The new news 24 thread

[bunglebus]

Is it me or is this a bit cheeky? Car is on the drive, taxed but no MoT currently 

[comfortablynumb]

10 minutes ago, bunglebus said:

Is it me or is this a bit cheeky? Car is on the drive, taxed but no MoT currently 

Had a similar threatening letter for the range rover of too many wheels, insurance had lapsed, MOT exempt, but still taxed, because I hadn't bothered doing anything about it, and obvs it's tax exempt too.

TAX OR SORN NOW OR WE SEND THE BOYS ROUND 🤣

[Zelandeth]

33 minutes ago, bunglebus said:

Is it me or is this a bit cheeky? Car is on the drive, taxed but no MoT currently 

I don't think so.  It is in breach of the rules after all, even if it may come across as petty.

A LOT of people don't ever think about things like this and would be completely unaware their insurance had lapsed as well - so this would be useful in their cases.  Better this than getting pulled over and your car impounded and fines.

[Markeh]

Hopefully some good news on my friend's 2008 today - to recap, 2 months ago she bit the bullet and got the cambelt done (15 plate with the 1.6 e-HDi lump, was due on age but not quite on mileage) at the best part of £1k with some other bits. Then the traction control started throwing codes, knocking out hill hold and cruise intermittently. Then 5th gear left the chat. Then the front brakes were about ready for doing, so we talked about where she could go that weekend to just get those sorted until the garage near her work could get it in to sort the gearbox. Not 12 hours after this conversation she stacked it down my stairs and broke her leg, which has naturally put paid to driving for a bit.

The garage her family normally use (which because they only work weekdays she normally doesn't, as she'd have to take time off to use them) were scaremongering with over the phone suggestions of £2k+. Fortunately her mother had looked up some local gearbox specialists, and today I went over (she doesn't have third party on other cars or drive manuals any more) and hit gold with the first one we found. Old school manual gearbox specialists, yep it's a common fault, bring it in Monday, about £500, haven't even got to drop the box, we can get the garage across the way to look at the other faults once that's done (particularly keen on getting her cruise going again because it'll help with her leg once she is safe to drive again). He did clock a potential coolant leak, mind, and was kind enough to top it up for us. Exactly the sort of specialist I hoped we might be able to find.

Let's see if it works out. Other than those faults the car drives absolutely fine, and once she's got it sorted it should need nothing save for a clutch in the future.

[SiC]

2 hours ago, bunglebus said:

Is it me or is this a bit cheeky? Car is on the drive, taxed but no MoT currently 

Not if you haven't SORN'd it. If taxed, it needs to be insured. If not insured then it needs to be declared off the road with a SORN. That's just what the law is. 

Only cheeky thing is that the tax you loose from doing so if there is a short period where it's not on the road and you don't want it insured. 

[barefoot]

A couple of more obscure issues of Jalopy on ebay this morning;

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/206027703385?mkpid=0&emsid=e11021.m164380.l178264&ch=osgood&euid=60da24fbf9ba42ba8d870a2f576b2d21&bu=43132799590&ut=RU&exe=0&ext=0&osub=-1~1&crd=20260127012011&segname=11021&recoId=206027703385&recoPos=1

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/305735842583?mkpid=0&emsid=e11021.m164382.l178272&ch=osgood&euid=60da24fbf9ba42ba8d870a2f576b2d21&bu=43132799590&ut=RU&exe=0&ext=0&osub=-1~1&crd=20260127012011&segname=11021&recoId=305735842583&recoPos=2

[lesapandre]

Number of US-style ‘battering ram’ pickup trucks on UK roads has nearly doubled in a decade

Usual 'news' story.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/27/us-style-pickup-trucks-uk-roads-up-data-shows

[Markeh]

8 minutes ago, lesapandre said:

Number of US-style ‘battering ram’ pickup trucks on UK roads has nearly doubled in a decade

Usual 'news' story.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/27/us-style-pickup-trucks-uk-roads-up-data-shows

Amazing how at no point the article mentions one of the main reasons there'll be more of them on the road, the BIK situation for double cab trucks prior to April.

[The Vicar]

Check this out, stopped by traffic plod in Ireland over the weekend..

