Articles by Stephen Corby

The entry-level to the truly lovely looking new entry-point to Mercedes-Benz SUV range is the GLA 200. While it is deeply attractive inside and hugely pleasant to look at outside, from any and every angle, truly improving on what was already a pretty good looker in its first generation, the 200 does sound like it might be tiny bit underpowered.The GLA 200 is powered by a 1.3-litre turbocharged petrol four-cylinder engine - as opposed to the 2.0-litre in the next step up, the GLA 250 - and is front-drive only. Which is a bit embarrassing when you're trying to tell your neighbour you've just bought a Mercedes "SUV".That engine makes just 120kW and 250Nm and uses a 7G-DCT seven-speed automatic, which is also one cog less than you get in the 250.The very tempting-sounding base price of $55,100 also gets you Comfort Seats in  ARTICO upholstery, Keyless Go, a powered tailgate, the very modern MBUX multimedia system with sat nav, reversing camera, Apple CarPlay  and Google Android plus wireless device charging, 64-colour ambient lighting, rain-sensing wipers, DAB+ digital radio, Active Parking Assist with Blind Spot Assist and Active Lane Keeping Assist, Traffic Sign Assist, Adaptive High Beam Assist, LED fixed headlights and 19-inch multi-spoke alloy wheels.

Until the AMG version arrives, the GLA 250 4MATIC is very much the GLA you're looking for, because it gets the alluring interior and attractive exterior that will draw buyers to this new GLA, but also wins an engine with a bit of get up and go, all-wheel drive and even an Off Road mode for those times when you're on a dirt road or driving to the snow.There's more than enough power and torque here, in fact, for most people and only the kind of people who need their urban SUV to really explode off the lights will feel the need for more than 250 variant offers. The only real letdown here is the boot, which is quite shockingly small. 

The first Mercedes-Benz GLA might have been described as merely an A Class on stilettos, but it was a huge success, shifting more than a million units worldwide, and that means it's replacement is something the company has put considerably more thought, and engineering, into. The result is a mighty fine looking urban SUV, with an ultra-modern and very spacious cabin. But is it as good as it looks?

How long do car seats last? Well, physically, if kept in dry conditions, out of the sun they might last many years indeed, but that doesn’t mean you should keep using them, or hand yours on to other parents, because the recommended expiration date for a car seat in Australia is 10 years.This will come as news to a lot of people who probably assumed that, not being made of milk, car seats wouldn’t have an expiry date.(Interestingly, the expiry date for car seats differs from country to country - in the US it’s just six years.)On the plus side, anyone who is still having children 10 years after they had the first one, and invested in their first car seat (and first time around, people tend to go brand new, because they’re excited/paranoid about safety), is clearly living in the 1930s, when everyone had half a dozen kids.So you really should only need two or three car seats to get you through the parenting of small children years, depending how many kids you have. The key thing to note, of course, is that the car seat expiration is a recommendation, not an Australian law, or even a NSW law. No policeman ever, not even the most fastidious highway patrolman, is going to pull you over and demand to know how old your child seat is. As the people at Infasecure point out: “The 10-year timeframe is not law, it’s not mandated in the Australian Standard, and it’s not enforceable – it’s something that the industry loosely agreed upon, and is generally used as a best-practice guideline.”But it’s a recommendation for a reason, and one that’s wise to listen to. Largely it’s about common sense - child restraints and baby capsules are built to last a long time, but shouldn’t be used indefinitely.For a start, much like cars, child seats are constantly improving in both construction and safety. A child seat from 10 years ago simply isn’t going to be as good, or as well designed, as a new one.Indeed, 10 years ago, Australians were not using the far superior ISOFIX seats that are so common now, because they were illegal in this country until 2014. And trust us, you really want an ISOFIX child restraint for your children.Then there’s the fact that wear and tear is obviously going to be an issue with anything that your children use regularly, particularly over a decade.Kids are hard on gear, just have a look at how fast they go through shoes.There’s also the issue of what the experts call “material degradation”, which is slower and more passive. But consider that a child seat is going to be kept in a a car where the temperatures cycle - depending where you live - from below zero to more than 80 degrees celsius. The plastics and impact foams in the seat simply aren’t going to be as robust after 10 years as they were when the restraint was new, partly because they've been cooked each summer. Harnesses and tethers can also stretch or weaken over that period of time.So how do you know how old your seat is?Some companies, like Infasecure, start their warranty from the Date of Purchase, so if you’ve got the receipt you’ll know that, but it’s far more common amongst child restraint manufacturers - like Safe and Sound, Meridian AHR, Steelcraft, Britax and Maxi-Cosi - to state that the usable life of a child seat expires 10 years after the Date of Manufacture (DOM).You’ll find this DOM either stamped into the plastic shell of the product or on a clearly marked label affixed to it.If you’re buying a child seat second hand, obviously it’s extremely important to check this date first.Indeed, the people at Britax advise that you should not only not sell your restraint if it’s more than 10 years old, but you should “cut off all of the harness and top tether, cut the cover, remove or black out the serial number and manufacture date, and write ‘trash, do not use’ on the car seat shell.”They really, really don’t recommend that you use them after 10 years.

