The ultimate car accessory. Merry Christmas.

Short post this week. The picture says it all. In the meantime, have a great Christmas break :-)

Tips for filling up.

I received an email from a reader recently with some tips for filling up. I've covered this elsewhere on the site, but it's always nice to pull these sorts of things together into a single, quick-reference point. So this week's blog is all about just that:

Tips for filling up.

First and foremost, if there is a delivery truck filling the underground storage tanks when you stop to buy petrol, DO NOT fill up! The pumping action will be stirring up all the crud at the bottom of the storage tanks and if you fill up now, despite the pump filters, some of that crud will end up in your tank. Come back in a couple of hours when the residue will have had time to settle again, or go to a different station.

Less is More.
Take advantage of early morning cold by filling up your tank early in the day, while the ground temperature is still cold. The temperature of gasoline, diesel, ethanol and other petroleum products plays an important role in getting the most for your money. Petrol stations do not have temperature compensation at the pumps (though loading and storage facilities do, ensuring them greater accuracy). Because the storage tanks are underground, the colder the ground the more dense the petrol. When it gets warmer it expands, so buying in the afternoon or in the evening your gallon is not exactly a gallon. Petrol pumps don't measure actual volume or density, they assume volume derived from flow-rate. The flow rate doesn't change with temperature but the density of the petrol does. So if the pump is calibrated to deliver an assumed gallon in 10 seconds based on full flow, if the petrol is colder, it will be more dense and you'll get marginally more in that 10 seconds than if you fill up in the afternoon.

Petrol evaporates more quickly than you might think.
When you're filling up, if you have time on your hands, fill up at about 1/3 of full power. This minimises the backflow of evaporating vapour created whilst you're filling up. The vapour has a chance to re-condense in your tank rather than being wasted into the outside air (or if you're in America, sucked back into the underground tank via the vapour recovery collar on the pump).

Fill up when your gas tank is half empty.
The first reason is similar to the top tip - crud in the bottom of the tank. If you let your tank get nearly empty, your fuel pump will start pulling the crud in the bottom of your tank and you run more risk of blocking a fuel filter. The other reason though is that the more gas you have in your tank, the less air there is above it to be filled with vapour that will escape as soon as you take the petrol cap off.

Now how much of a difference will these sorts of things make in the real world? One a single tank, not much. Over the course of a year, you might actually notice a difference. Over the lifetime of your vehicle, probably a measurable difference.

Insurance recommendation

If you follow this blog you'll know that a couple of months ago my wife was involved in an accident when an unlicensed, underage driver ran a red light (Toyota saved my wife's life). Obviously the car ended up being written off and we bought a replacement. The true test of any insurance company is when you come to make a claim. I now have a recommendation for you all. Progressive Insurance. Why? Well their local claim rep dealt with us really quickly and efficiently. The claim was settled in 6 days and the amount they offered us for the car that was written off was nothing like a lowball. I'd calculated what I thought the car should be worth. To get the figure I came to, I averaged together the high and low used car prices listed on Kelley Blue Book (KBB), NADA and Edmunds - the three biggest car price guides over here in the USA). I put in the same mileage, colour and option details for each site and ended up with a figure I felt was reasonable. The Progressive agent called us up once the car had been written off and offered us an amount that was exactly 69 cents less than the figure I came up with.
The final test for me was their 'accident forgiveness'. We've been with them for long enough that we're allowed one large claim without it affecting our premium. That's what is advertised anyway, and I was expecting our premium to go up "because of other factors". ie. because of the claim, but explained away elsewhere. Today I received our renewal notice and bugger me - our premium has come down because of falling insurance rates and the economy.
Claim dealt with quickly - check. Didn't lowball us on the payout - check. Rates didn't go up - check. Oh and you can pay your premium with Paypal now too. That's a winner for me.

Top Gear USA Part 2.

Ok I'll admit it - I gave it a second shake of the stick last night. Hard to believe but I think the pilot episode might actually have been the best one. The three wooden presenters became even more wooden last night, and watching "Rutledge" trying to deliver his lines from the Aston whilst driving in the desert was embarrassing. I don't know what his day-job is but he's clearly never been on TV before. And his lack of understanding of how speedometers are marked was legendarily bad.
My friend's 5-year-old daughter could deliver scripted lines more convincingly than he could and just about anyone who knows about cars knows that the max speed on a speedometer is always, always, ALWAYS faster than the car can actually go.
Foust became even more flamboyant (read: gay) and the third bloke - Adam something-or-other became even less funny and even more forgettable.
Worst of all however, I've discovered something truly horrible:
Jeremy Clarkson and Andy Wilman (TG:UK producer) review all the footage for TG:USA. A BBC Brit with a biting sense of humor helms the production and a large part of the crew are experienced from working on episodes of the original Top Gear.
I'm utterly speechless.
If the above is really the case, how can Top Gear USA be so appallingly bad? Surely if Clarkson and Wilman really are reviewing the footage, they'd never have approved a single frame of this diarrhea they're peddling on History Channel. It's classic American remake drivel. It needs to be canceled and quick before it destroys the Top Gear name forever.

Fool me once. Shame on you.
Fool me twice. Shame on me.
There won't be a third viewing of Top Gear USA for me.

Top Gear USA

Well. Top Gear US sucks in a way I thought was previously impossible. Three blocks of wood who can't read a script and aren't funny. They have zero chemistry together, and all they're doing is copying TG UK almost segment for segment, stunt for stunt. They did a Viper vs. a Cobra helicopter tonight which was a direct copy of when Clarkson went up against an Apache in a Lotus Exige. Only on Top Gear USA it was neither funny nor exciting.
They previewed a segment showing one of them in a car sealed up, filled with water, being driven on their track which is obviously a copy of Top Gear UK's episode where they were trying to prove that British Leyland cars weren't crap. Presumably from the same show, last night they showed a clip of one of the presenters hopping out of a car with a lousy handbrake on a hill - a direct copy of Hammond doing it. I think they even choreographed the way he got out of the car to try to be identical.
Their main driver, Tanner Foust, is all kinds of gay - the only thing missing from the show was his boyfriend. The fat bearded presenter is just objectionable in every way possible. (who the heck calls their kid "Rutledge"?) And I think they chose the third guy (Adam Ferrara) because his last name sounds like 'Ferrari'. I've no idea who he is but he made the other two look talented. None of the three of them have any excitement in their presentation. The scripting was so bad that at one point, Faust jumped ahead making a complete hash of the joke they were trying to tell.
Even the interview for star in a reasonably priced car was appallingly artificial and wooden - I think even Buzz Aldrin was reading from a script. And badly.
Top Gear USA sucks so badly I can't even find a metaphor for it. Clarkson needs to grab one of his guns and come over here and put this show out of its misery.
Kill it. Kill it with fire.

Why I dislike auto lights

In keeping with the light-oriented blog post last month, whilst following a GM something-or-other this morning (one of their line of staggeringly crappy SUVs), I was reminded why I dislike automatic headlights. You know - the ones that turn themselves on and off. It was a particularly crisp morning with stark morning sun and deep shadows. Every time we all stopped at traffic lights that were in the shade, the GM's lights came on. As we moved off into the sun, they went off. As we got stuck in slow traffic and went into shade, they came on again. Sun, off. Shade on. All the way to work.
It was daylight all the way - no need to have any lights on at all, yet in their infinite stupidity, GM's engineers decided that merely driving into the shade was reason enough to turn on this particular vehicle's lights.
Genius.