It’s an obvious thing, but not so obvious that I haven’t been caught twice in the last month. When buying a secondhand car, or just the secondhand tyres off a car, check every tyre!

To the latter first. Recently someone in the small town in which I live advertised the tyres from an EF Falcon. ‘Near new’ said the ad. Since at that time I still owned an EF Falcon, I rang up. The seller didn’t know the tyre size but dutifully went away and checked. The size was right, so I went off to inspect the tyres.

Much to my surprise, I found that the tyres – and wheels – were still on the car! A wagon, it had spun and hit a tree. The car was a write-off, but the owner was trying to recoup more than she’d have got from a wrecker. So, the tyres (and wheels) were for sale, as was the engine. Trouble is, she didn’t tell anyone that you’d have to get them off (the wheels) or out (the engine) on your own!

This flummoxed me a little, especially when I pointed out that if I took the wheels and tyres off the car, it’d be awfully hard to move around her steep, grassy backyard – that’s where the car was. So, I suggested, perhaps she should place the car where it would be easy to winch, wheel-less, onto a truck when it was time for the car to finally go. I looked at a couple of the tyres, saw the brand-new tread, and made an offer. She accepted, so I went off for my trolley jack.

It was only when I was taking off the wheels that I noticed that in fact only two tyres were near-new. The other pair was probably half worn. But it was too late to complain… I should have checked the tyres more carefully before making my offer…

And blow me down if the same thing didn’t nearly happen again! This time I was buying a complete car. With the incident of the Falcon tyres still very clear in my mind, I checked with more than usual care the tyres on the car I was buying – a Peugeot 405 SRDT. And, again, there was a surprise in store.

Incredibly, the sizes front and back didn’t match. Now that might not be a shock on a Porsche 911 but it certainly is on a Peugeot 405! The correct standard tyre size for the Pug is 185/65 14. But lo and behold, on the back were 185/70 tyres! I quizzed the owner and he waved away the problem with a sweep of his hand. But why were they different? Oh, he said indifferently, perhaps his son had been responsible for getting those put on the car…

So, as I said, always check all four tyres….

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Yesterday I reckon I spent more time eating than driving.

I attended the launch of the Hyundai i30 in Sydney, an event paid for by Hyundai. And ‘paid for’ meant flying me down to Sydney from Brisbane (normal class), bussing me to the Sebel Pier One hotel for an overnight stay, giving me breakfast (normal hotel dining room), walking to a reinvented warehouse, watching a presentation on the car, driving it a short way before food and drink refreshments, driving it back to the starting point for a 3-course celebrity chef prepared meal, taking a stretch limo back to the airport, and then flying home.

I have real problems with this approach to launching a car. If a car company wishes to gather journalists at one location – and there were something like 20 present – then I guess paying for the flights is fine. But for a single day event, surely an overnight stay is not needed. Maybe even the refreshments at the drive stop are acceptable – although it seems to me that if the stop was placed near a shop, anyone who needed food or drink could buy them for themselves. After all, if they weren’t attending a Hyundai new car launch, everyone there would still need to eat.

But I can see no reason for a three-course lunch (In fact, when I think about it, four courses – there were deep-dried dates wrapped in some pastry or other to start with), waitresses at hand, preceded by a spiel from the chef. I think that this clearly falls into these categories warned against in the Australian Journalists’ Code of Ethics:

4. Do not allow personal interest, or any belief, commitment, payment, gift or benefit, to undermine your accuracy, fairness or independence.

7. Do your utmost to ensure disclosure of any direct or indirect payment made for interviews, pictures, information or stories.

And if you think a swanky lunch could not be construed as a ‘gift or benefit’ and certainly not as an ‘indirect payment’, you might also want to know that every journalist that attended the launch was handed, as a gift, a 4GB iPod nano.

So if you’d like to win a brand new iPod nano, tell us below how you think a 1-day new car launch should be run. I’ll announce the winner after a week.

PS: And the car? The diesel version looks like a genuine groundbreaker – and one that we’d like to do a long drive in…

PPS: Read widely and see how many journalists who covered the launch of the i30 disclose the gift…

PPS: When switched on, the iPod shows itself to be empty. However, when plugged into a PC, the full press pack for the i30 appears. But as far as I can see, the entire contents were also on the provided CD…

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EBay is a weird and wonderful place. As I’ve implied previously, I love it. I bid on eBay probably every day of the week – and my greatest love is buying books. Unlike so many other secondhand (and, for that matter, new) goods, at least with books you’ll know that they’ll ‘work’ and the freight bill is unlikely to be huge.

