AlunS

Can you breathalyse someone for just having their foglights on??? Reasonable suspicion, and all that ...

Don't you mean ..!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ?

Deliberate, of course, but I'm guessing he didn't "get it" :mrgreen:

Don't wear out that "!" key will you now. Good riddance, and thank you for sharing your well-reasoned, and inciteful arguments with us all :)

What a plonker.

Dubliner???? Is that supposed to be some sort of bizarre Monty Python'esque insult? Anyway it doesn't work 'cos I just live there, and I'm as English as they come, so there, yah boo hiss, and keep your petty xenophobia to yourself in future, please. Anyway, what I was trying to say was that for every person on an Internet forum somewhere in the world stating categorically that "Product X is sh!te, I'm going to buy product Y because I've heard it's great!", there's someone saying "Product Y is sh!te, ..." ... you get the picture. And the category "product" can be anything from cars, to comput

... and Mazda's never go wrong, of course. (P.S. Ford is the majority shareholder in Mazda!)

I didn't put the "." in there :) Just typed the URL, and phpBB decided all by itself that the "." was part of it :(

... and if you buy them from Powerbulbs, you get some natty blue Philips sidelight bulbs absolutely free! (I'm only a satisfied customer etc. etc. ...)

I've installed Philips Vision Plus bulbs from www.powerbulbs.co.uk. They're great, but they're not blue . Philips also do a blue bulb called (rather imaginitavely) Philips Blue Vision if that's your "thing". Personally all I wanted to achieve was better vision at night whatever the colour.

If they're recalls it should cost you exactly £0.00 and not a penny more! The £150 I assume is for the service and seems to be around the mid-point of what people here have been charged.

Excuse my ignorance but what's an HVAC?

At the moment here in Ireland (according to the Irish Ford website, anyway) you can only apparently get the stage 4 90PS version of the 1.6TDCi. If you want more you can get the old non PSA 1.8 @ 110PS (?) or the 2.0.

Mine have been on order for more than a month now. When they were ordered the dealer said "about a week" :)

On diesels it's pretty much always black. Don't worry.

Thanks for that info. Any idea where these "seat strike plates" are? If so, I'll go grease them myself rather than mess about with taking the car into the dealers.

Just to make it clear, it's the folding seat backs of the REAR seats that are rattling backwards and forwards, not the trays in the backs of the front seats. If there's anyone sitting on the back seats the rattle goes away. Maybe I should just pick up hitchhikers everywhere I go just to stop them rattling :)

But where? The whole mechanism seems to be built in to the bottom of the seat where it hinges. There's nowhere obvious to me that I can physically get to to try and wedge anything anywhere.

Title says it all. I know some cars have a warning system that detects when lghting bulbs fail, but in general it appears to be only on more expensive models. What with all this CANbus elec-trickery though, who knows?

Whilst driving along the many mirror smooth roads that grace this Emerald Isle I live on (I wish!) my rear seat backs have started rattling. I've tried folding them forward and then back again to make absolutely sure the restraining mechanism has clicked properly, but they're still doing it. Short of moving somewhere where they know how to build roads properly, has anybody got any ideas?

This appears to be one (and probably the only) instance of Ireland being cheaper than the UK. My recent 1st service on my 1.6TDCi cost me €172.08 which converts to £116.13 !!! There was another thread on this recently, do a search on it, but I seem to recall the average cost being around the £170 mark.

Me too :) It's €391 a year for 1501- 1600 cc, and €539 for 1901 - 2000 cc, so a fairly decent saving. Also your insurance would be probably considerably higher as well. There are even insurance companies here (you'll like this one!) who will refuse to insure cars with engines over 1.8 litres in size :)

YES!

Interesting ... is there any obvious way of telling if it's been changed at all?

Just had mine done here in Ireland, and they charged me €172, so £175 seems like a bit of a rip off to me (£1= approx €1.47). That would explain why my steering wheel height/reach adjustment was completely screwed up when I picked up the car, I assume!