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

OnStar are tracking you even if you cancel your service.

If you've read my site in depth, you'll know I have a loathing for OnStar. It's GM's "spy in your car", or as they call it "convenience service". They market the service with low-brow terrorising adverts (what if you crash and you can't call for help?) and it's laughably easy to defeat either by electronic circumvention, or by less sophisticated social engineering (read The Art Of Deception - Kevin Mitnick's book - and you'll easily be able to drive off without someone else's OnStar-equipped car). GM can remotely start (and thus remotely disable) your car, and the remote circuitry is intertwined so deeply with the car's onboard systems that if you have brake-by-wire, they can slow the car down too. That in itself means the system is open for abuse by hackers (there's already been one high profile case of a similar system being remotely hacked in Germany, resulting in a life-threatening crash). The onboard mic is open all the time even if the in-car system says it's not (so you have no privacy) and now a change in their terms and conditions allows them to track your speed and location every time you drive, even if you cancel their service. There's hundreds of other reasons to hate this system but now they've sewn the seeds for 24/7 tracking, if you're in a GM vehicle, you're only a few short years away from them remotely governing your vehicle's maximum speed to force you not to drive too fast. Frankly, I'd rip the thing out of any car I owned. Although I'd never buy an OnStar-equipped car in the first place. OnStar tracking you even if you cancel your service

Trivialising car driving

Last week's post on road trains got me thinking about the increasingly dangerous attitude that people take towards cars and driving nowadays. It's almost like driving is an inconvenience that gets in the way of texting, eating, drinking and other socialising - a necessary evil between points A and B. The US driving education and test program (for example) is laughably easy and teaches the students nothing about the realities of driving. In some states the theory part of the test is open-book - they give you the answers - and still people fail. Yet here driving is treated as a right, not a privilege.

A large part of the problem is that so many drivers do not understand that they are driving a 2-ton weapon. Decades of apathy by governments, the authorities and the car manufacturers themselves have led us down the path of vehicles which are so obese with safety paraphernalia that it's no wonder we can't get decent gas mileage out of them any more. And why? Because it's easier to cocoon and protect a driver in the event of an accident than it is to properly educate them in the first place and maintain that education through rigorous traffic enforcement (by which I mean hefty fines and suspensions for things like texting).

This apathy leads to other knock-on effects that aren't immediately apparent, for example the absurdly low speed limits we suffer on a daily basis. The reason they're so low is because there's a widely-held (but mistaken) belief that speed causes accidents and that lowering the speed limits will reduce those accident rates. This has been proven time and time again to be false but parking a policeman behind a wall with a radar gun is such a cash-cow that no police force will ever give it up.

Compounding this problem is the constant addition by manufacturers of distractions into the vehicle. Ford's Sync is a prime example - a system so complicated that its very design needs you to take your eyes off the road constantly to perform even the simplest task. How did we allow this to be put into a car? And we thought BMW's iDrive was bad when it came out.

Sadly there is no solution to this any more. We're so far down the path of dumbing down driving that we're faced with a bleak future of self-driving cars and road trains to "protect us from ourselves". It is categorically the wrong thing to do - we should not be removing responsibility from the drivers and making driving easier, we should be doing the opposite. We should be reinforcing the simple concept that yes, driving a car is dangerous, and perhaps you should spend more time concentrating on the task at hand.

Volvo want to solve traffic problems with road trains.

There's a project that has been going on for a few years now testing the idea of road trains to solve traffic problems. Whilst Google and others go on about driverless cars, Volvo instead think the answer is 'platooning'. Their idea is that trained drivers in lead vehicles set up the head of a road train, and if your car is suitably equipped, you can join the end of the train and your car goes into a self-drive mode, taking its cues from the lead vehicle. As with many ideas before it, Volvo claim this will reduce congestion, reduce fuel economy and increase speeds. And as with many ideas before it, it will fail for a number of reasons.

First - the trained driver. We are such a litigious society now that this concept alone will be the reason this system will fail. Volvo explain that the lead drivers would be licensed, insured and trained but even then you're asking the other drivers to put their vehicle in the hands of someone else whilst they sit back and do nothing. What happens when the first of these systems crashes, or the lead driver is drunk or high? The lead driver is human, and will suffer from everyday human frailties just like you or I. And who is going to pay these lead drivers? Whoever pays them becomes liable for any accident involving the vehicles following them.

Secondly, the infrastructure. As with all these systems, it will require an infrastructure change. In this case it will require all cars to be fitted with hardware and software to allow them to work in the road train. That will push the cost up and people will opt not to buy it. That assumes that the vehicle manufacturers could even agree on a single common standard, and history has taught us that this will never happen.

The idea that any driver would want this seems laughable to me. If you want to cluster a bunch of people together in tight formation behind a single driver, get on a bus. It takes up a lot less room on the road than 50 cars and it works right now. If you really think driving a car should be trivialised to the point of it being a self-driven "capsule" that eliminates the driver from all responsibility, I don't want to be anywhere near you on the road.

Volvo explains why road trains are the future

No, you can't have petrol. Even if you have enough money.

