Tips & Guides

Lighting faults and worn tyres cause a large share of roadworthiness failures across Europe, and both take minutes to check at home. Walk around the car with the lights on, read the tread wear bars in your tyres, top up the washer fluid, and make sure no warning light is showing on the dashboard. A retest costs time and money that this checklist usually saves.

Brake fade on a long descent is not a supercar problem, it is a loaded-family-car problem, and it comes from asking the brakes to do the gearbox's job. Descend in roughly the gear you would need to climb the same slope, brake firmly and briefly instead of dragging the pedal, and never coast in neutral. EV drivers should start a long descent at around 80 percent charge so regenerative braking still has somewhere to put the energy.

A low coolant level can turn a hot afternoon on the motorway into a roadside breakdown, and the check takes less time than filling up with fuel. Know where the expansion tank is, what MIN and MAX actually mean, and which warning signs point to a leak rather than normal evaporation. Electric and hybrid cars need the same check for their battery cooling, not just combustion engines.

Flash charging pushes enormous power, up to around a megawatt, into a battery in a short burst, and BYD claims it can add about 400 kilometres of range in five minutes. The idea started with buses topping up at their stops and is now reaching passenger cars. For now the catch is that only a handful of cars and chargers can actually do it, so for most drivers it is a preview of where charging is heading.

Electric cars do wear tyres faster than comparable petrol cars, by around 20 percent, because they are heavier and their motors deliver instant torque. It is real, but largely manageable: EV-specific tyres recover most of the gap and a smooth driving style does the rest. The one genuine downside that gets little attention is that heavier EVs shed more tyre particulate matter.

Parking with two wheels on a kerb rarely hurts your car while it sits there; suspension holds the weight at an angle fine. The real damage happens when you mount or dismount, and it lands on tyres and wheels first, above all a hidden sidewall bulge that cannot be repaired. Take it slow and straight, and remember that across most of Europe pavement parking is not allowed unless a sign permits it.

Straightening your wheels when you park is mostly about safety and habit, not overnight damage. What actually strains your power steering is holding full lock with the engine running. On a slope, the way you leave your wheels decides whether a runaway rolls into the kerb or into traffic.