By leasing the car, I pay a monthly fee to a leasing company, often a bank, who have purchased the vehicle from my usual dealer.  That fee allows me to drive the car up to an agreed number of kilometres each year.

And when the lease runs out, I just return the car to the dealer and can lease a new one.

Buy why not buy the car outright as a business and then sell it again later?

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Until now, the law only said that you had to have “suitable” tyres for the road conditions, but did not actually specify that you had to have winter tyres on in winter.  Indeed, many people with good tread on their summer tyres continued to use them throughout the winter, and would probably argue that they were suitable as long as the main roads were clear.

The trouble was, that unless they caused an accident, the police were as good as powerless to argue against them, so the politicians were under pressure to amend the law to get things clarified.

Unfortunately, they made quite a mess of it.

For a start, they only agreed on it at the end of November, giving many people only a few days to change the tyres on their cars before it came into effect.

It would not have been so bad, if it wasn’t for the fact that the first snow was already on the ground.  At that is still part of the problem – the new rules still only apply for particular road conditions, ie. when there is snow, ice, slush, black ice, and a number of other variants of frozen water on the ground.

The M+S symbol

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Well, maybe that’s not entirely true, but it’s definitely not easy.

Last Sunday I wanted to hear Cathy Dobson’s public reading from her book “Planet Germany“.  I left in plenty of time.  Driving to Düsseldorf is usually a matter of about 2½ hours.  A bit more if I hit Cologne around the rush hour, but not on a Sunday.  Not on a public holiday.

But I decided to allow myself plenty of time anyway, and left home 4 hours before the reading was due to start.

The only trouble was, that the motorway to the east of Cologne was closed to allow a bridge to be removed!

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It all started with the bicycles.  We’ve noticed this year a lack of respect on the part of cyclists for red lights.

It doesn’t matter what kind of red light: pedestrian crossings, crossroads, or even cycle paths.  They just ride straight through them.  It’s a common occurance on the Hohemarkstraße in Oberursel, where I see at least one cyclist every week go through at red light – usually whilst pedestrians are crossing.

But at crossings it can be even worst – they veer off to the right to use the pedestrian crossing across the side road and avoid the red traffic light that way.  Of course, the pedestrian crossing may also be at red, but that doesn’t seem to worry them.

Then there are the pedestrians who just walk across the main road without looking, forcing drivers to brake hard.  And I don’t mean taking a run at it, I mean leisurely walking across.

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The car that I have replaced it with no longer runs on bio-ethanol (E85), although it does use the new E10 fuel.

So how have those four years been and why did I switch back?

Well, whilst on the one hand it was nice to try something new and be environmentally friendly at the same time, it did come with some drawbacks. The main one being that, although it was cheaper than normal petrol, the fuel consumption was slightly higher with bio-ethanol and at first there were only about 70 petrol stations in Germany selling it.

More recently, on the way to Rügen for example, I have come across some petrol stations on or near the motorways selling it, which has been a pleasant surprise. But outside of Germany I don’t believe I’ve seen it yet on my travels.

With the higher consumption it has also meant that a day trip to somewhere like Cologne or Saarbrucken is just about possible without going to a petrol station on the way back, but it is pushing it if there are any hold ups.

But since most of my appointments are within a 20km radius of home, that was rarely an issue and I liked the convenience of driving to my local garage at any time of the day or night and filling up using my own coded key. At the end of the month I just a received an invoice for the total due.

The real reason that I have reverted to a “normal” car though, is that Ford simply don’t make the “Flexifuel” model with the same specification as I had previously.

So instead I now have a car with an “EcoBoost” engine in it. Apparently this uses 20% less fuel than a normal engine, and so is cheaper to run and has less emissions. It also goes into a type of “standby” mode when you are waiting at traffic lights or level crossings, and recommends the driver which gear they should drive in for maximum fuel efficiency.

It may not be the great leap forward to using other forms of energy in cars, but I still hope that it is a step in the right direction. I’ll let you know how I get on after a few hundred kilometres!