Content by Rolfe in May, 2026

I think that's true, but I think all makes of car went through a period of being very shoddy as regards rust in the 1970s and then things got a lot better. Some makes were just worse than others, and I think Datsun was the absolute pits. Remember "Ziebarting"?

I'm not conceding that you haven't been offensively racist, if that's what you mean. I'm certainly not expecting any sort of apology, it's quite clear that's not going to be forthcoming, but the assertion that you can use any offensive language you like so long as you "didn't mean to be...

Wasn't he wearing the clogs?

My dad had a couple of Datsuns in the 1970s that pretty much rusted away before they were five.

Can't stop digging, can you?

Totally. My feelings entirely.

It happens. Although the pedant in me wants to know what happened to your grandfather's actual army-issue boots.

It kicked off because you used a lazy slur that conflates being good at budgeting one's personal finances with meanness. And then doubled down into grossly offensive terms when this was gently pointed out to you. I can do this all week if you insist.

That's very true. I've been very lucky to avoid it. It's a sad fact that the poorer you are, the more expensive things are. I remember the teacher at my primary school explaining what later became known as "Vimes' boots" to us, before anybody knew who Terry Pratchett was. She used socks rather...

Biker, drop it.

I've had quite a lot of stuff on interest-free credit, but apart from the inevitable mortgages, I have a serious aversion to paying interest.

I'm just remembering an earlier trip round the (half-built) M25 in summer, and I actually stopped, took off the overalls, strapped them to my rear carrier, and did the rest of the trip in shorts, t-shirt and motorcycling helmet (because that last was the law). Just as well nothing happened.

I do remember going to the war cemetery in Arnhem. Sobering experience.

I remember when I bought my first car. I'd been a university lecturer for over three years by then. I had been in the habit of saying that nobody could afford a car, they just bought them anyway. I was running around on a 125cc Honda. I had a good savings account at the time and interest rates...

OMG, my lips were sealed.

Nah, I just use the MG iSmart app.

Good luck with your new motor, and stay in touch.

I'm sure I was there when on cycling holidays in Holland in 1979 and 1980. Great country for bike holidays. I was just saying to the friend I went with that it would have been fantastic to have had e-bikes then, but of course there's no such thing. Interesting observation about the coffee cup...

I did a few evenings of binge-watching on YouTube when I decided to get an EV, and picked up the point about the winter range. I take the winter range as my baseline and summer is gravy.

Tragically, he went to the same school as I did, just many many years later (and after it became co-educational).

I keep reading this as "How did you find your MG" despite my near-perfect post-cataract-surgery eyesight.

His first name is Anas. He's the leader of the Scottish Labour Party.

My dealer replaced a door handle and the charging port lights, and fitted the undertray fix, all under warranty. And they're complete bastards.

Like I said, this is not an infantry training camp. Your humorous comments are offensive and racist to others. That you don't understand this does not leave you occupying the moral high ground.

I still think Mr Sarwar is more disadvantaged in that department.

You will not be in any hot water if you don't abbreviate words, add special characters, or put extraneous code in so that the letter-string is broken. And I'm just going to sigh weakly about the "racist comments" part, and go to bed.

It's up to the site owner to decide which words are banned. There are very few banned words here.

It's exactly the same as on another forum where I have been a member for over 20 years. On that one, the word "shit" is on the banned list. If you simply type "shit" it will appear as "****" and you don't get dinged for it. But if you type "sh[i ][/i ]it" (without the spaces) that will appear...

Yes, that's how it works. That way the banned words don't appear in the post, so no infraction has been committed, and this is fine. What is not fine is putting other characters into the word so that it appears either in clear or so little masked that it's obvious what it's meant to be. That's...

I got £4,000 from the insurance company when they decided to write off my Golf, and paid the rest cash, so I suppose that's just cash?

I wasn't criticising your post. I was using your post to highlight a rule that people are sometimes unaware of. A lot of people make a habit of "masking" words on Twitter and similar platforms, in the belief that an algorithm will downgrade their accounts if they type things like r-pe and...

I'm going to lock this thread, so take the conversation to the thread with the poll. Please feel free to re-post anything there that you already said here. Poll thread.

Range anxiety is a thing invented by Toyota to scare people away from buying EVs and push them towards hybrids, so that they (Toyota) could continue making a fortune out of the unreliability and regular servicing needs of the ICE. It doesn't really exist, any more than it does in ICE cars.

Lucky you. You are truly blessed.

I was hoping things would be worked out somehow.

Congratulations, that looks excellent. Did you say what sort of torque it has? How big is the battery? I didn't want rear suspension, partly because I've never been used to it, and partly because it seriously interferes with being able to fit a rear carrier rack and a saddlebag. But I'm looking...

Point about "disguising" words you think might be naughty. Don't do it. The way the forum is set up, if someone types a word on the (short) list of banned words, the autocensor will catch it and post something else. In this way there is no danger of the member receiving any sort of sanction for...

