AS HJ says regularly, most cars have a design life of approx. 7 years. Buying any old car more than 5 years old is a lottery. People need to be a lot more careful about buying old cars but they just plough on regardless.

Yes, its a different case buying older ''sensible'' cars if you know a bit about cars and most importantly can fix them yourselves, in which case many a long year of bargain motoring can be had, and for such people things like BINIs or other troublesome vehicles especially with weird contraptions of gearboxes are avoided like the plague.

On a practical front, if the problem is lorries, I suggest noting the owners and contact them with your concerns, bad publcity is something the owners would avoid.

Most lorries are now tracked and have cameras and if the transport manager receives a complaint promptly the tracking and camera systems these days can tell him exactly what speed the vehicle was doing at a particular point (a good system might well have already have made note of the vehicle speeding in a 30 if this is the case), similarly the tachograph if times given are accurate can be damning confirmation alongside the tracker and camera..and yes agency drivers have been permanetly banned from where i work following complaints which were confirmed by the on board equipment, my boss takes such complaints very seriously indeed because they are thankfully extremely rare.

However they are a driver's defence too and can point to a vehicle being driven properly, and the company may not take kindly to what they might consider an unfair or unjust complaint againt one or several of their drivers.

Bare in mind a lorry travelling at 30mph is far more imposing than a car driven at the same speed, and its speed can easily be overestimated.