Golf Mk 6: Wearing Bits Out

I had my car MOTed a couple of weeks ago. It passed without any remedial work although there was an advisory about a “light misting of oil on the front shock absorber”. I did ask what that meant and was told it was nothing to worry about. However, if that is the case, why did they bother to stick it on?

It’s worth pointing out that the car wouldn’t have passed if I hadn’t replaced the front windscreen wipers. The rubber on one of them had started to come apart and the other was slightly streaky. Given that these were the original factory fit items that had been through five Winters I can have few complaints about their service and given that the replacement Bosch Wipers were £16 for the pair and easy to fit it seems like a reasonable cost.

The only other thing to come up recently was a warning light for a faulty bulb which turned out to be the reversing light. I’d asked the garage to replace this before doing the MOT but, as it turned out, the bulb hadn’t blown but had simply worked loose. They fixed it by simply taking it out and shoving it back in again; it sounds like one of my standard fixes for errant computers. So overall I looked set for another year of motoring. That is until last weekend when I felt the rear end of the car do something a bit odd at a roundabout. When I stopped at the supermarket carpark I discovered the cause: a huge screw which had become lodged in the sidewall of the tyre. It was also raining by this time so I had to resort to my Incredible Hulk impression to put the spare on.

The car now has just under 57,000 miles on it and the tyres were the original factory fit ones. I’ve been using Winter tyres for a few months each year so I’d estimate that they had covered around 40 – 45 ,000 miles on their own and they were all between 2-3mm of tread so I had been considering changing them at some point anyway. As it is, I went for the Michelin CrossClimate+ tyres which are marketed as a Summer tyre with Winter capability, which is advertising-speak for all-weather tyres although they are approved for German Winter use. So far they seem fine and a definite improvement in the wet (which may just be the extra tread). I’ll have to see whether they are any good in the Winter but I do still have a set of Winter wheels if needed – and if I don’t need them I’ll probably have to find a new home for them.