Safety

In your test of the Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo you again state that this car has a full-size spare. My Laredo came with a space-saver. How do you explain that? The standard tyres are Michelin 265x18 but the spare is a Kuhmo 245x18. That's a space-saver by any definition. You also refer to the car's 3.5-tonne towing capacity and that may be so for most of the time. But what if there's a puncture and the spare has to be used? The owner's handbook specifically states: "Do not attempt to tow a trailer while using a compact spare tyre". Look a little deeper get your facts right. Articles like this are not totally correct.

I'm enjoying my older Mazda Bravo but I've been testing newer four-wheel drives with an eye to the future. I find the unnecessarily large bonnets on today's four-wheel drives are a hindrance to accurate steering by obscuring difficult road conditions close to your front. This seemingly US convention of "mine is bigger than yours" has put me right off cars like the Ford Ranger and Everest. Is there any relief in sight?

I thought I'd let you know about our 2013 Holden Colorado, which caught fire in our backyard. We still don't know the cause as the insurance paid the claim without investigating and Holden wiped their hands of it. There were no suspicious circumstances; the car was turned off for nearly 3 hours before the fire! I believe the fire was caused by a fault with the car. We nearly lost our home and potentially our lives.

We are having problems with the automatic transmission in our 2013 Ford Focus and Ford has admitted that it is a safety hazard. We bought the car new in 2013 and since then it has four upgrades, two new clutches and a transmission control module. We are angry that Ford is not co-operating; we want a full refund but they have offered only $20,000. We were having trouble with the transmission in the first year and they assigned us a case manager but to date we have been handballed to three different people. Is it fair for us to expect a full refund of $26,000?

In terms of wear on relative components what is better for a manual vehicle when stationary at a red light: clutch disengaged, or in neutral with clutch engaged?

After recently suffering a punctured air-conditioning condenser in my Golf R, I was about ready to blame VW for such a bad design to allow stones to pass through with almost no protection, but a quick search of the Internet shows it's not just a VW problem, it's very common. I looked at a friend's brand new Mazda 2, which again has a massive opening right into the condenser. How has such a design flaw found its way to become common practice?

The subject of car cameras is becoming more pertinent by the day, rightly so because of their accuracy and now that photos will stand up in court if needed. Trying to find a camera that suits the driver is near impossible. I'm one of many car owners who have gone to various shops and we hear the sales pitch that their product is the best and will do what's required. We need to know what to look for in a middle-of-the-road camera, a good all-rounder. These cameras seem to be versatile in all the detail they can record. How about some help in choosing a camera? Good ones needn't be the dearest.