If you’re unlucky enough to have your car stolen, there’s a very good chance it will end up in what’s known as a chop shop. There it will be dismantled or chopped up and its parts will either be sold to innocent consumers or used to repair wrecked cars.
There’s every chance you aren’t aware that you may have to pay up to £520 more in car tax from this month. When Confused.com asked drivers, nine out of 10 (87 per cent) weren’t aware of the changes to car tax rates that hit new-car buyers from April 2018.
The latest Vehicle Excise Duty (VED) is levied on new diesels as the government attempts to deter drivers from buying them. Read on to find out if you’ll be affected.
We all know running a car is an expensive business. But exactly how costly is it? Over an average driver’s lifetime, do you think motoring will cost tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of pounds?
Now we’ve got some answers. Two lots of research have come up with figures. While neither agrees with the other, both concur: running a car is more costly than many of us think. According to finance company MyJar, people will start forking out for motoring aged 17 and go on until they’re 80. MoneySuperMarket meanwhile looks at the cost over a car’s lifetime. Read on to find out what they think you’ll spend.
Recalls can be required for important safety equipment such as airbags
Thousands of cars sold last year have missed vital safety recalls, official figures show. The Driver Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) has revealed that 87,000 vehicles checked in 2017 had failed to have important safety recall work carried out.
On top of that, the vehicle’s current owners weren’t aware that they were possibly driving a defective vehicle. In an attempt to get on top of the problem, the DVSA has launched a new website. The aim is to make it easier for drivers to find out if their car has been recalled for a safety glitch they may not know about. Here’s why this is such a pressing problem.
Dealing with complaints for an entire year probably won’t seem like anyone’s idea of a good time. But that is exactly what the Motor Ombudsman was set up for. And after a year of resolving disputes between drivers and garages, the organisation says complaints remain high.
Founded last November, the Motor Ombudsman is a voluntary and fully impartial private sector organisation to regulate the motor industry. With a code of practice set out by the Chartered Trading Standards Institute, it offers drivers a free dispute resolution service. This covers areas including car sales, servicing, repair, and warranty problems. Read on to find out what’s been driving motorists round the bend in 2017.
Clocking a car is now easier than ever with a laptop computer
Drivers are being urged to keep their eyes open in an effort to beat car crooks. A new investigation has found villains are benefiting from car clocking not being thoroughly policed. They can then profit from selling mileage-altered motors illegally. And car owners have been warned to stay up to date with manufacturer recalls designed to thwart thefts of models featuring keyless entry.
Finding a cheap car isn’t difficult. There are more than 800,000 used cars for sale at any one time on websites such as Auto Trader, eBay, Exchange & Mart and Gumtree. And that’s in addition to other online sales sites both locally and nationally.
Buying a good one, however, calls for drivers to do their homework. We’ve created this checklist to help drivers buy the best motor for their budget and sort the good from the bad and the downright ugly.
It might not take that much damage for a car to be written off. But can it be put back on the road?
From October 2017 onwards, the insurance categories for damaged cars change. Where once these categorisations went neatly from A to D, they now go A, B, S, and N. The classes have been changed in a bid to ensure fewer dangerously crash-damaged cars end up being put back on the road. We look at what’s been done, what it means for drivers and whether it’ll make a difference.
Smoking isn’t just harmful to you and your passengers
We all know smoking is bad for us. But now there’s conclusive evidence that it’s harmful to our car’s health as well. Anyone who partakes in the evil weed will realise that smoking is an expensive hobby. But the impact on our pocket doesn’t stop with buying tobacco or cigarettes. It can keep on hurting us financially when we sell our cars too.
A new report by car valuation experts CAP HPI reveals that cars can lose as much as £2000 off their resale value if they’ve been smoked in.
Buy a cloned car in good faith and it is likely to be impounded by the police, and you’ll have nothing to show for your money
Most people will be familiar with identity theft. Criminals gain valuable sensitive information about an individual in order to impersonate them and take out loans or credit in their name. But how many drivers have heard of cloned cars? And even if the expression is familiar, how do you tell a fake, cloned car from a genuine model?
A cloned car is a model that has been stolen then given a new identity. This is generally by replacing its number plates with those from a car that’s the same make, model, colour and even age. It means that the car won’t register as dodgy in basic ID checks such as those from police Automatic Number Plate Recognition cameras.
It’s a problem that more drivers need to be aware of. Last week, eBay hit the headlines after it was revealed that organised criminals in Manchester had been using the popular car buying site to sell stolen cars as legitimate vehicles.
It means that when drivers fail to conduct full and thorough checks of a used car, they can end up handing over a small fortune for a car that will be taken off their hands by the police, leaving them with no car and no money. Meanwhile, the crooks vanish into thin air.
One victim, a retired police officer, lost £17,000 buying a Mercedes. Another paid more than £18,000 for a BMW that turned out to be stolen and was soon returned to its rightful owner by police, leaving him penniless.
These are the steps every used car buyer should take to protect themselves from buying a cloned car.