Preparing Your Car for a Long Journey

Split the checks in two, because the common mistake is doing all of them on the morning.

• A week before — everything that might need a part, a booking or a decision. Finding a worn tyre at 6am on departure day is how holidays start badly
• The morning of — five minutes of things that only matter fresh

And one item that almost nobody does and that matters more than all the rest combined: set the tyre pressures for a fully loaded car, not for the way you normally drive it. Your car has a second set of figures for exactly this, and most drivers have never used them.

The tyre pressure nobody adjusts

Find the placard — usually inside the driver’s door shut, sometimes on the fuel filler flap or in the handbook. Look carefully at it. Most cars list two or more columns: one for normal or partial load, and one for full load and sustained high speed.

The second column is typically several psi higher, front and rear, and it exists because a fully laden car asks something quite different of its tyres. Four adults and a boot full of luggage can add a couple of hundred kilograms, most of it over the rear axle.

Run that on solo pressures at 70mph for three hours and the sidewalls flex more than they were designed to, which generates heat. Heat is what destroys tyres — it is the mechanism behind most motorway blowouts. An underinflated, overloaded tyre at sustained speed is the specific combination that causes them.

It also handles worse, wears its shoulders, and uses more fuel. Setting the laden pressures takes four minutes at a garage forecourt and is the highest-value thing on this page.

Set them cold, before you set off, not after an hour on the motorway — warm tyres read high, and inflating to the placard figure when hot leaves you underinflated once they cool.

A week before

Tyres. Tread across the full width including the inner shoulders, which means turning the steering to full lock to look. Check for bulges, cuts and embedded objects. Anything approaching 3mm is worth replacing before a long trip rather than after it.

The spare — or whatever replaced it. Check the spare’s pressure and age, and find out whether you even have one. If the car came with a sealant and compressor kit instead, check the sealant’s expiry date and understand its limits: it deals with a small tread puncture and does nothing for a sidewall tear or a blowout.

Oil and coolant. Levels, and the condition of the oil. Topping up is fine; topping up repeatedly is a leak, and a leak is worth finding before a motorway rather than on one.

Is a service due? If it falls anywhere near the trip, have it beforehand — but not the day before. That is the counter-intuitive bit and it is worth taking seriously: any work on a car has a small chance of something needing to settle or reveal itself, and you want that to happen on the way to Tesco rather than on the M5 near Bristol. Leave a few hundred miles between the garage and the journey.

Cambelt, if you have no history. A snapped belt is one of very few faults with no warning and no limp-home mode, and it is the single most commonly missed item on a used car. If nobody can produce a receipt, find out where you stand before a long drive rather than after.

Wipers and screenwash. Motorway spray is relentless and salt film builds fast. A blade that smears at 30mph is genuinely dangerous at 70.

Breakdown cover. Check it is current, that it covers this vehicle, and that it includes recovery to your destination rather than to the nearest garage. If you are going abroad, check whether European cover is included or an add-on — most policies do not include it by default.

Air conditioning. With five people in a car in August it stops being a comfort item. If it is not as cold as it should be, the cause is often cheaper than a regas.

The morning of

1. Tyre pressures, set cold, to the laden figures
2. Lights — all of them, with someone standing outside. Both brake lights, indicators, fogs, reverse
3. Fluid levels — a final look at oil, coolant and screenwash
4. Load secured — nothing loose in the cabin. An unrestrained object in a boot without a parcel shelf becomes a projectile in a heavy stop
5. Fuel, and enough of it not to be hunting for a services on a strange motorway

Loading the car properly

Three rules that make a measurable difference to how the car handles:

Heavy items low and as far forward in the boot as possible, ideally ahead of the rear axle line. Weight high and far back makes the rear light and the car unsettled, particularly in crosswinds and under braking.

Do not load above the seat backs in an estate or hatchback without a load barrier. There is nothing between that suitcase and the back of your head.

