Vanity mirrors in the driver's sun visor. Really?

My new Honda has a vanity mirror in the driver's side sun visor - a first for me. It's not bad enough that I have to content with women using their rear view mirror to apply makeup and guys using it for shaving on my morning commute every day; now there's the potential that they can use a vanity mirror in the sun visor too? Who's bright idea was that? Surely there can be no reasonable explanation for doing this. Drivers are distracted enough as it is now - did we really need to add just one more thing to take their mind away from the matter at hand? It does seem that car manufacturers are more and more interested in clogging up the interiors of our cars with useless junk, and less and less interested in keeping the driver accountable for piloting a 2 ton weapon.

Only make improvements where they are needed.

I'm enjoying my new Honda Element. I replaced the old one with a 2009 model year largely because I liked the changes they'd made externally. But on taking delivery of the car, there are numerous things which Honda have improved - almost all of which were things I griped about in the past. For example the cruise control on/off button is now on the steering wheel instead of down by my left knee on the dash, and the intermittent wipe now has variable timing. Plus, the improved engine air intake, remapped ECU and 5 speed auto instead of 4 speed returns 5mpg more than the old one. Ok so these aren't exactly groundbreaking items in today's car market, but the fact that they were so illogically implemented the first time around meant there was room to improve. So either Honda listened to their customers, or they've since employed a designer who looked at the original Element and had a "WTF?" moment.

The really nice thing is that a lot of the stuff which didn't need touching has been left alone, and that was also a pleasant surprise. How many times have you upgraded a car, or changed cars within the same brand, and found something which worked just fine in the original but seems to have been "improved" or moved in the new one just for the sake of it?

I guess the message to the car manufacturers here is to only improve that which needs it. If something works well and logically, leave it alone.

Now that's how a car dealer should be.

I settled the paperwork on a new car last weekend. Far from the high-pressure no-haggle screw-the-customer mainstream dealersm Willey Honda in Bountiful, UT, did me proud on the price of the new car. I'm a repeat customer for them - I got the original Element from them in 2006. I went back there because they are a pleasant car dealer, with pleasant staff and a no bullshit pricing approach. For example they didn't lowball me on the trade-in value. In fact they were higher than I'd budgeted for. On the new car they came in at an out-the-door price which was $200 less than the MSRP. Bear in mind the MSRP doesn't include tax, title, license and paperwork etc etc. In short : they came down $2,200 on the price. The best part? It reduces my monthly car payment by $40. Oh wait - that's not the best part. The best part is that the car I want is in Vegas and the dealer is trucking it up to me here at no cost to me....
That's how you do business as a car dealer.

OnStar advertising: suspect.

OnStar's latest advertising campaign seems a little suspect to me. They claim that in the last year alone they have responded to 100 million calls for help. That doesn't add up and here's why. GM Produce an average of 2.2m vehicles a year equipped with OnStar. They've been doing so since 1996. To date that means about 26.4m vehicles. The subscription is free for the first year, then it costs, so assume that 50% of those vehicles don't have active subscriptions. Being GM products, the chances of all those vehicles still being on the road with functioning OnStar units is slim, but we'll be kind and say 70% are still on the road. That gives us a napkin calculation of about 9.25m OnStar equipped cars on the road, with live subscriptions. So for OnStar's advertising to be true, that implies every GM OnStar owner crashed their car over 10 times last year.....

That's clearly wrong, so we have to assume that their 'calls for help' include people calling for directions and their other services. But the ads always feature someone trapped in a wreck crying for help which is totally misleading because they imply that all 100 million people were in a situation that made OnStar critical for them. By GM's own figures they only respond to about 700 air bag deployments a month - or 8,400 a year.

8,400 is not 100 million.

NASCAR's Car Of Yesteryear

If you've read my site or blog for any length of time, you'll know I'm not the world's biggest fan of American cars. As an extension, I think NASCAR is the most pointless waste of motorsports in the history of Creation. (And I'm an atheist so that's saying something).

So it's amusing to read about their Car Of Tomorrow that was introduced in 2007. It had 'cutting-edge' innovations like crumple zones, a rerouted exhaust designed not to fry the driver, a front splitter, a larger rear wing and - well - that's it really. It still uses pushrod engines and with the exception of a couple of courses like Watkins Glen, they all still drive in left-handed circles.

Those design features would have been the Car Of Tomorrow in the late 70's. Most other motorsports have had all of those features and dozens more true technical innovations for decades. So from this should I conclude that NASCAR is a full 30 years behind the rest of the world when it comes to their 'technology' ? I know it was only fairly recently that they decided the drivers would fare better in crashes if the circuits had tyre walls and impact barriers rather than three metres of impenetrable concrete to stop wayward cars.

Basic jack safety.

This weekend I swapped the winter wheel and tyre combo on my vehicle for the summer one. To make life easier, I used a 3-ton floor jack to get the job done and it occurred to me that it would make a good blog entry. Too many people, it seems, assume that trolley-style floor jacks (and bottle jacks for that matter) are a safe way to lift a car. For the most part that's true - obviously, or you wouldn't be able to buy one - but they're not the best way to hold a car off the ground once it's up there. Why? Trolley jacks rely on seals and valves to hold the pressure in the cylinder that is used to jack up the arm holding your car off the ground. Those seals and valves normally rely on rubber o-rings, and rubber, as we all know, perishes. At some point, that seal isn't going to be as good as it was when new and it will slowly let all the pressure out. When that happens, the jack will slowly lower the car back down on it's own. If the failure is sudden, it won't so much lower the car as drop it. Either of these scenarios is bad news if you've got a wheel off the car - it results in the car being dropped on it's brake rotors and that will essentially mean new brakes. But brakes can be replaced easily. Squishy bags of mostly water - you and me - don't fix quite so readily when two tons of car fall on us. If you're working on wheels, likely your legs will get pinned under the car and you'll have two broken shins. If you're working under the car, then it will crush your chest. As the drug commercials would say - a potentially fatal side effect.
So how to prevent this from happening? Simple - jack stands. Once the car is up at the height you need it, pop a jack stand underneath against a load-bearing part of the chassis or subframe and lower the car on to it. For 10 seconds of extra hassle, you now have a purely mechanical support under the vehicle as well as the trolley jack. The chances of both failing at once are slim to none.