3 minutes ago, Stonekeeper said:

I have not seen more than two days of Snow for years. 12 years driving a school bus and only a handful of snow days.😄

With air holding more moisture we might see much more snow. I dont remember the winter of 62/ 63 as i was only 1.5 years old. Saw lots of snow in Canada in mid 60s even though our latitude same as south of France ie in Toronto area. Recall we had lots of snow on Dartmoor winter of 1980 think it was. We had temperature of -20c in 2010 with freak cold spell here in Worcester. Prefer it to 38c and local town like Stourbridge and Pershore catching 🔥.

Going to be interesting. Perhaps feet of snow in the winters and 40c plus in the summers. The number of heat related deaths will be huge. Couple of thousand in UK in 2003, 70k in Europe. Suspect we will see half as much again than this for this year and more again in years to come.

Edited Saturday at 20:281 day by lol-lol

Yeah, the 62/63 winter was no fun over here either; diesel froze in the tanks, roads were impassable near me with snow impacted on the A12 up the straight 3-mile hill with vehicles abandoned all over the place, and my parents' house had ice on the insides of the windows, and having a bath was impossible due to the bath and the plug hole, along with the downpipe to the outside drain being a solid block of ice.

Winter of 1962–1963 in the United Kingdom - Wikipedia

24 minutes ago, Graham Butcher said:

Yeah, the 62/63 winter was no fun over here either; diesel froze in the tanks, roads were impassable near me with snow impacted on the A12 up the straight 3-mile hill with vehicles abandoned all over the place, and my parents' house had ice on the insides of the windows, and having a bath was impossible due to the bath and the plug hole, along with the downpipe to the outside drain being a solid block of ice.

Winter of 1962–1963 in the United Kingdom - Wikipedia

You tell kids today and they don't believe you.

(Said in a Yorkshire Monty Python accent).

Going on for 3 months was amazing.

Edited Saturday at 17:512 days by lol-lol

19 minutes ago, lol-lol said:

You tell kids today and they don't believe you.

(Said in a Yorkshire Monty Python accent).

Going on for 3 months was amazing.

Yeap, but it happened. I remember it was living hell; thank god for the hot water bottles that we all had to take with us to bed each night. I remember how we had to relocate the beds away from the windows as they froze up every night, where our breath formed condensation on the glass and almost immediately turned to ice.

5 hours ago, Stonekeeper said:

Seeing wealthy owners boast about free fuel while rapid public charging remains extortionate just creates resentment and a stubborn determination to stick with ICE cars.

The above is something demonstrated on here fairly regularly with people boasting about free or cheap charging and using it as a stick to evangelise about EVs without any recognition of how the vast majority of the UK live life, or how they are in a completely different situation.

I don't think it causes much resentment in here but it certainly annoys and frustrates due to the constant repetition and blindness to the lives and situations of others.

I think the expression is probably 'tone deaf'...

Edited Saturday at 20:151 day by skomaz

2 hours ago, Graham Butcher said:

my parents' house had ice on the insides of the windows

Places I lived in in the late 80s had ice on the inside o the windows in winter... Let alone in 1962/63...!!!

@skomaz Do I take it then that your house was an older type of house? Central heating was becoming pretty common in new houses in the 1970s-1980s. I remember that my parents had it installed sometime in the 80s.

We moved into the house in the 50s, lighting it with the courtesy of gas mantle lamps mounted on the walls and a single electric socket in the kitchen. I only just now discovered that these gas mantles were radioactive thanks to the mantle containing thorium dioxide.

2 hours ago, Graham Butcher said:

Yeap, but it happened. I remember it was living hell; thank god for the hot water bottles that we all had to take with us to bed each night. I remember how we had to relocate the beds away from the windows as they froze up every night, where our breath formed condensation on the glass and almost immediately turned to ice.

I was four and lived in a house with one fire in a downstairs room with a coal fire that heated the chimney walls of the rooms above, thankfully I don't remember how it felt just know it was the same when i was eleven and a gas fire was put in and the upstairs rooms were still only heated by the heat from the back of the fire because that was were 70% of it's heat went😄

The open chimney kept the house cool in the summer too

2 minutes ago, Lee01 said:

I seem to remember an even older version with Marty Feldman if memory serves.

Edited Saturday at 21:211 day by lol-lol

At Last The 1948 Show starring Tim Brooke-Taylor, John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Marty Feldman. 

We had to huddle around a candle in mid-winter to keep us warm. If it got really cold dad used to light it

Edited Saturday at 21:171 day by Stonekeeper

1 hour ago, Graham Butcher said:

@skomaz Do I take it then that your house was an older type of house? Central heating was becoming pretty common in new houses in the 1970s-1980s. I remember that my parents had it installed sometime in the 80s.

We moved into the house in the 50s, lighting it with the courtesy of gas mantle lamps mounted on the walls and a single electric socket in the kitchen. I only just now discovered that these gas mantles were radioactive thanks to the mantle containing thorium dioxide.

Yes .. I'd just started work at 18 as a sponsored engineering student and had moved away from home. I was renting a place with a group of mates from the same workplace. It was an old single brick skinned terraced property with no central heating, draughty single glazing and one gas fire in the living room. It also had massive draughts up through the floor from the cellar and to get to the one bathroom you had to go through one of the two upstairs bedrooms. I was downstairs in the front room facing the street.

I eventually got a fan heater on a timer that I set to come on a few minutes before I got up each morning but the timer was a clockwork one and often jammed.