Roof boxes change the car. They raise the centre of gravity, add real drag — expect a noticeable fuel penalty, and more at higher speeds — and make the car sensitive to crosswinds and to the buffeting from overtaking lorries. Two practical points: check your car’s roof load limit, which is lower than people assume and includes the bars and box themselves, and re-check the fittings at your first stop. Everything settles in the first hour.

Also worth knowing: a loaded car takes longer to stop and needs a bigger gap. The brakes are the same; the mass is not.

The first-stop check

Twenty minutes to an hour in, at the first services, spend two minutes:

• Walk round and look at the tyres — anything visibly soft, anything picked up
• Check the roof box or bike rack fittings
• Listen and smell. Any new noise or hot smell is far cheaper addressed here than two hundred miles later
• Glance under the car where it has been parked for anything dripping

Faults that are going to appear on a long drive usually appear early, when the car first gets properly hot under sustained load. That is the moment to catch them.

What to carry

Not an exhaustive kit — the things people actually end up wanting:

• Hi-vis vest, ideally one per person, kept in the cabin rather than the boot
• A torch that is not your phone
• Jump leads or a lithium jump pack
• Tyre inflator, if the car has no spare
• Water — for the passengers, and for a cooling system in an emergency
• Phone charger and a note of your breakdown provider’s number and policy number

If it goes wrong on a motorway

Worth reading once before you need it.

Get off at the next exit or into a service area if the car will still move. If it will not, aim for the hard shoulder or an emergency area, as far left as possible, wheels turned to the left, hazard lights on.

Get out through the left-hand doors if it is safe to do so, and get behind the barrier — up the bank, away from the carriageway. Do not stand between the car and the traffic, and do not attempt any repair on a live-lane side. If you cannot get out safely, or you are stopped in a running lane, keep your seatbelt on, leave the hazards on and call 999.

Then call your breakdown provider from behind the barrier.

What does it cost?

Item	Typical Birmingham range
Pre-journey check	Often free alongside another job
Full service	£149–£219
Wiper blades, pair	£20–£50
Air conditioning check	£20–£40
Four-wheel alignment	£55–£90
Coolant drain and refill	£70–£150

Why this matters more starting from Birmingham

Most long journeys from here begin on a motorway within twenty minutes — the M6 north or south, the M5 towards the south west, the M42 and then the M40 or M1. There is very little gentle warm-up between a Birmingham driveway and sustained 70mph.

That changes the risk profile of a marginal fault. A worn tyre, a soft brake, a low coolant level or a tired damper is a nuisance on the Coventry Road at 25mph. The same fault twenty minutes later, fully loaded, at motorway speed, on a stretch of the M6 with no hard shoulder, is a different event entirely.

There is a second, more specific point. The M6 around Spaghetti Junction and J6 is one of the most congested stretches of motorway in the country, so a great many journeys begin with a fully loaded car sitting stationary with a hot engine and the air conditioning working hard. That is exactly the condition that finds a marginal cooling system — a tired fan, a silted radiator, a thermostat that is not quite right — and it finds it before you have left the city.

If your car has ever crept up on the temperature gauge in traffic and settled once moving, deal with that before a loaded summer motorway run rather than after.

When should you call a garage?

Book a week or more before you travel, not the day before. That gives time for parts and leaves a few hundred miles for anything new to settle.

Ask for a pre-journey check by name and say how far you are going and how loaded the car will be. It changes what gets looked at — tyres, brakes, cooling system and suspension matter more with five up than with one.

Deal with anything intermittent first. A noise that comes and goes, a gauge that occasionally creeps, a warning light that clears itself. Intermittent faults become permanent under sustained load, and a motorway is where cars are asked to work hardest for longest.

Do not ignore a dashboard warning because the trip is booked. It is the most expensive way to start a holiday.

Tell us the date you are travelling and roughly the mileage when you ring, and we will tell you what is worth doing and what genuinely is not. A full car service in Birmingham, seven days a week — so a pre-holiday check can be a Sunday rather than a day off work.