Clear the ice off your windows, then drive.

Look - I know it's cold outside - it's winter. Things ice up. Car windows especially. But if your windows are completely iced-in, please don't be a danger to yourself and more importantly, everyone else on the road. The photo here was taken this morning. I followed this guy to work - we never went over 15mph and he slowed down further every time anyone passed us coming the other way. He had the letterbox-sized clearing in the front and rear windows, and the side windows were completely iced up. Less than a minute after I took this, he crashed into the red Jeep on the left of this picture. It wasn't a high speed crash - again he was dithering about at 15mph. But he crashed nevertheless, and now his reckless irresponsibility has caused inconvenience (and injury?) to two sets of people. And why? Because he couldn't take the extra couple of minutes to clear the ice off his car properly. I suppose if you ask, these people all come up with the same excuses. "Ooooh it's so inconvenient. I'm in such a rush." Or "I'll let the heaters do their job." By all means let the heaters do their job, but do it while you're parked, before you leave. If you don't, the first five miles of your drive will be like this tool in front of me.
This leads me to another peripheral observation : people who are surprised that their cars get stolen from their driveways in the winter. These are the ones who are trying to be responsible but still don't like the inconvenience of a cold morning. So they turn the car on, heaters on full blast, then go back into the house to wait. A running car, keys in it, owners inside their house? Easy money. You might as well leave your keys in the car at the petrol station while you go inside to pay ..... oh wait ..... they do that around here too.
It's winter. It gets cold. You know this - you live here. Man up and deal with it. Don't be a dick by driving with iced up windows.

The 40mph club.

I think I might have written about this a couple of years ago, but again this Christmas I was subjected to the 40mph club that seems to plague Britain now. We were there for our Christmas vacation to see the family, and whilst driving, it became quickly apparent that everyone seems to be stuck at 40mph now. Irrespective of the speed limits, too. Wide open, long country 'A' roads with national speed limits (60mph), good sight lines and dry roads, were full of people doing 40mph. The same people would then cruise past a '30' sign on entering a village, and keep going at 40mph. I can't explain what's happened - I don't know if people are now afraid to go faster than 40mph because of all the (misleading and wrong) anti-speeding campaigns, the sheer volume of speed cameras or the perception that their car will some how careen out of control into a ditch if they go any quicker.
When we left the UK in 2001, things were very different. If you didn't get it up to at least 55 in a national speed limit area, you'd be overtaken constantly. People did 70 on dual carriageways (like you should - and like the law allows), 60 or more in national limits, and then (for the most part) slowed down to 30 for residential areas. Now it seems like the entire country is driving at 40mph.
The exception is the motorways, where everyone now does 50mph because the entire network appears to be one giant roadwork, with average-speed cameras every couple of miles. Never mind that over Christmas there were no workers out, or that all the lanes were open, or that the traffic was relatively light. No - everyone was hemmed-in and forced to do 20mph below the limit because of a system of cameras that have no subjectivity. Actually - less than that - it seemed most were doing 45mph (according to our GPS anyway), so we did make some progress as we were the only car in the outside lane, overtaking everyone else, actually doing 50.
That all came to an end of course when we got off on to an 'A' road where we were slowed back down to 40mph again.....

The benefit of front foglights

Too many people, it seems, don't really know how to properly use front foglights. The natural assumption is that if it's foggy, you should use foglights, right? Well - sort of. Foglights are there to help with a particular problem - when the atmosphere in front of you is highly reflective, your own regular headlights can be blinding to you. Whether it's fog, heavy rain and spray, or driving snow, the headlights are angled and positioned such that you can end up with near total white-out as the light reflects back at you. What makes this worse is when you flick from dipped to full headlights, because now you've pretty much doubled the amount of light shining back at you. This is dangerous because it's dazzling to you, and it means you can't see very far, and this is where fog lights come in. They're normally mounted lower down on the front of a car and typically cast a wider but shorter beam. The idea is that, being low down, they reflect less light back at you from whatever is outside. Here's where the confusion sets in - people will tend to put their foglights on in addition to their main dipped headlights, and that really has no benefit. What I prefer to recommend is switching your headlights down to side lights / marker lights, and then turning on the foglights on. There's still plenty of light out of the front of the car for others to see you, but now all that light is low down to the ground. With the main headlights off, the backscatter off the fog or snow is largely eliminated, the dazzle has gone and you can see much more clearly what's going on ahead of you. The picture here is mocked up in photoshop in an attempt to show the difference between driving on dipped main beams (top) and marker lights with fog lights (bottom).
Final tip : if your car has rear foglights, use them in low vis - it makes you FAR more visible to everyone behind. But turn them off again when the inclement condition clears up otherwise it's dazzling. I'm looking at you, every driver in England ....

It's important to note the distinction between fog lights and driving lights, though. Driving lights are normally mounted at the same height as the headlights (or higher), and are there for added illumination in normal conditions. They normally have different lenses to the main headlights to give a flat, wide beam to illuminate the sides of the road (where normal headlights have a narrow, long beam for distance). Turning driving lights on in fog is the same as flicking to high beams - dazzling and pointless.

