Toyota wants to steer for you

Toyota recently demonstrated an accident-avoidance system that not only brakes for you, but steers for you too. It uses a series of sensors hooked up to its onboard computer to determine if you're about to be involved in an accident. It then takes control of the steering and brakes and attempts to avoid the accident for you.
The key word there is "attempts".
This is another in a long line of R&D projects that we don't want and don't need. This constant dumbing-down of everything is going to be the death of our civilisation. If this technology becomes commonplace, then drivers will have even less reason to concentrate whilst driving, and there will be even more accidents. Remember, computer systems are not infallible. If there's a bug in the code, and during the attempt to avoid what it "thinks" is an impending accident, your car actually causes another one, then the lawyers will get involved and everyone will pay.
Why don't Toyota spend this money on driver education instead? Driving schools, safety programs, driver education and other such things? Surely it's better to attempt to treat the cause of the problem rather than the symptoms?
And for those who relish the idea of their vehicle driving itself, here's a suggestion: use a taxi, bus or train. They exist right now.
Toyota wants to steer for you.

Once again a failed car show

Wanting to give everyone a fair shake of the stick, I watched Adam Corolla's Car Show on Speed TV last Wednesday. Corolla was widely tipped as the ideal frontman for the American version of Top Gear but he proved in his own show last week why he never got picked. If you thought Top Gear USA was bad, The Car Show made it look like high quality programming. So what was wrong? Well to start with the four hosts spent the first segment of the show sitting behind a desk doing various news items. It looked like any number of post-game or post-match analysis shows on US sports networks. Four wooden presenters in suits, discussing stuff whilst looking vacant and uninvolved.
Eventually they got on to the meat of the program - car stunts and reviews and here's where the show really hit it's stride in terms of being a full-blown suckfest. The 24 hours of "lemons" race was too obviously scripted right down to the dodgy driving and various incidents. The review of the Rolls Royce looked like Dan Niell had a teleprompter strapped to a trailer outside the car and the rest of the segments went downhill from there.
Top Gear USA tried to copy Top Gear UK, and did it badly. The Car Show by comparison tried to copy Top Gea USA - badly. You know how when you photocopy a photocopy the end result is blotchy and unrecognisable? That's what Speed Channel have managed here; a poor copy of a poor copy. I guess Americans really can't make entertaining TV shows about cars.
But they don't know that - Top Gear USA returns for a second season shortly. May the Gods of motoring have pity on us.

The Lincoln MKT

I know I've blogged about this before but American car companies really don't seem to be able to grasp the concept of design. Last night I followed a slab-sided chunk of metal down the street that was so revolting it made the Pontiac Aztek look like the work of a master. It turned out to be a Lincoln MKT. From what I can tell, that car is an exercise in how to get the proportions of everything on a vehicle wrong from every angle. The rear is this giant sea of metal with lights all the way across it. The sides have a Coca Cola wave in them at the swage line, but done in such a way that it makes the car look fat. The windows are too small, and there's too much sheet metal in the doors. At the front, things don't get any better. The front grille is gigantic - you could suck small children in through the openings and the end result of all this is a car that is so repugnant it's hard to imagine anyone ever signing off on the design. I think even Lincoln realise this - on their own gallery page, of the 50 photos available, only 13 of them show the outside of this monstrosity, and only 8 of those show the whole vehicle. Worse, someone apparently bought one of these things willingly and is driving it around town here. It never ceases to amaze me. I know it takes all types of people to make the world go round, but we could do with less of the people that have no sense of styling. Either that or Lincoln needs to stop trying to make a minivan look like a car.

