CES and Save The Ring

First up: CES 2011. I've written a show report from a car-nerd's point of view following my trip to Vegas for the Consumer Electronics show. You can find my show report here.CES 2011 show report.
Secondly: I don't know if you've ever driven the Nurburgring Nordschleife but if you haven't, you should. And therein lies the rub. Up until last year, the Ring was publicly owned but last year it was sold to two venture-capitalists who added a bunch of stuff that the Ring didn't need - a huge shopping mall and massive hotels that are always empty, a roller coaster that has never worked, and a bunch of other enticements for tourists. They did this without due diligence - ie. they did this based on the published numbers from the German tourism authority who had stats about annual attendance at the Ring. Unfortunately, the stats had been somewhat padded. In one year, 370,000 enthusiasts turned up but the published attendance figure was over 2 million. Anyway, the two venture-capitalists are now bankrupt and the Ring is faced with a $400M bill with no way to pay it off. Nobody is quite sure what the future holds now but there's a very real possibility that Nordschleife will be closed, only to live on in memory and racing video games. As a car nut, this will clearly be an intolerable thought to you, so if you're on Facebook, please sign up to the Save The Ring page and watch for updates.

Forza Motorsport 3

You'll know from reading this blog that I thought Sony and Polyphony did an appalling job with Gran Turismo 5 for the PS3. It was so bad that I've since actually gone out and bought an Xbox360 just so I could play Forza Motorsport 3 instead. And let me tell you it was worth every cent. If you're frustrated with the abject failure of Gran Turismo 5, I urge you to do the same.
Let me explain.
The two biggest flaws in GT5 are the dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks AI (which incidentally doesn't get any better as your driver experience level climbs), and the comically stupid "crash damage" (which also doesn't get any better as the game progresses).
In Forza 3, the crash damage can be set to off, cosmetic, or full. Cosmetic has no effect other than ruining how the car looks. Full damage means that you get heavily punished for driving like a dick. Radiators leak, engines and transmissions get broken, suspension collapses, steering pulls one way or the other - it's a joy, and it's a massive incentive to learn to drive the courses and cars properly.
The other issue - AI - is so far ahead in Forza 3 compared to GT5 that it's impossible to make a true comparison. It would be like a drag race between a McLaren F1 car and a 3-year-old pushing a stroller. I discovered everything I needed to know about Forza's AI in one race; in the third corner, I just had a nose ahead on the car next to me. In GT5, that's a disaster because the driving-on-rails AI would simply turn into you and run you off the track. In Forza, the car next to me altered its line and braked to tuck in behind me. Then four corners later, the two cars in front of me got into some sort of argument about track position, with the inside car sliding into the outside car, and the outside car retaliating. End result? The both crashed, the rear bumper got torn off one of them and I ran over it, damaging my transmission.
There were other things too. Sure Forza runs a lower resolution than GT5 but it doesn't have graphical pop-up. The shading doesn't suddenly change on the other cars. The shadows look great. The tracks have more variety in them. You have massive car customisation options - from custom vinyl and paintwork to infinite tuning of gearboxes and suspension. And unlike GT5 where you can simply win every race by slamming the best of everything into a car, Forza imposes car classes meaning you have to choose very carefully what you put into your car to keep it within the class restrictions but make it competitive. Especially in online racing.
For me, Forza has proven itself to be superior to GT5 in every realm. I urge you to buy it if you haven't already. You'll be amazed at how much more fun and less clinical it is to play than GT5.
Oh - and if you like customisation - below is a pretty simple example of the sort of paint job you can do. This is my Red Bull GTi getting some air :

Gran Turismo 5 : why it sucks

Gran Turismo 5 has been out for a while now for the PS3. I picked it up on launch day but then sold it on Amazon's used list only two weeks later. Why?
A number of reasons. I've been a big fan of Gran Turismo on the Playstation since I first played GT2. It was an awesome racing game at the time. Unfortunately, successive versions have simply added more eye candy and nothing else. GT5 is almost stunning to look at - if you can overlook the hideous jagged shadows and the pop-up (where things just blink into existence as you're driving). Certain screenshots and replays could easily be mistaken for real photos or videos. The problem is that the developers spent 6 years working on how the game looks, without altering the mechanic of how the game plays. Polyphony Digital have spent tens of thousands of hours concentrating on every last detail of the interior and exterior of 200 of the available 1000 cars, which makes for amazing static photos, but at the expense of fixing the two biggest problems with the whole GT franchise.
First - the AI. The computer-controlled drivers are dumber than a box of rocks. They drive on rails, following the identical line around the track line a train. If you're in their way, they simply crash into you. They have no concept that you even exist and when coupled with the second big problem - lack of crash damage - it makes the game essentially no fun. They're not penalised for touching the cones on the test tracks, and they never spin out when you touch them. However, when they drive into you, you spin, flip, crash and lose control.
So yes - the second big issue is crash damage, or lack of it. Polyphony made a great deal of noise about their all-new crash damage model but in reality, it's pointless and useless. In career mode, it comes on in stages, and you don't really get their "full" crash damage until your driver level reaches 40 (although you can get at it straight away in Arcade mode). At this point, it's still a total joke - you can't ever damage a car to the point where it becomes undriveable. The radiator never overheats, the steering never pulls to one side or the other, the windscreen never gets smashed, you can't rip off wheels or blow tyres. In essence, you can ram your car into the wall at 160mph, bounce off and then go on to win the race. This has always been a problem with the Gran Turismo games and it's not improved in GT5. The apologists will tell you that a real driving simulator is about driving, not crashing, which is absolutely true. But if you get too close to the car in front, or lose the back end in a turn, then the simulation ought to penalise you for it in the form of realistic mechanical and visible damage to the vehicle. Without this, there's no incentive to learn to master the game's different cars and tracks.
The screenshot accompanying this blog entry shows just how appalling the problem is. This is the result of slamming an Audi R8 into a wall at 160mph with the "full" damage enabled. Needless to say, I bounced off and drove on to win the race.
Multiple updates have not addressed these two core issues and I think Polyphony really don't understand how to fix either problem. After all, it's been this way since Gran Turismo 2, and THAT is the problem for me. The game looks stunning for the most part, but it simply isn't any fun to play. Need For Speed:Shift, or Forza 3, or GRiD or DiRT - all undoubtedly more arcade racers than simulation, but all infinitely more FUN to play.

W

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.