I especially like automotive books – or, more generally, transport books – and so when I come across a cheap gem, my fingers bid as fast as I can strike the keys. But unfortunately, over the last few years, the starting price of many car books has risen dramatically.

When I am selling a book on eBay – any book – I figure the minimum price needs to be around $5; if the books are clearly worth less than that, I bundle them. So I am not expecting books to start at 50 cents. But when books are listed with a starting price of fifty bucks – and the next week another vendor has the same book at $10 – you start to wonder at the book’s true value.

This was the situation when I first saw on eBay The Last Onslaught on Detroit. The book, which appeared to be about the demise of car maker Kaiser-Frazer, appealed to me in much the same way that books about the demise of the British car industry in the period after WWII fascinate me. The subtitle – An Intimate Behind the Scenes Study of the Postwar American Car Industry – looked promising… more than a marque history; perhaps context and manufacturing pressures and commercial competition.

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Those of us who are not full-time workers on cars, but instead are enthusiasts who don’t get their hands dirty on a daily basis, are most likely to benefit from this product.

So what is it? It’s an antiseptic liquid that you dispense from a pump-pack and then wipe over your hands. The stuff dries quickly and doesn’t leave a sticky residue.

I find it particularly effective when I cut my hands (looking now I can count six minor cuts, three of which are open) as very often heavy duty hand cleaners have the unfortunate side-effect of infecting cuts.

So you’re working on brakes or an engine or bodywork and, at the time you inflict a minor cut on yourself, your hands are filthy. If the cut or abrasion is of little consequence, you leave it and then later clean your hands with a heavy duty soap or dedicated hand cleaner.

And if that’s all you do, it’s likely the open wounds will get infected.

But if after cleaning your hands, you give them a wipe-over with Dettol Instant Hand Sanitizer, the later infection is avoided.

There may well be other products that work in the same way – it’s just that I haven’t come across them. For minor cuts and abrasions it’s much better than the antiseptic cream you might apply to a more serious wound – you can quickly and easily spread the sanitizer over both hands by just squeezing some of the liquid onto a palm and then rubbing your hands together. It doesn’t need to be wiped off – it then evaporates.

The product costs $5 or $6 and it’s available at supermarkets.  Note that it’s highly inflammable, so use it on your hands only after you’ve left the workshop…

(And no the sample wasn’t a freebie – I bought it just like anyone else.)

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I needed to pick up a press car in Brisbane and drive it home. Living inland from the Gold Coast, that seemed easy enough. Get dropped off at the railway station. Hop on the train from Helensvale to Bowen Hills in Brisbane, then walk to where the new car was. Trouble is, that walk is about 10 kilometres…

So, rather than walking, why not take the Brompton M6R Plus with me?

This small wheeled bike, that folds into an incredibly compact package, had arrived in the Edgar household the previous week. A demonstrator for my wife’s business, I’d ridden it only a few hundred metres, long enough to find the seat rather uncomfortable (but perhaps that’s after the luxury of a recumbent trike seat!), that there were six gears and that the frame felt surprisingly stiff on the road. Oh yes, and despite having rear suspension, the actual available travel is pathetically small.

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The other day I had to drive a car without a clutch.

Now you might do that every day but usually the car in question has an automatic transmission. But this one didn’t – it was my (now departed) EF Ford Falcon 5-speed. And the clutch gave way just as I exited a set of traffic lights, 6×4 trailer in tow. I bumped the gearlever into neutral and sidelined myself into a providentially located parking lane.

Hmm, I thought, what now?

I sent an SMS to my wife and considered. The presence of the trailer made things rather difficult – a flatbed truck to take the car back to my home some 30 (mostly country) kilometres away would certainly add up in cost when it had to be big enough to carry the trailer as well.

And that would be a major problem when, right now, we were flat broke.

Then I thought about the route home. One, two, three, four sets of traffic lights; two roundabouts; a very steep (and slow) section of country road; then some local streets. Could I do it without a clutch? I didn’t know – I’d never tried driving such a car. Let alone one with a trailer on the back.

Well, first things first. I waited until the traffic had cleared, selected first gear and then cranked the starter. The Falcon lurched forward, grinding along with the starter – and then the engine came to life. I roared forward, then reached the next set of traffic lights (very close to the first set – I was just passing under a freeway). The car continued to power forward as I lifted the throttle (no quick dipping of the clutch!) but thankfully the traffic cleared and I was able to make a turn through the green.

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