Tips & Guides

A loose 20 kg dog hits with roughly half a tonne in a 50 km/h crash. A well-fitted crate strapped in the boot behind the rear bench is the safest option, a crash-tested harness the fallback. Germany, France, Italy and Spain can fine you; Belgium and the Netherlands only when the dog gets in the way.

About 3.6 kW on most cars, the same as one household wall socket: enough for a coffee machine, power tools or an e-bike charger. In an ADAC test, the cars also used 390 to 500 watts just to keep the socket live, so V2L suits big loads for short periods, not a cool box all weekend. And all six carmakers forbid using it in the rain.

In a tunnel, keep a bigger gap, switch on dipped headlights and never stop, turn or reverse. Some tunnels set their own gap: 150 metres at the Mont Blanc. If your car stops: hazard lights on, engine off, key left in, and call from the emergency telephone. If there is fire, walk to the nearest green exit sign.

Usually around 50 km. The light typically comes on with 5 to 8 litres left, and in an ADAC test every range display under-promised by 8 to 60 km. Running dry on a motorway is another matter: it can cost 70 euros and a point in Germany, 116 euros in Belgium and 35 euros in France. The Netherlands does not fine it.

At every fast charger of 50 kW or more built in the EU since April 2024, yes: it must take a bank card and show its price per kWh before you plug in. The card price can still be higher than the app price, by up to 62 percent in an ADAC check on German motorways. Keep the card as your backup, not your default.

Once a year, ideally at the end of summer, because sun and heat age the rubber more than wiping does. An obviously defective blade is a major fault at the roadworthiness test. And fill the washer bottle with screenwash, not tap water: a UK study linked plain water to around one in five sporadic cases of Legionnaires' disease.

A heat pump helps most in mild cold, not deep cold. Around freezing it can cut the energy used for heating by half or more, but at minus 10 the ADAC found no real advantage over a plain heater. Preheating on the cable and heating the seat first save more than the pump itself.

Motoring clubs put the limit at about 10 cm for an ordinary car and 30 cm for a genuine 4x4. Moving water is worse: 30 cm of current can carry a car away. And your insurer treats a car the flood came to very differently from a car you drove into the water.

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.