Tips & Guides

Your car drains rainwater through a handful of open holes, and every autumn leaves block them. Nothing warns you: the first signs are misted windows and a damp carpet, and the bill is corroded control units your insurer may refuse to pay for. A bottle of water and five minutes tells you whether yours are clear.

Open the door with the hand furthest from it. Reaching across your body rotates your shoulders and turns your head towards the traffic behind you, so the check happens whether you remembered it or not. A cyclist gets no warning at all from a door, which makes this one of the few collisions only the person inside the car can prevent.

The animal is almost never what hurts people. The tree, the ditch and the oncoming lane are, and all three are reached by swerving. Brake as hard as the car will let you, keep both hands on the wheel and hold your lane. Afterwards, call the police even if the car still drives, because the report number is what your insurer will ask for.

Relay theft does not copy your key. It carries the car's question to the key and the key's honest answer back. ADAC has run more than 850 models past the same equipment and only ultra-wideband cars refused it, so the first job is finding out which side your car is on. If it is not protected, a sealed pouch for every key, actually tested, is the whole defence.

Your EV does most of its braking with the motor, so the discs can go weeks without a pad ever cleaning them. Cast iron rusts within hours of getting wet, and the result is corroded discs and seized calipers on a car whose pads still measure nearly new. Two or three firm stops a week prevent most of it.

Repaying a car loan early is a right, not a favour, and since a 2019 European court ruling the refund has to include the arrangement fee and commission, not just the unused interest. What a lender is allowed to charge back, and why a lease works completely differently.

Your timing belt expires on two counts, kilometres and years, and the years keep running while the car sits still. A belt with 70,000 km on it can be three years overdue, and on almost every modern engine the failure costs more than the car is worth.

Radar cruise control filters out objects that are not moving, because a motorway is full of stationary metal it must not brake for. The dangerous moment is the car ahead changing lane to reveal a stopped queue, and automatic emergency braking is a separate system built to reduce impact speed rather than avoid it.

Almost every car with start-stop needs an AGM or EFB battery, and on most of them the replacement has to be registered with a diagnostic tool. Skip that step and the energy management keeps using the charging profile it worked out for the old, tired battery, which is how a new one ends up flat within two years.