Welcome! Most of the anti-EV "horror stories" are the result of people who got the wrong car for their needs. Often it's because they looked at the headline WLTP range numbers and didn't factor in winter range (most important), and the fact that you're not going to run the car to 0% and on road...

Just don't come out with lines like "grip like a Scotsman to his wallet," and you won't encounter any bitterness.

So? Get back to me when someone calls you "Auld Enemy" as an insult.

It probably isn't any worse. That doesn't make it acceptable. Did you know that the Scots don't have any generic derogatory terms for English people?

But the historical reason for it is really interesting. (But "sweaties" is getting offensive.)

Any minute now I'll give you a historical explanation of the stereotype of the "mean Scot".

There have been attempts, notably by Tesla I think, to replace the lead-acid 12V with a lithium-ion equivalent, but these haven't always gone well. It'll probably happen at some point though.

You need an EV with vehicle to load, my lad.

Such versatility!

That works extremely well, although it wouldn't fit in the MG4. The levelling of the bed seems extremely handy. I have things I store under the foot end of the bed (or occasionally on top of the storage box under the head end) to approximate to the same effect. I still think folding down the...

99 dollars? That's £73 as of this morning. The one I'm going to pick up is £10. Presumably the Tesla one is more durable, but that's a huge price difference. Tesla branded products have always been extremely expensive though. It's possible that fancy shape might fit other cars too, it might fit...

You only live once. Go for something with 100 Nm of torque or close to it, and whatever other bells and whistles you fancy. It is actually legal to have a throttle that works only up to something like 3.5 mph, to help get you started on a hill, so it's perfectly possible that any bike with a...

The issue is if the car isn't topping up the 12V, I think, or if the 12V dies so hard the car can't revive it.

Do you know what torque rating your bike has? And what the gear ratios are? These seem to be the main determining factors of what sort of gradient you can get up. Do you have a walk assist? The new one I'm getting does, and hopefully that will be a big help when it does become necessary to push...

That ride was perfect for Hilda - mostly tarmac, and although there were hills, there was nothing steep enough to worry either of us at all. I don't think I was in bottom gear once. There was quite a stiff headwind on the way back but I just threw charge at it. Why bring the electricity if...

Since today looked like the only decent day for a fortnight I decided to forget the shopping and go for a bonus bike ride instead. The "Tweed railway path" that connects Peebles to the National Cycle Route 1 towards Galashiels. I can't see a reasonable circular route so it's an out and back. I...

Decisions, decisions... Decision arrived at.

Agreed.

I know what PVC is! That comparison doesn't really tell me how durable the viscose is. The PVC wasn't impressive.

Is that the actual wheel, rather than an aero cover?

I think that last is the important part. I'm home now and the best thing to do is chuck it out and replace it. I'm just slightly unsure whether just to get the £10 like-for-like replacement or go for the one marked "new". Here's the crux of the difference. Same thing as I have at the moment...

I think there was a repair kit with it when I bought it, but goodness knows where it is now. It's not in the bag where the repair kit for the 30-year-old one I threw away still is! (I could have given it a shot with Hilda's puncture repair kit which I was carrying, but finding the hole wasn't...

Well, I found the hole. (Weird picture. The airbed is dark blue.) It's on the top of the bed, the bit you lie on, so it's definitely not a case of a sharp object in the car. It seems to be a seam that has failed. It's probably about the part of the bed where I might lean my elbow if I was...

Lots of people have two or even three bikes, for different applications. If I was divesting myself of any of my mounts it would be the 27-year-old Giant, which has done absolutely sterling service but which is heavier than Hilda, has poorer gear ratios than Hilda, and no electrical assist. But...

😅

Baffled. Maybe something about not fishing things out of the loo? Why not?

Conversely, when I was there in the year of the Elbe floods, I asked the hotel owner at Kripp how high they'd had the water come when the Rhine flooded. He indicated a level about half way up the wall on the first floor breakfast room. I noticed that the ground floor was mainly car park and some...

No children, either.

It can make me a bit flustered and embarrassed sometimes, as if "does he think I'm decrepit or crippled or what?" but I smother that and smile nicely and say thank you, because that's the right thing to do. The opposite happened in Singapore. I'd spent the day sightseeing, hours in the vertical...

You can open doors for me, and indeed give up seats, any day you like!

Very similar to my reasons, except in my case it was two cousins of mine who had MG sports cars, again back in the sixties.

Get it while stocks last, I say.

I'm sure that's a good and healthy attitude, and no, I wasn't suggesting you wanted to impose that on everyone. I was just looking at it from the point of view of a shy man, embarrassed by the procedure and desperately not wanting attention drawn to what he was there for. As Gomev said, male...

Hilda is absolutely brilliant. As you switch on the assist you feel a little surge, and pedalling just gets easier. I'm going up gradients that would have had my heart sinking on my other bike, even 50 years ago. You get three assist levels though, and that's it. No more, and when you're in the...

I just don't think the men who take the sniggering in good part have the right to inflict it on the men who are upset by it. It's like my friend saying to me, well, I don't mind if men are allowed to use the women's changing room, and I say, that's all very well, but lots of women do mind, and...

