sasha@lazytrips

I've seen the grey car around a few times as well

Saw a GT3 RS in Chester last week in the promotional White with Red & Black accents with the bit down the side, etc. Looked pretty mean and certainly stood out on the road.

I love hearing about trashed zeds. The more zeds get knackered/blown up/written off, the more rare mine becomes and the more valuable it'll be in the future!

Just signed up for my wife's 3.2 V6 TT & the zed in a couple months. The discounts over the next cheapest insurance option are surreal!

Saw you pulling in behind me & left an improvised "spotted" card on the back of the receipt. Unfortunately, I think one of the Tesco staff saw me stuffing it under your wiper and may have taken it out as I was driving out.

One of the contacts in one of your sensors is most likely broken. Happened to me when a nice lady in an Audi decided to introduce some cosmetic changes to my rear end. My recommendation is to disconnect them. In my personal experience they are fairly useless anyway if they are the same standard Nissan issue as mine as by the time they beep on the full, I am still so far away that having one is pointless.

Go to Sumo Power (trader on this forum) for the Do-Luck bumper as they are the official distributors. But on the other hand, I'd suggest you go for the Vizage JP Type N seeing as I want to be the only gay in the village.

A very similar story happened to me when I drove into a Nissan garage (joint with Renault) soon after buying the car, parked right in front of their showroom (this is a low-end Nissan garage with nothing fancy ever going near it), walk in and ask how much it would be for a service. The guy at the desk looks through the window at my car and goes "I'm sorry. We're only servicing Nissans and Renaults". Needless to say I did a quick runner from there.

My view is that having more than one car is cool if you can afford it. Buying a second car in order to be able to afford the first one is in my personal opinion plain stupid. If I can't afford to buy a car and run it every day, drive it at weekends and go to Europe if I feel like it, then I need to buy a cheaper/cheaper to run car. Let's do a simple calculation. £600 for a shed, £50 for an MOT, £100 for a service, £70 for spare parts as sheds do go wrong (probably conservative on cars of this age and build quality), assuming you do high mileage in the shed as the reason for getting it in the first place, take £300 for a cambelt change every 3 years (again, conservative). Now add insurance and assume we are figuring it out for a typical 30yr old with 1 accident & 3 points or something along those lines = £400 given the ridiculous price hikes (optimistic as you won't be able to use your no claims on this car and even with multicar policies, prices have gone up a lot) Now let's assume something will go bang on the shed within 3 years from high mileage + age + quality and you'll have to replace it again with another £600 shed as per some of the above numbers. So your costs on average will be: Year 1: £1,320 Year 2: £720 Year 3: £720 Year 4: £1,320 ... (£920 on average per year) Now let's assume that your mega efficient shed despite its age, wear and lack of investment manages to get an average of 40 mpg. I typically get more out my zed, but let's assume you get around 28mpg from the zed. That's a net difference of 12mpg. Question: how many miles do you need to do in order to make the shed actually worthwhile? Answer: The shed will take 2.5 gallons per 100 miles as opposed to 3.57 gallons for the zed. Let's take the current petrol price as average (probably overkill, but whatever). So that's £1.30 a litre. So the shed will cost something like £14.80 (back of the envelope calc here) as opposed to £21.15 for the zed. So every 100 miles you save £6.35 or thereabouts. So that means you'll need to do around 15,000 miles a year just to break even. Doing 20,000 miles, given the somewhat optimistic assumptions above saves you a massive £300. In my personal opinion if the amount of hassle, paperwork, potential problems, lack of enjoyment, image, whatever other reasons in your mind are outweighed by £300, you should not have bought the zed in the first place. Nuff said.

Then at least fix your rounding error

It's a shame that your conversion from litres to gallons is rounded. You'd be better off using the litre capacity and then multiplying by a fixed conversion factor to get gallons (around 4.55 - get a precise version of google). Also, you could simplify that calculation a lot by just dividing the mileage by mpg and then multiplying by price and the above conversion factor. In your sheet, the Golf R32 should have identical fuel costs to the zed and the 3.2 Brera as they all use petrol and have equivalent MPG.

My thinking was that instead of spending the extra £70 or thereabouts on a more expensive PSU now, I'll put the money into more crucial components which I'll regret not getting and then upgrade the CPU whenever I get the second card.

I'm planning to build a computer and plan to place the order in a week or thereabouts. Are there any computer literate people who can advise as to whether all the different components are compatible and/or any improvements without any more money being spent? The idea was to get the maximum I can right now with a view to upgrades over time. I plan to get a secondary 460 card to put into SLI with the first, gradually build up to 16GB RAM by adding sticks as and when (can then go all the way to 32GB if needed) and will add 2-3 more identical hard drives in a RAID 10 set up for some SSD-beating performance. I'll be getting Windows 7 & Office elsewhere. The PSU is moderately cheap and I can always replace it when more components make it into the system. PCU: Intel Core i7 2600k Mobo: Asus P6P67 PRO PGU: Gigabyte ATI GTX 460 1GB RAM: Corsair 1x4GB 1600MHz Vengeance DDR3 stick PSU: Corsair 500W CX PSU ODD: Sony 24x DVD-RW HDD: Samsung HD103SJ Spinpoint F3 1TB 7200rpm 32MB Cache Case: NZXT Phantom White Case Wireless card: Tenda Wireless-N300 PCI Adapter (read rave reviews of this card) Opinions?