[comfortablynumb]

1 hour ago, The Vicar said:

Check this out, stopped by traffic plod in Ireland over the weekend..

Now, if he'd towed the Agricultural trailer on the road, and piled the others on top, "Agricultural innit mate! All good here..."😁

[High Jetter]

2 hours ago, The Vicar said:

Check this out, stopped by traffic plod in Ireland over the weekend..

Why? Was he speeding? 🤣

[beko1987]

Had someone park their massive blobby modern fake SUV next to my smaller middle aged fake SUV today

[PhilA]

What an odd thing. 

Everything's covered in frost. 

The roof tells me the air duct above my desk needs looking at, it might be leaking, or it might be the tube is up against the inside of the roof, I'll take a look at that.

It's set to get even colder, -5°C on Thursday. 

Before you foo-poo that away, keep in mind I'm the same latitude as Morocco and Western Sahara. It doesn't really get cold here. We're sub-tropical. Last year's snow was weird, but we're seeing this flip-flop into cooler winters now with milder summers. Unusual. 

Reminds me I need to call and order a starter motor for the Pontiac. 

Phil

[JJ0063]

Finally have full fibre!

 

Had FTTC round here for donkeys years and being in rural Norfolk, I never thought we’d see the day of actually getting fibre. Had an email in November saying the ducting is now in and we can put an order in. 
 

Morrison data were subbed the job and came out last Thursday and put the ONT in but the lad was a lazy cunt and said he couldn’t get the fibre to the house because his rod wouldn’t fit the ducting (bullshit)

Openreach came out this morning, opened the lid on the path and found the rope that the dig team had kindly already fed (so didn’t need rodding anyway) and fitted the fibre. 
 

gone from 40mb to 450mb so it’s a nice difference for £4 extra on the BT bill!

 

[PhilA]

Nice. GPON or XGS?

[JJ0063]

2 minutes ago, PhilA said:

Nice. GPON or XGS?

Internet 

How would I find out? 😂

[PhilA]

12 minutes ago, JJ0063 said:

Internet 

How would I find out? 😂

Well.. if they let you buy 2Gbps or more up/down then it's XGS.

They just went nerdy with the naming, using the Roman numeral X for "ten" so  XGS, Ten Gigabit Symmetrical.

The other way is with a laser meter and see what color of light is coming your way. A spectral peak at 1590nm is XGS. Or you can just ask the installing engineer. 

More likely is they're rolling that out in the city and you're getting the old hardware installed in the sticks. It's good for the environment, recycling. 

 

Phil

 

TL;DR:- Don't worry about it, it'll be better than what you had...!

[JJ0063]

18 minutes ago, PhilA said:

Well.. if they let you buy 2Gbps or more up/down then it's XGS.

They just went nerdy with the naming, using the Roman numeral X for "ten" so  XGS, Ten Gigabit Symmetrical.

The other way is with a laser meter and see what color of light is coming your way. A spectral peak at 1590nm is XGS. Or you can just ask the installing engineer. 

More likely is they're rolling that out in the city and you're getting the old hardware installed in the sticks. It's good for the environment, recycling. 

 

Phil

 

TL;DR:- Don't worry about it, it'll be better than what you had...!

It’ll be the shit one. The package says Fibre 500 on my account. 
 

This is Norfolk, I imagine some of my neighbours are still on dial up and fax machines.

[comfortablynumb]

I live in Norfolk.

What's internet?? 😁

[EyesWeldedShut]

1 minute ago, JJ0063 said:

It’ll be the shit one. The package says Fibre 500 on my account. 
 

This is Norfolk, I imagine some of my neighbours are still on dial up and fax machines.

We're on copper to the cabinet - 10 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up. Near neighbours can get 45/8  as they have overhead fibre to the boundary then copper. The guy right next to the fibre mini-cabinet has the luxury of 80/20.

On a 4G Sim router I can almost get that 80/20 so we flicked off the landline around 2019 until such time as the Information Superhighway reached us. Funnily enough, still waiting. (Did I mention there are no dual carriageways in this county?  )

(This is not a problem in itself but if the streaming services etc keep upping their bandwidth/stop sending 720K stuff then we'll be in the old Digital Poverty world that I keep telling students about)

 

[PhilA]

We serve some very rural areas. There's a lot of new fiber going in, and anything as of the middle of last year is ten gig. No more GPON going in. 