Obviously, modern cars a lot more pleasant, and safer, to drive than older ones, thanks to huge, and continuous, leaps forward in engineering and software, but they are also just far nicer places to spend time - even when they're not moving - thanks to impressive improvements in their audio systems. 

The law, famously, is an ass, but when it comes to speed cameras, it's a differently shaped ass - although still a stinky one - depending on which State you live in.

Who is the Stig? It is, or certainly was, one of the great mysteries of our time.What we know for sure is that he was, and is, the unidentified, mysterious and enigmatic “tame racing driver” on the global televisual juggernaut that was, and still kind of is, Top Gear, and it was his job to set the hot lap times by which all of the world’s greatest cars were compared on the Top Gear leaderboard. A simple answer to the question would be Ben Collins, but that’s only one answer, because he was also Perry McCarthy, and Michael Schumacher, and Big Stig and Black Stig, among others. There is currently another white-suited Stig whose identity remains a secret.And then there are the things we know about him that make Stig truly mysterious and amusing, like the “fact" that he never blinks, sleeps upside down, and is scared of bells, ducks and boy Scouts. Some also say that he has two sets of knees, webbed buttocks, a digital face and that if you tune your FM radio to 88.4 you can hear his thoughts.All we really know, for sure, is that he's called the Stig.Not since the boys from Kiss finally took off their make-up to reveal their hard-rocked faces, back in 1983, had the planet been so caught up in the race to find out someone’s true identity. So when Ben Collins - a man no one had ever heard of, despite all the speculation about the secret racing driver being someone famous - outed himself as the Stig, publishing a book called The Man in the White Suit in 2010, it was a huge story.The myth and mystique of the Stig had been built up over many years, and magnified by the success of the Top Gear TV show, hosted most famously by Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond, which was, for several years, the most-watched non-fiction television program… in the world (as Clarkson would bray it).The Stig's identity had been exposed once before, in the form of a newspaper scoop, back in 2003, when Top Gear was only really a big deal in the UK, rather than worldwide.Clarkson and the his good friend Andy Wilman, the producer and genius behind the show, came up with the idea for the Stig when they launched the version of Top Gear we know today - featuring a racetrack, a live studio audience and plenty of crazy races and stunts - in 2002. The two of them wanted a professional racing driver to set fast, and comparable, times on the Top Gear test track, in a segment known as Power Laps, but they struggled to find one who was any good at speaking on camera, so they decided to make him a mute in a suit instead. The name “Stig comes from the private school both attended, where any new boy arriving was always called “Stig”. The idea that Stig was some kind of superhuman being was laid down the very first time Clarkson introduced him as an “it” - “nobody knows its name, and we don't wanna know, because it's a racing driver”.The first Stig, who wore a black suit, was Perry McCarthy, a not particularly famous F1 driver, who went to huge amounts of trouble to maintain his anonymity, wearing his helmet and suit at all times and even putting on fake accents when required to speak.The Stig’s other job on the show was to teach celebrities to drive around the Top Gear track at high speed, for another segment called Star in a Reasonably Priced Car, in which celebrities would set a lap time and be compared with other famous people for their driving skills.Doing this while maintaining his anonymity was yet another challenge for McCarthy, until his identity was revealed by a Sunday newspaper article in January 2003. The Black Stig was then killed off by the show in the first episode of Series 3, after driving off the deck of an aircraft carrier into the ocean at high speed. There has always been some debate over whether he was sacked or resigned.The Stig who would go on to genuine global fame was known simply as white Stig and was unveiled in 2003 and, incredibly, his identity remained a tightly held secret for seven years.During that time his role expanded beyond just doing Power Laps and training celebrities to being more of a comic foil and taking part in some of the show’s iconic races and even its Winter Olympics, in which Stig jumped a snowmobile off a ski jump in Norway.While the show’s hosts always talked up the Stig’s super-human driving abilities, the world speculated wildly about who he might actually be. Suggestions included F1 drivers Damon Hill and Michael Schumacher, musician Jay Kay and even US president Barack Obama (a rumour spread by the show itself).The question “Who is the Stig” is sometimes said to be one of the most asked questions on the internet, and T-shirts bearing the words “I am the Stig”, have made the BBC untold millions in merchandise sales.On one occasion, in 2009, the show allowed the Stig to remove his helmet and reveal himself as none other than Michael Schumacher. This was, of course, an elaborate ruse.When Ben Collins decided to write a book outing himself as the Stig (partly because he felt he wasn’t being paid enough and wanted to cash in), a legal battle erupted with the BBC, which makes the show and sells it worldwide, attempting to stop publication of the book, which they said breached his contractual obligations.After the court case, Collins was sacked, the show’s presenters and producers, and many fans around the world, were very angry at him for ruining all the fun and a search immediately began for a new white Stig. This new Stig was found in a manger in Bethlehem during the show’s Middle East special in 2010, it was a baby Stig but it soon grew to full size, and speed, and remains the official Stig on Top Gear to this day, even surviving his show’s most famous co-hosts, Clarkson, Hammond and May, who have all moved on to a new show of their own, The Grand Tour. Top Gear lives on without them, and with the Stig.In case you were wondering, the short-lived Australian Top Gear show’s Stig was also unmasked by the media as Cameron McConville, a V8 super car driver and Bathurst winner. 

