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Dear Editor,
While manning the MMOC hostility area, oops I mean hospitality area, at the NEC show this weekend, a member of our branch stopped by for a cuppa before wandering round the show. The following day he phoned me up and said that the polisher he’d bought didn’t flippin’ work and could I remonstrate with the trader concerned.
Mr Trader wasn’t at his stand, but his young son was, who patiently reminded our member via my mobile that the instructions clearly told him to press TWO buttons to start it as a safety measure.
When the lad handed me my phone back, I could almost feel the heat of our member’s blushes down the line. It’s alright, he said, just forget it. He WISHES I’d forget it – our own branch secretary needed instructions from a 12 year old to turn on his polisher, and he says I should forget it?!
Oh hang on, saying it was the secretary has given away who it was, hasn’t it? Ooops sorry Dave, I didn’t mean to let the cat out of the bag, honest…

Hi David,
We had to laugh at the sequence of errors in your report of driving out of your garage (see Nov. Newsletter). Enid learned to drive in Malta in the ’60′s in a side valve MM. When Mr Mifsud arrived for Enid’s lessons, the car always sat a bit low on the driver’s side. Upon investigation one could see this also had a stoved in front wing on the driver’s.
However, it had been repaired with a cement mixer. The damaged area was filled with concrete – not too smooth a mix either – and the hand pained over. Perhaps you have a solution to fix yours!!

Pair of seats from Metro. Grey fabric. Complete with runners and head Rests.
These will fit in a Morris Minor and give a more comfortable ride plus easy adjustment. They tilt forwards and recline back. I got these for Farley but decided that they look a bit too modern. I cobbled some brackets to fit but they ought to be redone.
Seats and runners are in good condition.
£60 Contact David Frazer 01790 763080

Hello o learned ones,
I’ve just collected my ex-demo Galaxy TDCi Ghia and after driving it home have more questions than I can shake a stick at. Spent a couple of hours investigating the handbook which gave the odd tantalising clue, but few comprehensive answers. Lemme start with an easy one – is it possible to configure a Ghia to have ‘fixed’ rear quarterlight windows (i.e. they dont open at all)? My windows LOOK like they should open – they’re not bonded in or anything, and there is a huge bulge in the trim at the rear of each of them that looks like it would cover a motor – but I cannot for the life of me work out how to open them. They’re certainly not the manual type shown in the handbook, with a little lug you release to ‘fold’ them out, but then I cant find any switches near the rear view mirror where the manual says electric ones are switched from!
Moving on, there is a button on the stereo controls with a phone icon on it. Pressing it mutes the radio, and the radio station display changes to read ‘UNAVAILABLE’. If it was just a ‘mute’ switch to shut the radio up when your phone rings, why would it say unavailable? On the indicator stalk theres a rocker switch with two more phone symbols on them, but nothing happens when you switch it either way. Its not shown in the manual at all, which isn’t exactly helpful! On the end of that stalk is a button marked ‘VOICE’. Pressing it generates a new display in the central information menu, along with an electronic voice asking me to speak now. Didn’t know what to say to it so I ignored it smile.gif but then it said “say phone, radio, (or summat else – too surprised to make notes!)”. Said PHONE, and it gave another list of options. Eventually I got as far as storing a name and phone number just by shouting at it, but I’m damned if I know how to actually DIAL it! How do you set it up with your phone? The manual helpfully says ‘refer to seperate manual’, but neglects to give an opinion on what to do when like me you dont HAVE another manual.
I’ve loads more, but wont bore you with it in first post. Any clues on the above please, before I’m forced to look like a muppet by going into my local dealer and looking helpless?

