I love my car.<\/p>\n
It’s not a flash sports car, it’s a 2-litre turbo diesel, five-door mid-range, executive-type thing.<\/p>\n
I like the drive; I can throw it up through the gearbox and get it in from stationary to cruising in sixth gear very quickly (the turbo has a lovely audible whine when I make it work hard).<\/p>\n
And I can throw it hard around corners, when it’s safe to do so, and I’m in the mood.<\/p>\n
But out on major roads, as soon as I hit cruising speed, which for me (because of the way I was taught to drive by specialists and, coincidentally, reinforced by the ex-Police motorcycle instructor who I did my Advanced Bike with) is the maximum speed limit, I switch on cruise control.<\/p>\n
I love cruise control, it propels me along at a totally consistent speed as the computer makes minor pace adjustments to take in to account gradients.<\/p>\n
And using cruise control gives me a phenomenal return on my MPG.<\/p>\n
I also love that cruise control shows me how inconsistent other motorists can be as they speed up\/slow down for no reason whatsoever.<\/p>\n
So yeah, a little bit of superiority just creeping in there. Superiority that is reinforced by the very many people who don’t know what the speed limit is on single-carriageway ‘A’ roads when the national speed limit applies, as I see them crawling past speed cameras at 40mph and 50mph. Twats.<\/em><\/p>\n I love that all of the doors on the car lock as soon as the car gets above 5mph, but will unlock the moment the airbags go off, in the event of a shunt.<\/p>\n Top Gear presenter and motoring journalist Jeremy Clarkson would hate it.<\/p>\n However this afternoon, as I was driving back from the stables in minus 3c (as displayed on the External Temperature Gauge), a new light flashed up on the dashboard.<\/p>\n I didn’t know exactly what it meant but the flashing warning triangle conveyed its own message and although I was extremely busy right at that moment I made a mental note to check the manual when I got home.<\/p>\n Irritatingly, the new signal quickly faded to black but as soon as I got home I checked the book.<\/p>\n Apparently it was a ‘skid warning’, designed to tell the motorist when the car is, erm, in a skid.<\/p>\n Now I’m all for helpful technology, but flashing up a warning triangle on the dashboard to tell me that the car is in a skid whilst I’m negotiating with the back-end of the vehicle and fighting a rear-end skid to keep the whole thing going forward and on the road… well, it just strikes me as a bit redundant.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I love my car. It’s not a flash sports car, it’s a 2-litre turbo diesel, five-door mid-range, executive-type thing. I like the drive; I can<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stuff","two-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2480"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2480\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}