Your Expert Guide to Car Gear, Accessories & Automotive Products in the UK
There’s a particular kind of madness that grips a driver the moment they start wondering exactly how fast their car really goes from 0-60, or whether that new remap actually put more boost through the turbo, or why the exhaust note changed after the garage “definitely didn’t touch anything else.” A performance monitor for car … Read more
Fill the tank, watch the needle drop faster than it used to, sigh, repeat. If that’s become a monthly ritual, you’re not imagining it — pump prices have been genuinely brutal, and most of us have no real idea where the fuel is actually going. Is it the motorway commute? The school run in second … Read more
There’s a very specific kind of dread that comes with a glowing orange engine symbol on your dashboard at 7am on a Monday. You don’t know if it’s a loose fuel cap or a £1,200 catalytic converter, and neither, frankly, does the little icon — as Wikipedia’s entry on the check engine light notes, a … Read more
That little amber engine symbol has a talent for appearing at the worst possible moment — motorway services, the night before a long drive, or three days before your MOT is due. OBD2 scanners under £30 exist precisely for this moment: they plug into the 16-pin port under your dashboard, talk to your car’s onboard … Read more
A bluetooth OBD2 scanner is a small wireless adapter that plugs into your car’s diagnostic port and sends live engine data straight to an app on your phone, letting you read and clear fault codes without a cable or a garage visit. Simple as that sounds, the market is a genuine minefield — dozens of … Read more
Somewhere in Norfolk right now, a driver is trusting a phone propped against the dashboard to get a 44-tonne artic through a market town built for horses and carts. It usually ends fine. Sometimes it ends with a bridge missing a chunk of brickwork and a very awkward phone call to the transport office. A … Read more
Glancing down at the speedometer sounds harmless enough, but that quarter-second flick of the eyes adds up over a motorway journey, and it’s one of the small habits a HUD speed display for car use is designed to break. A HUD speed display for car dashboards is a small projector or screen, usually mounted on … Read more
Picture this: you’re halfway down the M6, the satnav’s just re-routed you round a closed junction, and the thing slides clean off the windscreen and lands somewhere near the pedals. Not ideal. Not even close to ideal. A decent sat nav mount for dashboard fitting solves that exact problem, and it’s one of those cheap, … Read more
Here’s a confession every driver eventually makes: your phone’s map app is brilliant right up until the signal drops on the M6, the battery dies at 40%, or a call from your mum interrupts your directions three roundabouts from home. A dedicated sat nav under £150 solves all three problems in one go, and it … Read more
A sat nav for roads is a dedicated GPS navigation device that plans routes, gives turn-by-turn directions and displays live hazards like speed cameras and roadworks without relying on your phone’s signal or data. That’s the textbook answer, anyway. The honest one is a bit more personal: it’s the little box on your dashboard that … Read more