Your article Planet savers (last week) mentions biofuels and the fact that they are carbon neutral. In spite of this, and the government’s claim for concern over climate change, they still require you to pay duty on such fuel.
For every 20 litres of diesel I buy I add a litre of Sainsbury’s vegetable cooking oil. This costs about 45p, but if customs knew I was using it for fuel it would demand another 47p as duty!
Chris Wood
Camberley, Surrey
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SCIENCE SENSE
Norman Baker takes issue with Professor David Bellamy, one of the UK’s best-known scientific pundits, about global warming (Letters, last week). I tend to believe Bellamy at least merits a little serious attention. He is not a stupid man and he has spent his life studying such things.
Norman Baker, on the other hand, studied German at London University as well as running one of the college bars. Before being an MP he held a variety of jobs — an executive at Our Price records, clerk at Hornsey railway station, manager of a wine shop and teacher of English as a foreign language. Not much of a scientist, then.
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David Bramhall
Stowmarket, Suffolk
PARKER AND RIDE
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Jeremy Clarkson seemed puzzled at the term “parkering” that he heard in Norway (Clarkson, January 29). Surely it is just slang for being chauffeur-driven in a large pink car?
Laurence Hawtin
Birmingham
I-DON’T-DRIVE
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In the points levelled against the BMW 650i (First Drive, January 29), Andrew Frankel cites the “horrid iDrive control system”. I agree wholeheartedly, to the extent that having had five BMWs in a row, my next car will likely be something else. I’d be very interested to know if my view of the iDrive really is widespread.
Angus McCann
Edinburgh
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CLARKSON RUMBLED
Jeremy Clarkson mentioned last week how his Mercedes SLK 55 is much better than his previous SL 55 because it doesn’t have air suspension. The SL 55 doesn’t have air suspension. What it does have is Active Body Control, an active suspension system with electrohydraulically controlled steel springs.
Khushal Khan
Birmingham
ON A PLATE
Your report of the Admiral survey about who is most likely to own a private plate (which as a company director I do), doesn’t mention the great difficulty in getting anyone to make the plate up (Up to Speed, last week). A request even for “show plates” is refused point blank by Halfords as, it says, it would be illegal to produce them. I am therefore curious to know who produced the HAL4DS plates in its current adverts. Presumably the same internet site in Ireland that made mine up with no questions asked.
Jon Smith
Kingsgate, Kent
PENALTY HELP
Emma Smith’s article (Breaking point: the parking fightback, last week) on the scandal of parking penalties arrived at the right moment for me. My appeal is to be heard by the National Parking Adjudication Service in a few days’ time and she has given me more ammunition for the struggle.
Roy Brown
Glasgow
FAILSAFE METHOD
So NCP is to “make its aptitude exam (for parking attendants) available on its website for those who want to test their brain power” (It’s a testing job, last week). Has it not occurred to NCP that this will render its 18 questions answerable in 20 minutes virtually impossible to fail?
Peter Saunders
Salisbury, Wiltshire
WING WONDERS
Chris Thomas (Letters, last week) is quite right to complain at the way external car mirrors stick out and get knocked off so easily, but the guilty items are in fact door mirrors, not wing mirrors.
Genuine wing mirrors like those on my classic Triumph suffer none of these faults since they are sited part way along the bonnet where the car is narrower and give a wide-angle view without increasing the vehicle’s width. So the solution is not to add expensive cameras but to put the mirrors back in a sensible place — on the wings.
Anthony New
Fishponds, Bristol
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