This project has been teetering on the edge and put on hold far too much, big government scheme. 

[stuboy]

Thought id splash out some parts for the Honduras as they looked like been on  there for a while

[SiC]

7 minutes ago, stuboy said:

Thought id splash out some parts for the Honduras as they looked like been on  there for a while

There is a good chance those bits are far worse quality than what is on there and have the large possibility of causing running issues.

Generally with Honda's, those sort of bits are good for the life of the vehicle and don't break. 

[The Vicar]

Nice little result on this ex-nun Corsa I picked up last week:

Couple of advisories for 6+ year old tires but a clean bill of health for 15 months. If I didn’t buy it they were going to ring the scrapman!

[artdjones]

32 minutes ago, The Vicar said:

Nice little result on this ex-nun Corsa I picked up last week:

Couple of advisories for 6+ year old tires but a clean bill of health for 15 months. If I didn’t buy it they were going to ring the scrapman!

They are pretty durable, especially the 1.2 version. The 1.0, not so much. 

A friend of mine had a 1996 1.2 in black which got sideswiped onto the top of an Armco barrier in the middle of Cork, by a BMW that had had a blowout. The four people inside escaped any very serious injuries.

[Split_Pin]

No subframes in a B so as long as the front suspension mounts are OK, plus the rear spring seats, you're good. Mine rotted everywhere but I got it fixed up.

The 1 litre on mine eventually cut out on me after months of unsolved misfire issues. It tapped when it restarted so I ragged fuck out of it on purpose. I got a replacement engine from a grass track racer for fifty quid and it lasted another 7 years. 4 banger 1.2 definitely the one to go for.

[AnthonyG]

12 hours ago, lesapandre said:

Number of US-style ‘battering ram’ pickup trucks on UK roads has nearly doubled in a decade

Usual 'news' story.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/27/us-style-pickup-trucks-uk-roads-up-data-shows

What a lot of rubbish. I thought for a second this was about UK imports of American spec Dodge Rams, Chevrolet Silverados etc, but it’s just about perfectly normal UK market ones. Usual eco warrior press release guff, which will only get reported by the Guardian and maybe that scruffy git on the BBC. Amusing to note that the market stats about the ‘most popular’ include two that haven’t been available new for quite a while, the Navara and the L200. Rust will do its bit for road safety by eating its way into Navara chassis! 

I assume the BIK changes will reduce the popularity of the double-cab ones, but then, if these will have the exemption from the ZEV mandate out to 2035 in the way vans will, they will stay popular.

[lesapandre]

7 minutes ago, AnthonyG said:

What a lot of rubbish. I thought for a second this was about US imports of Dodge Rams, Chevrolet Silverados etc, but it’s just about perfectly normal UK market ones.

I assume the BIK changes will reduce the popularity of the double-cab ones, but then, if these will have the exemption from the ZEV mandate out to 2035 in the way vans will, they will stay popular.

And given the state of current road surfaces and that a lot of pick-ups are actually used as pick-ups by trades and farmers etc it is not surprising they are about.

I'm not sure how Guardian writers expect the world to function - they will still want someone to come round and re-roof their house in a pick-up 😂

But hey-ho. I post these news items for information and to inform on what's apparently important to some.

[AnthonyG]

You read the Guardian so we don’t have to - it’s a public service!

*I lie, I look at it most days. It’s still just about free to use and despite the obvious bias, much better than the BBC website, which is frankly shit. Half their ‘news’ is about the comings and goings on their own bloody programmes! 

[artdjones]

14 minutes ago, lesapandre said:

I'm not sure how Guardian writers expect the world to function - they will still want someone to come round and re-roof their house in a pick-up 😂

They are usually humanities graduates, so any knowledge of how anything practical in the world works would be purely fortuitous. In any case, anything liked by actual working people is something to be sneered at, in their minds.

The Mums for Lungs lady sounds like a total bed wetter in the throes of a moral panic. A 2.5 litre pickup doesn't cause any extra emissions over any equivalent vehicle. Maybe it would be a good idea if mothers taught their children not to stand or run out in front of motor vehicles, which is what my mother taught me