… gotta new motor?

We picked up Son’s new car, yesterday.

When I say ‘new’, I mean it’s new to him, of course.

A nice little Hyundai that is in very good nick for it’s age and has reasonably low mileage. It seems to go OK and ticks over nicely. My only complaint would be that the clutch feels a bit heavy – but that might be partly due to the fact that I’ve not used a clutch pedal in six years. And yes, I did stall it a couple of times at first.  But I think it’s a great little starter car for him.

With Son in the passenger seat, I drove it up to the local Halfords, so we could get some essentials for him:  magnetic L plates; a steering wheel lock and some floor mats.  But first, we stopped at the nearest petrol station, as this thing was already running on fumes.

And there was my first dilemma: will this run OK on the new E5 fuel?

Second dilemma: hold on, what is the new one? Is it E5 or E10?    Driving a diesel, I’d not paid much attention to this new fuel grade.  A bit of Googling in the corner of the forecourt revealed that E10 was the new one and E5 the old.  I opted for the older fuel, as that is what this car had likely been run on for most of it’s life (a later bit of researched told me that all Hyundai cars built since 2005 are able to run on the newer fuel).

I instructed Son on how to fill up – another first – and then after we’d made our purchases at Halfords, I drove over to a nearby industrial estate, where we slapped the L plates on front and back and swapped seats.

I have to say, it was a little bit daunting having my little boy behind the wheel (little? He’s nearly as tall as me, now).

But, he did OK. The roads on the estate were wide and there was some, but not a lot of,  traffic.

There was definitely a couple of dodgy moments though:  “Right, we’re coming up to a roundabout, so you need to slow down a bit…  see that lorry coming round?  You’ll need to give way to him, so slow down … slow down… SLOW DOWN!”

But, as I say, on the whole he didn’t do too bad, considering he’s only had a couple of lessons so far.

He didn’t even seem too fazed when he stalled it at a roundabout and the impatient BMW driver behind us started tooting his horn after about 3 seconds.

What is it, with some people?