I’ve got some new wheels at the moment! My much loved Skoda Roomster (brilliant car!) suffered a minor dent just before Xmas when a joung lad in a works pick-up truck reversed into it in Tuddenham village. It was a minor traffic snarl-up with a bus coming the other way and a queue of cars, including me trying to go the other way. He was only trying to help, poor lad, but mis-calculated a bit and put a minor dent in my bonnett. So on his company insurance my car was taken away for some minor work (two weeks, and counting at the moment).

So now I’m driving a hired Skoda ‘Scala’. (Why would you name a car after a jar of pesto?) It’s ok – new and shiny and clean. Everything is nice and tight and very responsive, so nothing to complain about really, though it is rather ‘vanilla’, with nothing to complain about really….

…except for the new “Driver assist” features. Now the “speed limiter’ I quite like – useful in traffic queues etc, but the disaster is ‘”Lane Assist”. 

The well intentioned idea is to keep you in your lane if you doze-off on the motorway. It detects white lines and provides some resistance to turning the wheel if you cross one. Maybe not a bad idea on a long trip, but for general driving it’s a right pain. Imagine a back-seat driver who actually reaches in and graps the steering wheel when you cross a white line! You’d want to punch them, but according to the new world, this is what’s required. And it frequently thinks other road features are white lines too! You can turn it off, but every time you restart the ignition it re-enables itself, AND YOU CAN’T stop it! So either I get used to it, or EVERY time I start the car, I have to press a series of buttins to turn the bloody thing off!

If this is the brave new world, you can keep it! I want my Roomster back!