If you live in America, you'll be used to pay-at-the-pump. It's one of America's greatest contributions to modern motoring. It all but eliminates drive-offs because you can't fill your car without stuffing a credit or debit card in the pump first, and the convenience is second only to drive-through cash machines. But all is not well in this motoring nirvana. First, there's the debit card problem - recently we had a rash of crimes locally where someone had installed card skimmers actually inside the pumps. That's a counterfeiting attack for which there's no defence. So tip number one : if the pump offers you a credit or debit transaction, do the credit one. You don't have to type in a PIN and the transaction is covered under the credit card organisation's anti-fraud clauses, be it VISA, Mastercard or whoever.
But second, and most importantly, there's an financial term you need to become very familiar with. Pre-authorisation. It's a mechanism that is used to quickly determine if you can actually cover the cost of what you're buying. When you swipe your card at a store, the amount runs through the quick-turnaround pre-authorisation system and gives a simple yes/no answer back to the point of sale. At the same time, a 'hold' is placed on your account for that amount. If you go through with the purchase, the hold is turned into a 'pending' amount which will clear at the end of the day. Why all this financial-speak in a motoring blog? Well petrol pumps will ding the account linked to your card with a pre-authorisation amount the instant you swipe it through the card reader on the pump. If it's a true credit card, that's not normally a problem, but if it's your bank card and it's merely using the credit card network to communicate with your bank, it could prevent you from filling up even if you have enough money in your account. Why? The following are the pre-authorisation amounts sent through to your financial institution from a couple of big-chain petrol stations:
Shell: $1.00
Conoco: $1.00
Philips66: $1.00
Chevron: $126.00
Texaco: $151.00
Notice the last two. If you have a hundred bucks in your bank account, and want twenty bucks of gas, don't go to a Chevron or Texaco. The pre-authorisation will attempt to hold more than $100 and because you have less than that in your account, it will most likely reject the amount outright.
If you have more than that amount, you're OK. The actual amount you spend at the pump will become the 'pending' amount and the high-dollar hold value will evaporate at the end of the day.
If you want to see just how quick this pre-authorisation system works, set your bank account to send you an SMS alert if your card is used at a petrol station. Swipe your card through the reader and you'll get a text message before you can get the nozzle of the pump to your petrol tank. That's how quick it is.
For my fellow Brits who live in England, you can probably only try this at Tesco. I don't know of any other petrol stations where they allow you the convenience of paying at the pump.

Speed is not dangerous

Just the title of this week's post is probably already irritating a lot of you, but calm down and I'll explain.

To help understand why I can quite confidently make that sort of statement, you need to look through the hype, the fearmongering and the plainly false information that is handed out like cookies by the police, councils and governments. The problem is that people are afraid of speed. They think that all sorts of evil happens when you're going anything faster than walking and that simply isn't true. The problem is people's lack of ability to control their vehicle, and a subset of that is speed - when people panic at speed, things get nasty much more quickly. But proper driver training could prevent this. You can't simply slap unrealistically low speed limits everywhere in an effort to reduce accidents. All it does is reduce the speed that the accidents happen. And these accident figures are freely available if you know where to look. Here in the USA, filing a GRAMA request can be very revealing. For example, in Utah, where I live now, the breakdown of the number of crashes where excessive speed was the primary cause looks like this:
2009: 1.2%
2008: 3.3%
2007: 0.94%
2006: 9.9%
More telling still, by far the largest percentage of accidents involving speed happen below 39mph - not exactly speeding, is it?

In England last year, the single largest cause of motorbike accidents was classified as failed to look, and it's obvious what that means. Speeding was second to bottom, only coming in marginally above deposit on road (meaning loose gravel, spilled diesel etc.) Numerically speaking the difference there is 14% of accidents came down to poor observation and a lowly 1% were attributable to speed.

In pedestrian fatalities, in general, the blame can almost always been laid with the pedestrian. The last time I looked into statistics for those fatalities in the UK, they panned out as follows:

- Pedestrian entered carriageway without due care (84%)
- Vehicle unable to avoid pedestrian in carriageway (12%)
- "Other" (4%)
Speed was the determining factor in one quarter of the "other" category - in other words 1% of pedestrians are killed due to motorists speeding.

Even the UK government has admitted that the speed kills mantra is, for want of a better description, total rubbish. In one notable memo on the topic, they opened with the following:

In recent years far too little research has been carried out into the causes of road accidents. Research that has been done has often started from the questionable presumption that the only route to improvements in road safety lies in the rigorous management of vehicle speeds. Conflicting viewpoints are ignored, irrespective of the significant weight of supporting evidence.

You can find that little gem of a report either on the government's own website (here) or in a PDF I printed from it (here) because topics like this tend to "disappear" when too much attention is drawn to them.

I'm currently gathering accident statistic information from various transport authorities across the US with GRAMA and FOIA requests - as I've done with Utah. I'll do some analysis and update my site and blog accordingly. I do know from initial investigations that in Arizona, the number of accidents in 2010 that were directly attributable to speeding was 1.4%. The number of accidents directly attributable to distracted driving (texting, using the phone) was over 30%.

For more reading I have a whole page on this topic: Speeding facts vs. fiction