Before you have children of your own, you kind of imagine that the day you get your driver’s licence is a purely celebratory one. A rite of passage that leads to expanded horizons and a freedom of movement previously unimaginable. And yet, from the parents’ point of view, this is actually a mildly terrifying time. All the statistics tell us that the most endangered and likely to crash drivers on our roads are P-platers (and young men in particular) and the shift from them driving around next to you with L-plates and their best behaviour on to being out there alone is a harrowing one.We all know that teenagers being allowed to drive cars is a recipe for disaster, but that whole rite-of-passage thing means we can’t really justify raising the L-plate age to something sensible, like 25.Teenagers have tricky little attention spans, and in boys, the part of their brains that assesses risk is still not fully functional. Instead, they seek out dumb and dangerous activities, and thus putting a tonne and a half of metal capable of moving through space at high speeds in their hands is, at the very least, foolhardy.There’s also the simple fact that it takes time to become a good driver; experience in different situations and conditions, road craft, wisdom. And this is why choosing one of the safest cars for P platers is such a vital moment for parents, in consultation with their excited teen, of course. So what is the best first car for a teenager in Australia, and are they as affordable as a first car should be? Fortunately, the answer is yes.

Can a Learner driver tow a trailer? As is so often the case in Australia, the answer to this depends on where you live. Generally, the answer is no, and yet there are thousands of kilometres of roads in this country where it is allowed, as long as you display an extra L-plate on the vehicle you’re towing. 

To modern Australian families, the SUV is what a Commodore or a Falcon used to be - the sensible, obvious and most common choice of family vehicle.