Slow-moving roadblocks

I covered this topic in April but I'm going to post on it again.
One of my greatest pet peeves whilst driving is slow drivers. That doesn't mean I like to speed, it means I like to make progress as traffic allows, and sometimes, traffic is idiots. If I were in law enforcement, I'd make sure that speed limits weren't "limits" but indicated the speed you're supposed to drive. How many times have you been stuck behind someone who's doing 17mph or 18mph in a 30 zone? Or in England, stuck behind someone doing 39mph on a single-lane A road? (60mph)? I'll tell you why they're doing it - for two reasons, both of which are wrong.
Firstly, they think it's safe and it patently isn't. Traffic in crossing streets will be expecting them to be doing the limit or close to it - not half of it - and that results in errors of judgement about closing speed and distance, and that leads to accidents. In addition, when people like me and everyone else get behind someone like this, we become impatient, which makes us prone to doing stupid things in order to get past and - you know - drive at the speed limit and make some progress. The worst case I've seen of this was driving up to the skiing resorts last winter when one of the uphill drivers was going so slowly that even the ski busses were overtaking him, in snow, going uphill, crossing double yellow lines to do it.

Secondly, they think it somehow saves them money. It doesn't. Modern cars are designed to be fuel efficient at two key speeds - around 30mph and around 57mph. If you're going too slow or too quick, you'll be either labouring the engine or pushing more air out of the way, both of which cost you gas mileage.

So to the police - instead of going after the easy prey and ticketing people for speeding (which by the way isn't dangerous and doesn't cause anything like the number of accidents you claim), why don't you address the more hazardous problem of people driving too slowly?

Happy independence day to my friends here in the colonies :)

Monotone

Since we moved to the US, I've noticed by far the most predominant car colours are white, silver, grey, beige and black. Looking out of my window this morning, in the rows of several hundred cars in the parking lots around my office, I can see three red cars, one yellow, one blue and one green. The rest of them are all the usual suspects. It's like living in a 1950's movie and not in a good way either.
I haven't been able to determine yet whether this monotone colour choice is actually a choice people make, or something that the car companies thrust upon us over here under the assumption that people won't buy anything colourful.
You can see the problem for yourself if you go to any of the brand name's US websites. Take my current ride for example - a VW Tiguan. On the US site they have red, blue, silver, black, grey, and two shades of white. In Europe you can get all those colours, plus metallic cream, sky blue, yellow and orange (depending on the variant). Toyota vehicles - in the US we get beige, white, silver, grey, black and dark blue (almost black). One or two models have red available.
The light at the end of the tunnel here are the new Ford models (Fiesta, Focus) that come in an explosion of colours. Fiat are doing the same thing - wild colours - bright yellows, orange, green, several different reds. Time will tell if people buy them or if we'll end up in the same monochrome world. It's not looking hopeful though - when I spoke to the new Fiat dealer in town, they'd sold 12 Fiat 500s in the first couple of weeks. Two silver, two white, eight black, none of them with any coloured graphics. The four they had on special order were three grey and one red.
You can see examples of this monochrome world by looking in Google earth. Best place to look is airport long-term parking lots. Here's a starting point.
Amsterdam - explosion of colour: 52 17 28.29N 4 44 9.28E
Chicago - monochrome with the odd red car: 33 57 4.45N 118 23 38.95W

When TV race coverage goes bad

Speed Channel cover Formula 1 racing - they have done ever since we moved to America. Occasionally though, Fox will cherry-pick a race and show it on their channel instead. The good news is that they keep the Speed Channel commentary team. The bad news is that they destroy the race by starting coverage after the race has started (missing the start and the run to the first corner), going to commercial every 11 minutes no matter what, and filling the screen with so many Fox popup promos that it's hard to see the cars or racing.
OLN do the same thing to the Dakar rally each year. They're the only network that broadcast the event and they cram it into 30 minutes a day. There's four commercial breaks, local-interest features that nobody is interested in, and when they finally get to the racing, they show the motorbikes and the cars and that's it. They barely mention the trucks, the quad bikes, or any of the non-mainstream teams (the independents).
The icing on this little turd-cake is that the BBC cover all these events but if you don't live in the UK, you can't use their on-demand service to watch any of it. Even if you pay for BBC channels on your satellite or cable service.
I'd like to believe that the US channels would learn a thing or two about motorsports but if it's not NASCAR they're just not interested.