Oh Dear

[Guest timswait]

Turned on the news this morning and heard this. Turns out the AA wants tougher rules on nasty dangerous things that make your car go quicker like nitrous oxide. And I thought the AA were meant to be on our side.

[Grizzly]

Yes. Apparently (according to the nice AA man on the TV this morning) Nitrous Oxide can give me 200bhp more. Jerk.

[Guest timswait]

Yes. Apparently (according to the nice AA man on the TV this morning) Nitrous Oxide can give me 200bhp more. Jerk.

Probably could. For about the half second it would take for various internal components of the engine to part company and become external!

[agent_zed]

well it makes your footwells fall off in fast and the furious so it must be pretty potent

[Guest Dan_Beeston]

Everyone knows the risks of new drivers, we were all there (I nearly killed myself in a car at 17 by driving outside my capability)

 

But why taget modified cars? What stops a new driver going out & buying a Corvette?, or a 15 year old Porche 911 ditchfinder and putting themselves (and others) at just the same risk. Modified cars are a stupid scapegoat for yet more leftist thinking........

 

Of course I only drive standard cars, my 2B is to the exact spec I designed it to be

[Guest manglemender]

When I was a lad, a mate from the next village passed his motorbike test on a little bike, bought a Kawasaki 900 and wrapped it round a lamp post within a week - killed him! These days, getting a licence for that sort of bike ins't so easy - with good reason

 

Maybe we need a sort of "Apprenticeship" scheme for young drivers similar to that which bike drivers go through. Maybe first two years in a car with limited power to weight ratio, limited engine size and only one passenger, then a further test to prove competency to drive a more powerful car?

 

Powerful cars don't scare me - it's the drivers!

[Guest TerryBarry]

They're all at it today.

King Boris was just on the radio extolling us to go out and buy a Tesla.

Nice idea - BUT at £ 87,000 I'm not going to buy one unless Gordon ( may his name be praised) announces a considerable subsidy (circa 95%) for me to trade in my current petrol engined device

[Swan Jnr]

the aa press muppet this morning made me want to throw something at the telly. shocking the sh one T spouted on national TV. exactly where was the story? where were the facts?

 

ok so the AA "think" its a bad idea that young people modify cars. fine. ok show me some facts that demonstrate that people in modified cars make up a disproportionate % of the 500 deaths per year? what no? you dont have any? seemingly not. so tell me again why you went to the BBC (and more to the point why they even aired such tripe)

 

when did it become ok just to make statements and not back them up? what exactly do the AA expecte to get from this? are they actually trying to lobby government to restrict engine sizes for new drivers? raise their own profile?

 

whatever they want, for me all they have to do is show some real figures, scientifically collected that suggest that their hunches are backed up by facts and maybe its then worth a lisen, otherwise its just a silly publicity stunt that reflects poorly on all concerned.

 

paul

[speedtripledan]

well it makes your footwells fall off in fast and the furious so it must be pretty potent

And they were only doing about a 100

 

Dan

[Guest sritony]

Been youngish still I think that yes done up cars are a small problem, but from my days of having a 1 lt corsa with stickers on, light maskings etc and spending the odd night at silverlink retail park the problem was caused by a few rather than the many, the people who spend 1000's on cars ain't going to be causing too much bother when some little chav trys to do me off the roundabout hes normally in a clapped out banger not a 20k skyline with nitros.

 

Its usually down to lack of experience, impressing a girl and learning the hard way that kills most of these people, When your getting on, settled down like me your more worried about MPG and keeping petrol to last longer haha! and keeping the gf from nagging too much!

[speedtripledan]

I used to have my breakdown with them but after one rather bad experience i would not touch them with a barge pole, In 2003 i had a really bad run of luck started with my lpg car blowing up a few times next i had 3 bike engines blow up for various reasons then my girlfriends car had the steering wheel snapped off by an attempted theft all had to be recovered then the cherry on the cake i crashed my bike 1:30am on the cat and fiddle on the way back from some where called the AA but due to the amount of call outs that year they wanted me to pay over the phone £165 pounds before they would send anyone out i was injured in shock and very cold (November high up in the peak district ) i explained this to them but the could not care less. 2.5 hrs later a 7.5tonne recovery truck found me the guy in it was quite old and did not have the strength to move my bike and wanted to winch it up on its side with a hook through the front wheel. it only had scratches and a broken clutch lever. i had to do it or have the bike trashed further (3rd party fire & theft) i was in a lot of pain with my shoulder.

even after complaints about the service nothing i,d been a member for years prior to that with very few call outs.

 

Moral of the story is don,t use the AA and have fully comp insurance and don,t ride sports bikes over the peaks in the small hrs ice and bikes don,t mix.

 

Dan

[Guest george_lincoln]

I heard them going on about it on radio 1 today too.

 

Didn't really hear much detail, unless you catch the long bulletin you don't really get any.

 

Surely the people who invest in their cars to modify them won't want to have to redo all their work by trashing the car.

[Joel]

Slightly off topic, but did anyone hear the story a few days ago about making us all have florescent seat belts?

 

No wonder the country's skint - we're paying teams of muppets to sit around and think up ever more ridiculous ideas

[trextr7monkey]

I was with AA from 1981 until a few years ago when I discovered that a series of annual increases meant I was paying 2 x the rate they were advertising to new members. Naturally I wa straight on the phone and got something like a 50% decrease but I felt conned so ditched them the next year. Now get recovery built into M and S insurance and buy a seperate policy for the kits so as not to antagonise my wife. My view is that the AA has reached the point where they believe their own publicity and have lost the point of their original organisation.