Space-saver spares

Quick quiz.
A space-saver spare tyre is:
(a) a get-you-to-the-tyre-place remedy
(b) a good substitute for a blown tyre at motorway speeds
(c) a good substitute for three blown tyres at motorway speeds
(d) a good substitute for a missing 21" hoop

If you said (a) then you have a brain, but sadly, the other three answers appear to be the most commonplace now. I see people flying along the motorways at 80mph or so every day with space-saver wheels on their cars. I've also seen cars on the motorway with three of the four wheels replaced with space-savers, and you guessed it, I've seen people with tricked out cars with big wheels missing a wheel but using a space-saver (meaning one wheel is radically smaller than the other three).
It really baffles me how people's brains can malfunction so badly that they don't understand how dangerous this is. (Once again, I believe that you should understand everything about your vehicle if you are to be allowed to drive it.) Most drivers will never have to use the spare that comes in their car, meaning most of us pay it little attention. The rubber sits there under the floor, perishing slowly, leaking air and when the time comes that we actually need to use it, it's all but useless. But for some people, they see it as the perfect replacement. It's not. The rubber isn't designed for heavy loads and high speeds - it's narrower than all your other tyres and doesn't have the same strength or number of steel belts and cords in it. The tread is generic, so it's no good in the rain at anything other than walking pace, and the wheel itself is pretty flimsy, lightweight steel, not the decent load-bearing stuff your normal wheels are made of. Space-savers should only be used as the manufacturer intended. If you zip along at 80mph on the motorway on a stormy day with one of these things, you're pretty much going to get what you deserve. The only problem is that your stupidity will likely cost someone else dearly at the same time.
There's no excuse for doing this. If you have to use one of these things, don't drive home with it - drive to the nearest tyre change place and just get the damn thing fixed.

Police Bias

Let me preface this week's entry by saying that I'm a pedestrian, I ride a bicycle and a motorbike and I drive a car; I'm intimately familiar with the rules of the road for all four. That's why I have an axe to grind about our local police force who behave, it has to be said, in much the same way as police forces pretty much every where I've lived. Last week on a lunch break, a group of colleagues and I were sitting at the front row of a set of red traffic lights, next to police car. A cyclist came dodging between the lanes of cars (I don't have a problem with that) and then cycled through the red light and across the intersection. The police officer did nothing. However, on his left, the left turn lane had changed to amber, then to red and one car went through on red to turn left across the intersection. The police car lit up like a Christmas tree and took off after him.
So why is it OK for a bicycle to go through a red light but not a car?
I've no doubt if a car on a green light had hit the cyclist jumping the red light, it would have somehow been the car driver's fault.
What makes it worse is that cyclists have been doing this for so long they now think it's a right. I nearly had an entertaining accident on my bicycle last year when I stopped at a red light and the cyclist behind me nearly ran into me. As he gave me the international signal for "you're number one", he wafted through the red light shouting "why the f*ck did you stop?".
So : moronic cyclists + biased police officers. Seems like all us drivers are to blame for everything now.

Why don't Europeans care for Infotainment?

Following on from last week's post about touch screens, Autoblog recently posted an article asking why Europeans don't care about infotainment in their cars. The author seemed genuinely bemused why, when he went to IFA (the European equivalent of the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas), it took actual effort to find any auto manufacturers showing anything in the entertainment market. If you've been to CES you'll know there's an entire hall dedicated to the pursuit of distracted driving where all the manufacturers proudly tout their latest methods to keep you from concentrating on actually driving. But at IFA - nothing. Well - not nothing, but very very little. So why is this, the author of the article asked. I can give you a couple of ideas, but predominantly it's because we Europeans tend to understand that when you get into a car and drive, you need to concentrate on the actual driving of the two ton weapon. I think we have far more interest in the act of driving. Americans, by contrast, seem to be expressing more and more desire to have self-driving cars, wrapped in airbags and lawyers to prevent them from having any personal responsibility for the actual act of driving. As a result we've got iDrive and SYNC and all the other wonderful infotainment systems that are impossible to use on the move because of the fiddly on-screen controls, and the fact that you need to look at the screen to use them. ie. you're not looking at the road. ie. you're not concentrating on driving. Here's the original article. I was as bemused as the original author, but I was bemused at how he couldn't grasp the basic concept that infotainment does not belong in a car: AutoBlog

There's a time and place for touchscreens.