Opinion does not trump physics

Given the cold snap that the US and parts of Europe are going through right now, and given the number of YouTube videos and news reports showing people skating, crashing and generally playing at bumper cars when driving, you'd think drivers might learn. Opinion doesn't trump physics - it's really that simple. It doesn't matter if you think you're a good driver, or if you think that AWD will save you on snow and ice. It doesn't matter if you think you've left enough room to the vehicle in front. Opinion doesn't create grip and opinion doesn't wind back time.
The rubber in summer and all-season tyres loses most of its elasticity at +7°C / 45°F - well above freezing. Once the air and road are colder than that, you might as well have bald tyres for all the good it does. Combined with the different tread patterns, once you get on to snow or ice, it's inevitable that you're going to skid and slide. The tyres simply can't deal with it.
Snow tyres are not just for snow. I blogged about this a couple of weeks ago but it's true. The extra siping in the tread gives more surface area and more edges to afford more grip on slippery surfaces. The rubber compound is designed to retain it's elasticity well below 7°C - often down as far as -35°C or further. So even if there's no snow or ice, once it's cold, you owe it to yourself to put snow tyres on just to maintain a level of grip closer to what you're used to in the summer. Then modify your driving style - treat the accelerator like it has an egg between the pedal and your foot. Don't stomp on the brakes, don't give sudden, sharp steering inputs. Drive relaxed and watch your mirrors. Be aware of what's going on around you and you'll be fine.
Drive like you do in the summer, on summer tyres, and you'll pretty much end up on YouTube:

Happy new year! Buy a car.

So that's it. Christmas is over and done with. The car manufacturers have stopped with their "give your entire family cars for christmas" advertising campaigns and now it's 2014. Awesome - it's the New Year New Car advertising blitz. Apparently, if you didn't buy your wife, partner, loved one, daughter or son a car for Christmas, you're a wicked, evil person. But you can redeem yourself, in the eyes of the car trade, by taking advantage of 'special offers' this New Year. Mercedes would like you to know they've held over their Christmas pricing just for you. Lexus have too, but only for 'well qualified buyers'.
Here's my question : does anyone, anywhere, ever pay full price for a car any more? I've been fortunate enough to have new cars for the last few that I've bought, and no matter what time of year, I've never paid full price - not even close. I can normally drive off with an out-the-door price that is well, WELL below the MSRP. And remember, the out-the-door price includes all the taxes and fees.
I wonder if any of the advertising or sales events that the car manufacturers have actually result in any more sales for them. Or do you think they just have to do these things to spend advertising budgets? For example I wonder if the Christmas sale and leasing offers result in any more sales than a wet week in April?
If you're in the market for a new car and you need to finance it, just sit it out until the car you're looking at appears with zero percent interest. It won't be more than 6 weeks until that happens. If you're in the market for a car right now, just go and buy one. Haggle the price, be sensible and you'll get a good deal from most places irrespective of what incentive or advertising is going on.
Lastly, bear in mind the old adage that "if it seems to good to be true, it probably is". The car trade is the home of that problem. Our local Subaru dealer had an advertising blitz in November last year where they were selling all new* cars at $8,000 off MSRP. The "NEW" was very big and the "*" was very small. The fine print was this: "new indicates vehicles that are new to our used inventory". In other words, they were selling used cars for less than the MSRP of new cars. Imagine that.

Why the contempt for the police?

A couple of weeks ago I published a post on speeding and it garnered a few emails asking why I had such contempt for the police. I'll tell you why - and it's a three-pronged reason.
I've only had cause to deal with the police force directly on three occasions in my life.
The first time was when I was a kid - our house in the Netherlands was burgled when we were on holiday. When we came home and found a lot of stuff gone, and a busted back door, the police came out to have a look. We gave them serial numbers for big-ticket items like stereos, bicycles etc, and their parting comment was along the lines of "we'll file this but we have more important things to do than worry about burglary". Naturally none of our stuff was ever found.
The second time was when a woman knocked my off my motorbike on a roundabout getting off the M25 at Junction 9 in England. Never found the bitch - she was driving a red Peugeot, and sideswiped me from the left. She knew she'd done it - I was on the hood of her car before she dumped me on to the road and drove off. Of course nobody stopped, so I collected my still-rideable but very bent motorbike and drove to the nearest police station (before cellphones were common) and verbatim, this is what they told me : "Even if we did find her, it would be your word against hers as you have no witnesses." Never mind that even the most retarded forensic analyst would have been able to match the shape of my body to the dent on her hood, and the position of the crack in her windscreen to my helmet, and the paint from her car to the paint on my left leg, boot and motorbike frame. No - it would be her word against mine, and as such, they didn't want to even try to find her. I know the reason why, of course. I was a motorcyclist, and the UK police have a well-documented bias against motorcyclists.
The third incident was a few years ago when an American cop pulled me over because - and again this is verbatim what he said - "it sounded like you were speeding". I asked if he had radar or photographic evidence, and of course he didn't, but then he told me he didn't need it because he was a police officer, and that his word would trump mine when it went to court. He wanted me to sign and accept a ticket, so I refused on the grounds of zero evidence, told him to take it to court and left him with "good luck on that". I never heard anything back, obviously.
So yes I understand they do a hard job, and yes I know we should appreciate them, and yes I know it's trendy and hip to hate the police, and yes I know its 'a few bad apples'. But when your only three true experiences with them have been with arrogant pricks - all 'bad apples', you start to take a pretty dim view of the entire establishment.