Fair enough, but if "girls on reception" are giggling at men showing up for a vasectomy appointment, they need a stern talking-to. And if that doesn't work, a stern sacking.

Actually I don't think it's fair to men to have girls (or indeed women) around at all when something like this is being done. Women get a female-only setup for mammograms.

Surgeon playing mind-games. Interesting.

They wouldn't give you the choice now, no more than they'd give you the choice of a general anaesthetic for a tooth extraction. The risks of general anaesthesia are now recognised as not worth it for minor procedures that can be carried out under local.

I saw pictures of the MG4 in its Australian incarnation, and it has three "top tether points" on the back seats, whereas mine has two. Whether you can physically get three seats in is another matter.

What John said, really. However, what my optician said is interesting. When I was jumping up and down carrying on about how great my eyesight was post-op, she remarked, "I'm really looking forward to getting cataracts, because you end up with better sight than you started with." I asked her why...

There's one on Ardnamurchan too.

I get them as pop-ups all the time. I only ever bought five cars and never took out car finance on any of them. I did get over £10,000 back ten years ago from a mis-sold PPI thing. But I knew about that and I dealt with the bank directly about it. The actual loan was for £10,000, but since 23...

Fascinating. What the AI says makes perfect medical sense. (They're not always wrong and hallucinating!) The double vision will go. If necessary your brain will sort it out. I suppose I had such an uncomplicated surgery that nothing swelled up or got discombobulated in any way, and I did the 42...

I stayed in Kripp several times on my way to and from Bayreuth without realising the connection, but then the penny dropped when I was trying to find the address to book again (there's another, larger Kripp somewhere that interferes with search results). Someone said it's near Remagen, a suburb...

Memories of this, my "dining experience" at Mingary castle. https://www.mgevs.com/threads/over-the-sea-to-skye.22624/page-3#post-391720

I had an exam question at school in the late 1960s, and the answer was the price of 1 kwh of electricity. 6d. I presume that was what it actually cost then. I'm now paying 8 1/2 d.

Here's Wednesday's route, to Pirnmill and return the same way. 37.7 miles. I was more than half way round my originally-planned route when I turned back. And here's Thursday's, round the south coast and back to Lamlash via the Ross Road. 32.8 miles. Not bad for 35 Nm of torque, really...

On my lap licking my fingers.

Found a nice Italian restaurant just a minute from the car chargers at the harbour. Seafood risotto. Yummy. Home now. It's raining.

It can take a few days. My surgeon said not everyone gets the instant miracle I got. I know several people who had post-op issues who are fine now.

That's better. Even though it's the Daily  Mail. And the detail differs somewhat from the original claim.

If you can read a number plate at 25 yards, that's all they care about. I was getting concerned by my night vision but I was legal.

Another "some bloke down the pub said" story.

Eilean Bhòid. Be very very careful how you pronounce that. Also, never never omit the accent. https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/welcome-penis-island-blundering-scots-6309618 (I am still wondering if @siteguru is aware of that article.)

Cill Moire I think. Chapel of Mary.

Caliban had his spring valet on Monday. After three nights in a car park beside a beach, with me sleeping in the car, I'll leave the rest to your imagination.

Wow. As someone interested in where David Gilroy dumped Suzanne Pilley's body on 5th May 2010, I wish he'd been driving a car like that rather than a middle-aged Vauxhall Vectra. I imagine the police do too.

Now sitting in the ferry queue. I was early and pretty much first, but the queue quickly started to form behind me. Caliban is now on 17% SoC with 37 miles range (4.5 miles/kWh on my scenic drive). So that's three nights camping, 3.6 miles from the charger to my camp site and now 35 miles scenic...

Blimey! (I went through Kilmory on my way to the south end of the Ross Road yesterday. There was a bunkhouse there, where I sat and ate a few calories.)

Never been on Rum.

A few pics of the castle. The books turn out to be lowbrow things such as bound copies of fashionable magazines. Meticulously curated slaughter. Nice bedroom. With en suite. The catering department. Replica of the Goodwood Cup. Something to do with Hotspur and Lady Percy in...

Brodick Castle. I'm sure I've been here before. When I was a kid.

That's how I feel about it too.

It has been raining overnight, and although it's dry now, it's overcast. I slept just fine on the kiddie mattress, although I'm a bit stiff, probably because I did two quite long rides back to back. If it stays dry I'll cycle up to Brodick Castle for a look round, then find lunch, then drive...

People keep nagging me to wear a cycle helmet. From when I first got on a pony age seven, I was forced to wear a riding hat. From when I first got on a motorbike age 25 I was forced to wear a motorcycling helmet. LEAVE MY BICYCLING STYLE ALONE.

No chance mate. Great night here. Kiddie mattress fine. Must get up soon. Going home today. Cat needs fed.

You sound like me in June 2022. Absolute miracle. (I had both eyes done at once as I think I said.) My eyesight is fantastic. Instant recovery, no issues at all. Driving my car the following day. All the best for round 2.

The latter, obviously!