Back in the late 90's, Phillips experimented with the Pronto remote control for home entertainment. It was a pure touchscreen device that was infinitely programmable and it bombed.
The reason? In the dark, people didn't want to look down at a glowing screen and navigate pages of menus and icons to find a function. They wanted to reach out, grab the remote and feel for the 'volume up' button. Removing the tactile feedback of physical buttons was a mistake that has since been borne out by successive universal remotes spawning more and more buttons and less and less touch screen functionality.

Car manufacturers have headed off down the same path now by putting more and more touchscreens in their vehicles, and less and less physical controls. The MyFord Touch is a key example of this. Gone are the buttons on the centre console, instead replaced with a single touchscreen display. Want to change the fan speed on the a/c?
Assuming you can read the display (most touchscreens have a hard time competing with the sun - a light source 168,000 times brighter), you need to navigate the menu to the comfort controls, then find the fan speed icons. When you do find them, there's no tactile feedback so then you have to check visually, again, to see if you actually did anything. All this time, your eyes are off the road, both in terms of direction (what you're looking at) and focus (looking up close, instead of far off).

Performing this sort of routine on an iPad whilst sitting on your sofa is mindless, but being forced to do it whilst driving is just poor design. I know where all the controls are for my a/c and audio system on my VW by touch. I don't need to look at them to operate them - I can just reach out and use the relevant control without taking my eyes off the road.

I think Ford realised this early on and attempted to rectify the situation by adding voice recognition, but it's a multi-step process. Push a button. Wait for the audio confirmation. Say "climate control". Wait for the audio confirmation. If you got it right, say "fan speed up". Wait for the audio confirmation. This assumes the voice recognition system can understand you in the first place - the slightest hint of an accent and you'll spend all day arguing with your car.

Probably because they also realised voice recognition was a dud, Ford added a third option - steering wheel controls that operate certain key functions - fan up and down, temperature up and down for example. And here is where they got back on the right track - physical, tactile buttons that you can use without needing to look at them. Why not skip the whole touchscreen and voice control nonsense and just use the buttons in the first place?

I'm not being a luddite here - I love technology - I'm simply saying that building a system so complicated that you need to take your eyes off the road to use it makes no sense. It's contributing to distracted driving.

I've not been so embarrassed as I was a few weeks ago when a colleague of mine was trying to use the system in his Ford Fusion to perform the simplest task. We got all the way to our destination without him figuring out how to turn off the air recirculation. As the passenger, I could see it clear as day. But I wasn't driving.
Do you really want to be presented with this amount of visual information overload just to set the damn ventilation system?

It's not an upsell.

I was sitting watching the techs work on my wife's car recently when one of them wandered in to the waiting area to talk to another customer. He was carrying an engine air filter that was in appalling condition. It was clogged with debris and was almost jet black. The tech explained that this was A Bad Thing to the customer but he wouldn't have any of it. He complained about the tech trying to upsell him on things he "didn't need". The tech tried again to explain to him that this wasn't doing his engine or gas mileage any good but the customer kept refusing to pay for a new filter. In the end they had to put the old one back in the guys truck and off he went. It bothers me when people have so little understanding of things that they can't even listen to basic logic. This guy was absolutely convinced that the new filter was an upsell of a non-critical part of his engine. I'm sure he'll be quite happy with his lean-running engine as it overheats and gives him terrible gas mileage. Look; if you own a car, please try to understand a little of how it works. That way you won't get ripped off by unscrupulous garages but equally you will be able to sense when they're telling you an honest opinion of work you really do need to have done.

The Haynes workshop manual for an F1 car

My wife recently bought me a very thoughtful anniversary gift - the Haynes workshop manual for the Red Bull Racing RB6 Formula 1 car. Okay so it's not a proper Haynes manual in the way that any home mechanic would know but it does cover every aspect of a Formula 1 car in so much detail it's mind-bending. If you're a true Formula 1 fan, you really need to try to get hold of this book; it's fascinating. I know they tell you on TV that aerodynamics is everything on an F1 car, but you have no appreciation for how true that is until you read a book like this (don't worry - it has plenty of pictures). For example did you know that the original position of the wing mirrors on the RB6 was dictated not by being able to look behind, but simply because there was already turbulent air above the barge boards from the front wheels? There wasn't much they could do with that particular area so rather than putting the mirrors somewhere where they'd induce drag, they just stuffed them in the already-turbulent air. The book covers everything from carbon fibre construction, to engine and gearbox, suspension, brakes, aerodynamics, even how much the paint weighs! It's a must for car nuts. Haynes Red Bull F1 workshop manual. ISBN: 9780857330994