A year or so later we were living somewhere else just as bad if not worse as it was on a main road into town and every time an artic went past the floorboards vibrated and moved so much the furniture rocked.

Edited Saturday at 22:121 day by skomaz

1 hour ago, Stonekeeper said:

At Last The 1948 Show starring Tim Brooke-Taylor, John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Marty Feldman. 

We had to huddle around a candle in mid-winter to keep us warm. If it got really cold dad used to light it

Brilliant, sketches, for a moment I thought we in the chuckle thread 😁

EV Powered

First Ferrari Luce sells for $40m, almost 40 times its es...

The first Ferrari Luce has sold for $40m at RM Sotheby's Monterey auction, almost 40 times its estimate, with every dollar of the price going to charity.

5 minutes ago, Stonekeeper said:

EV Powered

First Ferrari Luce sells for $40m, almost 40 times its es...

The first Ferrari Luce has sold for $40m at RM Sotheby's Monterey auction, almost 40 times its estimate, with every dollar of the price going to charity.

There are clearly some very rich fools about if they are happy to spend 40 times over the odds for something that ugly (IMHO of course)

6 minutes ago, skomaz said:

There are clearly some very rich fools about if they are happy to spend 40 times over the odds for something that ugly (IMHO of course)

Not so sure, there will only ever be one "first" produced so it should be a good investment or an excellent tax liability mitigation. I doubt it will be driven far if at all.

It was in aid of Ferrari's charity

13 minutes ago, Stonekeeper said:

Not so sure, there will only ever be one "first" produced so it should be a good investment or an excellent tax liability mitigation. I doubt it will be driven far if at all.

It was in aid of Ferrari's charity

Well....the do say that a fool and his money are easily parted.

You could also equally say that if a person has that much disposable cash, do they really need a good investment???

45 minutes ago, Graham Butcher said:

Well....the do say that a fool and his money are easily parted.

You could also equally say that if a person has that much disposable cash, do they really need a good investment???

I think it's called hiding in plain sight 😉

You would be surprised what people who live in a different world than us do

Edited yesterday at 11:451 day by Stonekeeper

@Stonekeeper Unbelievable, but when you hear how much the monthly cost of storage is and the length of time the cars have been there, you have to wonder if the storage costs almost equal the final value after x years.

This is a very valid question.

18 hours ago, Graham Butcher said:

This is a very valid question.

Thought I saw this one a few weeks ago.

VW, who make the Explorer for Ford, have a wholly owned subsidiary called PowerCo I gather, who puts together the power packs for the VAG Group and I can imagine the £33K price of the pack, including all its cooling elements, presumable over £10k for all the work to fit, sounds pricey, gets us to the £45k. So Ford would need to buy the pack from Powerco / VW and each make their margin including Ford hence the silly price. I would suppose one would actually go to a firm like Cleevely EV, or scrap the vehilce rather than go ahead with this ridiculous quote. Ford are getting themselves in a bad place for cars like the Explorer which is a VW production line vehicle as I understand it. What is interesting is that it is looking like Ford is set to do the same for the new Fiesta which is going to be a Renault 5 in drag, we already have the Nissan Micra doing this. Ford said many years ago that it wanted to concentrate on design etc and leave manufacturing to Toll car makers. Road to ruin I would have thought. Mr Farley brutally honest. Import tariffs can delay the apparent inevitable which is what US is doing. Dont know the cells within the Explorer ID* but probably Chinese or Korean. West slow to get on EV component production and hence the silly prices of EVs and their components..... https://www.cleevelyev.co.uk/

@lol-lol There has been for decades now, makers like Ford taking cars made by others and badging them. This is nothing new; it is not an EV thing. In many cases the cars are indeed a joint venture between 2 or more makers, where each will make various parts and then 1 will be nominated to do the final assembly.

As for the owner taking their car to a firm like Cleevely EV, it is something that only a handful of car enthusiasts would think about, as most owners will stick with the brand's dealer network, especially while it is under warranty.

Ford Capri is really a VW ID4 under the skin; hell, loads of people are unaware that Skoda, VW, Audi, Bentley, Bugatti, Seat, Cupra, Lamborghini, MAN, etc. are even in the same group and share many common parts and many cars beneath the skin have the same platform, running gear etc.

Anyone following Mat Armstrong on his YouTube channel should be aware of how other brands take parts from others, stick their logos on them and sell them at massive markups, many times the original price.

On 16/08/2026 at 11:27, skomaz said:

There are clearly some very rich fools about if they are happy to spend 40 times over the odds for something that ugly (IMHO of course)

The buyer behind the staggering $40 million winning bid for the first-ever Ferrari Luce has been revealed as Dr. Herbert “Herbie” Wertheim, a billionaire businessman, inventor and philanthropist.

The Supercar Blog

Meet the person who paid $40 million for a Ferrari Luce -...

The buyer behind the staggering $40 million winning bid for the first-ever Ferrari Luce has been revealed as Dr. Herbert “Herbie” Wertheim, a billionaire

1 hour ago, Stonekeeper said:

The buyer behind the staggering $40 million winning bid for the first-ever Ferrari Luce has been revealed as Dr. Herbert “Herbie” Wertheim, a billionaire businessman, inventor and philanthropist.

The Supercar Blog

Meet the person who paid $40 million for a Ferrari Luce -...

The buyer behind the staggering $40 million winning bid for the first-ever Ferrari Luce has been revealed as Dr. Herbert “Herbie” Wertheim, a billionaire

Well he looks a complete **** and exactly the sort of person I thought might be stupid enough to have bought it... 🤣