19 Apr 07
Five months on, I'm still loving my S-Max. But as I suggested at the end of my last report, it's proving to be an expensive affair.
It's not just that at a shade over 30 grand, it's about as far from a poverty-spec family-shifter as you can get, with its DVD player, 18" alloys, Alcantara /leather trim, Bluetooth, Voice Control and fancy alphabet-soup driving aids (ESP, IVDC with CCD).
And it's not that quenching its thirst for petrol means that filling it up costs somewhere north of £60 every time I go to the garage (although my Nectar points are piling on nicely, thank you).
No, more than that, it's proving to be expensive because after nearly 20 years of driving, I've just managed to net my first-ever speeding fine - and the first-ever points on my licence.
Of course, it's my fault, rather than the S-Max's. But if it didn't ride so well, so comfortably at high speed along the motorway, I wouldn't have found myself being snapped by a van on a motorway bridge in Wales at the end of February.
Now I've already vented my spleen on the situation in a previous airbag, so I won't go there again, but a motorway speed limit that was set as a stick-your-finger-in-the-air experiment in the 60s is seriously out of date when you get cars that can hit three figures without even really trying. On a trip down the M4 to Wales to see the folks, I routinely have to keep an eye on my speed. If I recklessly spend too much time looking at the road, I often find when glancing down at the speedo that I'm setting a pace that will get me an automatic ban if I don't slow down.