Will see if it comes back. It may well be that my second exhaust has cracked somewhere which would be annoying, but at least it's not as bad as it originally sounded when I heard the engine running rough! I'll see if I can get half an hour at lunch to have a look at it in the daylight tomorrow. Thanks!

Was panicking on the phone earlier. I've reset the ECU and made it about half a mile further down the road. I got 1166 & 1167 together which indicates that the Heated O2 Sensor 2 has issues but after the reset the car sounded a lot better and seemed absolutely fine on the short drive. Should I be worried? How expensive are these sensors to replace and how hard is it to do? I have no idea where this thing sits and how hard it is to get to it and whether these codes could mean anything else being wrong.

i've got 1166 error on the way back tonight. anyone know what that is?

4 hours

I'm not sure on the rattling, but the 2nd gear issues you described are what some would describe as a "feature" of the gearbox. Most of them behave that way and need to get warm to behave.

it would be interesting if someone with half a braincell actually came up with some smart campaign to affect petrol prices rather than all the garbage that we all get emailed. Something like doing your absolute best and not buying petrol for 1,2 or 3 days right at the end of the Financial year and waiting until afterwards could be rather amusing given that a number of government metrics, borrowing arrangements and rating agency classifications, etc, etc are done on Financial Years and while in the long run this won't impact the amount of money the government generates in tax, vertically, there could be some major issues. I'm sure there are other much smarter ways of having a real impact rather than boycotting one particular petrol station. As many mentioned before, 75% of the price of petrol is made up of the fuel levy & vat. The remainder is chiefly split into a number of contractual and other overhead costs, staff & profit. Profit gets taxed for Corporation tax, wages get taxed with Income Tax and there are a number of levies and associated charges with the types of contractual arrangements these companies make as well as all other forms of tax that they pay on refineries, road tax on tankers, taxes on ships & mooring, etc, etc. All in all, in one cycle of the monetary turnover of an Oil Company selling Petrol in the UK, somewhere around 85% will go straight into the Government's pocket. Given all this, the huge bashing one of my beautiful rims received in a monster pothole on a dual carriageway makes me pretty annoyed as I believe that given the above + road tax + tax on the insurance we pay + etc, etc, etc, you would only have to spend a fraction of this amount of money on the roads to keep them in a condition like a number of European countries. Afterall, it is the roads which generate the tax in the first place. [/rant]

I love the fact that Cynthia's surname is "Steele"

I've been having thoughts on and off and have an interesting but incredibly mysterious and top secret plan which involves driving the car hard for 24 hours with only a few short stops for fuel. Having browsed the depths and breaths of the forum, I haven't found any reviews of how the car would cope with sitting at moderate revs for that long and what if anything would need doing before undertaking something like that. A few important points are that there would be at least one reasonable section of around 3-4 hours probably sitting at or around at least 5k revs for 3-4 hours. I've got the VQ35DE and although I am well aware of its "bulletproof" credentials, has anyone either done something similar or read anything about a zed in a standard-ish set up doing something of the sort? What about other bits like the tranny, tyres, etc?

Got a killer question: Given that the numberplate for Jap imports is narrow, is the hole above it & the light cluster also narrower? I need to fix an issue with having to take the bumper off to change bulbs and need to find out if I can just get a replacement light cluster instead. Cheers.

I'm not going to be very helpful as other more techy people will know what they're talking about, but seeing as it's your first post, you are pressing the clutch, and you do have petrol in the car, right? Have you recently bought some cheap petrol (eg. Asda)? If so, it may well have frozen all the way through to the line and the click you're hearing is starter motor/ignition trying to spark something with nothing coming through.

That wasn't risking. The risking was when I went driving round North Wales buying a specific Christmas present. There was one particular hill with ice all the way up and particularly slippery at the top where I couldn't get up. A couple cars stopped and asked if I needed help, but the ground was so slippery, there was no use for any pushing. So I did the natural thing and told them I'm gonna take a run up. Let the car slide all the way down, accelerated a bit, then planted the foot and went Japanese drifter style up the long hill, right-to-left-to-right etc. The Tesco car park was a haven afterwards!

I was as usual not paying any attention only to be reminded of the presence of another zed by the horn as it was coming the other way. Looked in the mirror, but couldn't make anything out in the dark. Think it was a GM/silver.