Category: General Articles

It is a legal requirement that all vehicles over three years old must take an annual MOT (Ministry of Transport) test. Its purpose is to determine whether your vehicle is roadworthy, as well as ensuring they comply with environmental requirements. 

Below we explain exactly what’s get checked during an MOT and how your car can benefit too. To get your car ready for its MOT, take a look at our wide range of car accessories, which we are sure will lead your car to pass its MOT. 

Vehicle body and speedometer 

During your MOT test, your car will be inspected for any corrosion to the body, seats, doors, engine mountings, and the chassis. Plus, anything that could cause injury, like sharp edges, is also checked. 

The mechanic also examines the speedometer by checking it illuminates correctly, and that the speed can be read clearly while you’re driving. This ensures that

The 2023 Kia Niro Hybrid is one of the most unique vehicles for sale today. With all the utility of a wagon, up to 53 mpg in combined driving, and a starting price in the mid-$20,000 range, it doesn’t fit neatly into any one category. It combines the best traits of several.

The Niro is also available as a versatile plug-in hybrid and a pure electric car with a range of up to 253 miles between charges. For this discussion, we’ll stick to the Niro Hybrid.

The Niro is entirely new for the 2023 model year. Last year’s Niro had some of the same virtues. But it was a bit of a social wallflower, blending into the parking lot with staid styling. You can’t say that of the 2023 model.

Designers gave it an utterly unique feature in today’s automotive market. Kia calls them “aero blades.” They stand out from

OPINION: Imagine my surprise at seeing the new-generation Toyota Prius when it was revealed this week.

The world’s biggest car company fretted over how to reinvent its hybrid icon in an era defined by full-electric vehicles, settling on giving it some newfound panache.

It looks great – sleek, stylish and entirely unlike what we’ve come to expect from Toyota’s longstanding eco leader. A new lease on life, as it were.

The old model was all creases and weird proportions, while multiple earlier generations were perhaps less awkward but also more boring, which is worse.

And yet it’s this latest version, which has me all starry-eyed, that will be the first Prius Toyota won’t sell in Australia.

In making this decision, it took the wrong lesson from the old model’s failure to resonate, and pulled the pin at precisely the wrong time.

It’s true that Prius sales plummeted of late,

Geely has announced that it has signed a licensing agreement with ElectroMobility Poland to supply its Geely Sustainable Experience Architecture (SEA) platform to EMP to develop a series of electric cars for EMP’s new Izera brand. Geely will also be EMP’s technology partner for the project.

EMP is backed by the Polish government and essentially Izera will be Poland’s first domestic brand in generations. EMP’s website says Poland is the largest European sales market for new cars without its own homegrown car brand so the Izera brand can be a catalyst for the development of Polish auto part and component manufacturers. Sounds very familiar, doesn’t it? Without a domestic brand currently, the auto parts industry is already the second largest industrial sector in Poland.

The first car that Izera will be developing on the SEA platform is of course a compact SUV, which is one of the most popular bodytypes

Much has been made of the roll out of ultra-fast charging (UFC) in different pockets across the globe. Pioneered by Tesla Motors, epitomised by Porsche in 2020 and challenged by mass market electric vehicle (EV) models like the Hyundai Ioniq and Kia EV6 more recently, UFC embodies a quest which seeks to match charge times of EVs to the refuelling of a conventional vehicle.

In May 2022, StoreDot, an Israeli start-up previously profiled by Automotive World, demonstrated a live example of its extreme fast-charging (XFC) batteries, recharging 100 miles in five minutes—referred to as ‘100in5.’ Founded on the mission to ‘reduce range anxiety’, StoreDot has ambitions to reach 100 miles recharge in three minutes by 2028 and 100 miles in two minutes by 2032—100in3 and 100in2, respectively.

But is such a dramatic shift in battery innovation in the next decade realistic? Moreover, is it even necessary?

Eastwood has released a full line of shop presses to make all the bending, stamping, and bearing you need to do as easy as it can be. 

Here are the options:
There’s the featherweight 10 Ton Hydraulic Benchtop Shop Press,
the middleweight 12 Ton Floor Shop Press,
and the heavyweight 20 Ton Floor Shop Press.

There are some huge benefits to the “ram” style of press that we went with. Especially when compared to our competitors that offer a “bottle jack” style press. These three presses do have a lot in common, so let’s start with the design. 

All three presses and me. (…making a patented silly face) 

Commonalities

All of these presses are ram presses rather than bottle jack presses. The huge advantage of this design is that it allows the ram to slide left and right, allowing you to press off center from the frame.

• The 2023 Lotus Eletre is expected to cost around $100,000 when it comes to the U.S. next year.
• Lotus’ first SUV and second electric car is quick but out of character for the brand.

Lotus cars are famous for very little. That is, they’ve long been known for their astonishingly light weights. Lotus founder Colin Chapman famously told a reporter the key to building a successful car was to “simplify, then add lightness.”

There’s a stat missing from the spec sheet of the 2023 Lotus Eletre. The company won’t say how much it weighs.

A Lotus Electric SUV

The missing figure makes sense when you consider just what the latest Lotus is. The Eletre fits into two heavy categories: It’s an SUV, and it’s electric. Electric cars, for the uninitiated, tend to weigh a great deal more than gas-powered cars. The materials used in their batteries are called heavy metals