Rodney Jane of Bob Jane T-Marts reckons tyres are a grudge purchase and people nearly always want the cheapest rubber — but there is a sweet spot where you can get good value without compromising safety.

Use the manual shift as much as you can and anticipate the road ahead. When you're facing a hill, be ready to down-change manually without waiting for the transmission to do it for itself. Never let it lug at low revs in too high a gear. The other thing to be mindful of is servicing. The transmission fluid should be regularly changed, at least every 50,000 km if not before, and a full service is recommended around 100,000 km. By doing that you should be able to extend the life of your automatic transmission. Servicing is even more important if the transmission is made to work hard, such as when towing.

We haven't heard of other 380s that have suffered the same problem, but in the course of our checking we heard of a VZ Commodore that had the same problem when the accelerator pedal broke.