Long-Term Car Updates

Long-term update: Our SRT gets ceramic paint protection and wheel protectors

Long-term update: Our SRT gets ceramic paint protection and wheel protectors

Our cars are parked on the street. As much as people like to baby their cars, some of us truly have no time to fiddle with microfibre cloths or doddle around at manual car washes. So we do what the majority of people do — get a dude to clean it. These dudes use dirty cloths and muddy waters, but there’s not much you can do about it unless you like sitting and supervising these things. Regular paint protection loses its shine in months and barely lasts a year, as per our experience. So we decided to try out the new-fangled “nano-ceramic”

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Long-term update: Our Honda S2000 gets a new roof, and a roof for its roof

Long-term update: Our Honda S2000 gets a new roof, and a roof for its roof

We haven’t been keeping up with updates on our 2007 Honda S2000 because we didn’t drive it much over the past 12 months (apparently less than 700 km as per the RTA inspection). But it had some major work done last year anyway, so the armchair accountants among you will surely be throwing the “cost per km” number at us as if it’s a taxi cab.

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Long-term update: Jaguar XK's smart repair showing its age

Long-term update: Jaguar XK’s smart repair showing its age

Hard to believe, but our 2008 Jaguar XK is a decade old now. I’d say we’ve kept it cleaner than most, even though we simply park it outside all the time and service it once a year. Real premium cars (not the rebadged stuff from mainstream carmakers) are generally built with better materials, so they last longer in terms of trim and leather (but not always mechanically). However, our Jag needed a bit of care to keep it looking fresh.

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Long-term update: The curious case of the fuel gauge in our Nissan Patrol

Long-term update: The curious case of the fuel gauge in our Nissan Patrol

A few months ago, our Nissan Patrol LE went in for its mandatory bi-annual service. Yet again, we pointed out that the fuel gauge was showing wrong readings half the time. If you’ve read our past long-term updates, you’ll know this is an ongoing problem since we bought the car (although curiously, no other post-facelift Patrol owner seems to have this issue). This time, the service advisor blamed it on a low battery. Okay, we’ll play along and see what happens.

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Product review: Summer test of ACDelco Shield window tint

Product review: Summer test of ACDelco Shield window tint

Since our Chrysler 300 SRT needed window tint, we hit up ACDelco to supply us with the “40%” version of their new ACDelco Shield film a couple of months ago. It comes with a 5-year warranty and installed at Liberty service centres. We also figured this would be a good chance to test how well tint actually does in keeping a car interior cool. So we grabbed an infra-red thermometer and sweated it out in the summer sun.

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