Well after spending a fascinating evening reading all the MkIII posts on this forum, I’ve discovered a few things. First up, its a MkIII. Yeah, I know, that was an easy one. But hey, I was impressed blink.gif .
Moving swiftly on, I discovered a link to a pdf of the manual the dealer neglected to give me, and some random button pressing persuaded the car to be on vague speaking terms with my new phone. I wouldn’t say they’re dating or anything like that, but they grudgingly accept that each other exist. I’ve only had the phone a week, though, and its pretty flippin’ dark outside now so I’ve given up for the night balancing my phone manual on one knee and the laptop on the other (not a recommended technique for driving, I might add, since the bottom rim of the steering wheel forces the laptop into dangerously close proximity to essential bits of anatomy). Only bought the damn phone because its bluetooth and the dealer enthused about how useful it would be. Anyway…
The pleasantly soothing female voice rapidly became a wailing banshee, and only ceased badgering me when I told it that if it didn’t shut up I’d lend the car to the mother-in-law. I was enjoying an animated conversation with it when I glanced out of the window and saw my neighbour looking at me as though I was some sort of demented moron, so I pretended that I was talking to the dog instead. This proved of little worth, mainly because the dog was indoors quaffing my cup of tea. Unfortunately the cars interpretation of English seems to differ somewhat from my own, and it was only by torturing my larynx into unimaginable contortions that the car decided that, yes, I really DID want to turn the fan speed down. I’ve considered this at length, and I really cant imagine why anyone would want to use this ‘feature’. I mean, you press a button to tell it you want to talk to it, wait for it to beep at you, then tell it you want to control the climate, then that you want to do that by changing the fan speed, and then finally what speed you want. Or alternatively, you could just press the button to change the fan speed… I had intended to attempt a change of radio station, but another look out the window showed that the neighbour was back, and this time he’d invited some friends to come and laugh too.
I have to say I’m not overly chuffed with the instrumentation colour, either. The rather vivid bright red glow that bathed the whole interior reminded me of the last time I was in Amsterdam, but I wont go into that here. In the interests of aesthetics, I had a go at changing the colours on the TomTom to match, or at least not clash quite so atrociously, but gave up on that when ‘er indoors phoned me up to ask whether I was coming in or if I needed a sleeping bag. The most frustrating bit was that I only got the TomTom because THAT’S bluetooth too, and I naively thought that it would be nice to have it communicate with my phone and avoid that depressing flashing blue light in the rear window. Silly me, I should have realised that, when dealing with bluetooth, two’s company but three’s a crowd, and after a pitched battle the car decided it needed comms with my phone more than the TomTom did. Having won this fight on points, the car over-rode all the custom settings I’d painstakingly set into TomTom to ‘speak’ to the phone, and said that I’d have to input them all again directly into the car because it wasn’t willing to read its internal phonebook. I offered to let the car sleep with the phone, even though it was only a first date, but the increasingly annoying old hag in the dashboard was having none of it.
Abandoning the phone, and keeping a watchful eye out for the neighbour, I had another play with talking to the climate control. After pleading ‘Help!’ at every menu, I discovered you can adjust fan speed, temperature, auto setting, demisting, and maybe a few more too, but you CANT turn it on. Or off. On the radio, you can seek stations (even though the scan up/down buttons are directly in front of the one you press to tell it you want to talk to it), name stations, even have read to you the whole damn list of stations, but again you cant turn it on or off. And you cant turn it up or down, either. Is this thing MEANT to be a useful tool, or a mere toy that marketing dreamed up a week before launch? It’s hardly what you’d call ‘thought through’, is it?
Oh, yes, the rear windows. No amount of prodding and poking would convince them to open, and the previously chatty dashboard didn’t even bother to answer me when I asked it for help, but fortunately another post on this forum told me that Ford had in their infinite wisdom decided to omit this option sometime early last year. Nice of them to let us know, eh? What’s really irritating is that it looks as though its all there too, motors, wiring, the lot, just that there’s no switches at the front to actually do anything with it. The dog came out for its constitutional and promptly barked at the daft bint in the dashboard, who responded by telling the dog to speak the number. I’m definitely going to play with that more tomorrow – I’m convinced that if I pull the dogs tail at the appropriate juncture, it’ll be able to control the CD changer better than I can. Yes, that’ll mean that I have to take the dog every time I use the car, but the mother-in-law hates the dog and wouldn’t dream of travelling in the car with it. Every cloud…

Okay I’ve now had time to to have a fuller look at the ‘voice control’ feature in my Galaxy, having waited until the neighbours were at work so I could do it without fearing a visit from the men in white coats. Unfortunately this is the same neighbour who spotted me engaged in a fully-fledged conversation with a dead stick which had optimistically been labeled as an apple tree, begging it not to follow its predecessors to the compost heap in spite of the lovingly applied, although somewhat smelly, compost we’ve been feeding it with for the last month. Having already pigeon-holed me as a window-licker, then, I didn’t feel it was too much of a loss for him now to spot me chatting to the car. No doubt the day will come when its perfectly natural to talk to your car, but in the meantime I’m destined to continue this furtive hiding in the shadows when nobodys looking.

