it for the tunnel and the traffic jam, then open the flap again before the glass mists and your concentration goes.

A head restraint only works if it is high enough and close enough, and it is the second test that people fail. The international rating protocol calls the geometry good when the top of the restraint sits no more than 6 cm below the top of your head and no more than 7 cm behind it. An Austrian check on 1,185 front-seat occupants found 53 percent set correctly, 41 percent slightly off, and 6 percent with no protective effect left at all.

eCall is free, dormant and built into every car type approved since 31 March 2018. It dials 112 on impact and sends your position, your direction of travel, how the car is powered and how many belts were fastened. The catch is the modem: in cars built from 2018 it usually speaks only 2G or 3G, and as those networks close a study for the European Commission puts up to 64 million vehicles at risk of a silent failure your dashboard will never mention.