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Stop Mate
You'll want to stop before you hit something!
www.gendandirect.co.uk

Like many Esprit owners, LEW's Esprit is parked safely in a garage when it's not being used. Getting an Esprit into a single sized garage is tight enough, but you also have to stop before you hit the back of the garage. There are many tricks used including a tennis ball on a string to touch the windscreen once far enough in. Blocks of wood on the floor to stop the car and markings on the wall to stop once level.

All of these work, but aren't great. LEW wanted something better after 4 years of garage parking and occasionally getting it wrong. Gendan (who supply V8 code readers for the Esprit) have a product that we thought might suit us down to the ground.

Stop Mate is a simply mat which fixes to the garage floor. Then drive slowly over the first hump into your parking position - i.e. with the wheel between the two humps. Seemed perfect in theory, so we thought we'd try it out.

Details
Helps to prevent damaging bumpers and bodywork. Ideal for cars, vans and light commercial vehicles. Simply position the stopmates and secure to the floor.

Features

2x tough, plastic floor mats, Can be secured to floor using adhesive tape supplied. Can be permanently fixed to floor using suitable fixings (not supplied)

   

As you can see LEW's home is pretty tight and we don't want to nudge the motorbike at the back of the garage (we have!).

  

Gendan supplied us with a set of StopMate mats. Simple idea, cheap and look pretty good. We unpacked them and set about installing them.

  

You'll need to place them correctly for them to be of any use (I'll tell you how to suck eggs later). We cheated, as we have marks from our Esprits front tyres on the floor. We position the mats over our marks and made sure they lined up. Otherwise you'll need to have parked your Esprit correctly first and can mark up where the tyres should sit for safe parking.

  

Our floor is painted, so after a quick clean of the area, we simply peeled off the sticky paper for fixing. Pushed down hard and we're secure. If you haven't got a painted floor (worth the effort of doing), you can use the holes provided to screw in the StopMate. This isn't the easiest thing to do, as drilling into concrete can be hard work! We suggest sealing the floor and painting, or if you're lazy, just do the patch for the StopMate and then you can stick them down.

  

Time to test the StopMate and see if we'd put them in the right place! Luckily we had and our Esprit was stopped inches from the bike!

Our price only
£13.95
Includes VAT & FREE delivery!
(click here for direct link)

LEW's Verdict

Ok, you may feel you don't need something like this and other ways of getting you're parking distance correct are fine. Well that may be the case, but this is something we wanted. Our Esprit is parked up regularly in our garage and although we haven't caused any damaged to our Esprit, we have touched things and do have to be careful when parking.

With our StopMate down we can now concentrate on making sure the Esprit gets safely in and the wing mirrors stay on (one didn't once!). One small bump and we're stopped by the larger block from going any further. They work perfect in our garage. We also have the added bonus of not needing to leave the handbrake on any more, which can bind if the road have been wet, as the small small bump secures the car (very slight declined out of our garage).

We love this product, we love the price and the FREE delivery! Easy to install and making parking the Esprit that bit easier. Highly recommend by LEW.

This installation was performed by LEW.

If you have any comments, feel free to e-mail us at admin@lotusespritworld.com

 

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