The voice contol seems to have three main areas of operation; the audio system, heating and ventilation system, and mobile phone comms. Following last nights debacle, at least I didn’t have to ‘train’ my phone to be recognised, so I thought this would be a good place to start. Big mistake… Having discovered that its possible to train more than one phone to the car, I had a go at ‘pairing’ the wifes phone too. Asking the phone to search for bluetooth devices, it picked up and offered me connection with half of the devices in the western hemisphere, including my own mobile, a couple of wireless networks, and a passing jumbo jet, but steadfastly refused to spot the Ford Galaxy it happened to be sitting in. How do you turn on visibility for the car? I’m sure the mother in law has a spell somewhere for invisibility, so maybe I’ll ask her later. Meanwhile, who knows, the manual certainly wasn’t giving any clues, and the creature that lives in the dashboard was still sulking from last nights threat to let the dog chew through the dash at it. Eventually the mobile offered me an ‘unknown device’, and selecting that I was asked for the password. Password? How the hell should I know? My irritatingly knowledgeable son suggested trying four zero’s as a default, which proved to be correct as the radio display then lit up with the device name. This proved rather contentious, since I’d renamed her phone some time ago so I could easily pick it out, and in a moment of inebriated rebellion I’d renamed it as ‘old hags phone’. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but ‘er indoors was distinctly less than impressed when it appeared in big red letters on the dashboard. Having promised to mow the lawn as atonement, I despatched her off to the house to stir some potion or whatever before the spy in the dashboard could get me in any more trouble.

I now had a bigger question – which phone out of the two would get ‘preference’ by the car when both were in it at the same time? I figured that since the dashboard was definitely female it would side with ‘er indoors, but in fairness it at least seems to be recognising both at once. Every now and then ‘She Who Must Be Obeyed’ casts a pitying glance out of the window and either raises her eyebrows inquisitively or harumphs contemptuously, depending on what chance she thinks there is of me mowing the lawn today. Tortuous as this learning curve seems, its infinitely preferable to dragging the mower out for a fight with the jungle thats sprung up since last week, so I pressed on. How come the ruddy grass rises so fast that I could hold jungle training in it unless I mow it every other day, but the apple trees just sit there are look dead?

Anyway, unless someone knows better, transferring the phone book from either phone to the car doesn’t seem possible, so I painstakingly trained the car to remember the complete list of people I’d ever called. It at least gave me the opportunity to erase the number of the single mum who’d moved in down the road and who’d needed help changing a fuse. Now her, I would mow the lawn for… I even remembered to train the car by speaking in a teeth-clenched mumble, recognising that I’m hardly likely to give other people the opportunity to point and laugh when I try and use it while actually out in the car. I proudly demonstrated to the dog that I could now, purely by the power of speech, begin a conversation with the old bat, but the dog remained unimpressed. This was possibly due to the fact that the old bat in question was at the time a mere ten feet away and seperated only by a pane of glass, and who’s bawling reply rendered the cars speaker redundant. One day I’m gonna bury her under the patio… Another question arose – how do you stop a phone call once you’ve started? ‘Stop’, ‘cancel’, ‘end’, ‘oh sod off’, none of these had any effect and ‘er indoors eventually solved it for me by hanging up herself. I considered ringing the mother in law to see whether or not the car microphone could pick me up well enough for a deaf and senile hag, but she’s normally in her coffin during the hours of daylight so I passed. On the phone front, then, I think a six out of ten sounds fair. Making the pairing process a bit less convoluted would help, and its more than a tad annoying that it wouldn’t take my phonebook direct from the phone.

Both the audio control and heating control fare a little better, since at least you dont need to pair them to the car first. Its still infuriatingly difficult persuading it to recognise what I’m saying, but then I suppose its been configured to accept the widest range of voices and not everyone speaks proper like wot I does. I wouldn’t mind a bet though that it’ll have no problems with interpreting the cackle that passes for the wifes voice, even though none of the rest of us can understand her and it makes most dogs wet themselves and run for the hills. I still think its bizarre that you cant control the volume by voice control, since surely thats the one thing that a driver would change most. Buried in the user manual is a reference to some system that automatically raises the volume in line with the speed of the car, but I’ve no idea whether its turned on or not, or even fitted. It would be more useful if it could sample the volume level inside the car rather than its speed, since when all five boys are in the car we usually daren’t slow down for fear of calls from the Noise Abatement Society. One glance from the old bat is usually enough to quiten them for a bit – I think they’re all scared she’s going to put a curse on them or something. So, eight out of ten for those two bits.

Overall, I think its a bit of a gimmick. For the first couple of weeks I’ll no doubt chat to it, but once the novelty has worn off I’ll go back to the old-fashioned but remarkably accurate method of actually pressing the button for the feature I want. Shame, really, as it could have been so much better if only it had had a little more development time. For anyone considering the options list – if it even is still an option, Fords brochures seem to contradict themselves – then I’d suggest that there could be other items you might value more in the longer term. I’d suggest the navigation, but having had the nightmares I’m experiencing with TomTom right now possibly not! I’ll give my impression on the overall car once I’ve had a few days with it, but in the meantime the neighbour will be home for lunch soon, and I want to see if I can persuade the dog to dump on his lawn rather than mine, so I’m off!