Do you want an insurance company 'spy' in your car? Maybe so...

More and more insurance companies are experimenting with data-capture devices for their customers. In some markets, certain drivers can now not get insurance if they don't have such a device installed. But what are they, and should you use one?
There's a couple of different variations on how the insurance companies collect your driving data but the most common one is a dongle that plugs into the OBD-II port on your car (under the dash). The dongle has a 3G or 4G cellphone radio in it (for getting the time and reporting back to the mothership), a set of accelerometers, and an onboard computer capable of storing certain data that comes from the car itself via the OBD-II port.
For the most part, the data that is collected is number of miles driven, times of day, g-forces when cornering and accelerating, and g-forces when stopping. The insurance companies have a weighting system that generates a profile of your driving habits based on these factors. That profile is what is then used to determine if you are due for a discount or not. Right now, it's mostly used for discounts, but you can bet the time will come when this system will also be used to determine if you need to pay more than the basic premium.
There's also a subtle different between the various companies and the way the profile is created too - some want you to have the device in your car for a month or two, and they generate a one-time profile from there. Others want you do have it in the car all the time.
In the US at least, the companies offer "up to" 30% discount in most cases. If they don't detect harsh braking, not too many miles driven and you're not out in the wee dark hours of the morning, you can expect to see discounts. (My wife received about 12% discount on her policy).
The problem is that the metrics they use to determine if you're "safe" are somewhat flawed. By far the most flawed is the insurance company definition of "harsh" braking - they generally consider that to be a decelleration rate of 3.13m/s/s or more. Most people can't visualise that, so try this: if you're driving at 30mph (about 50kmh), you come to a stop in 4.5 seconds. For a modern car in city traffic, that's actually pretty gradual but most of these devices sample data once per second, meaning that if you're stopping at that threshold, it actually records 4 "harsh braking" events.
A much better metric would be 'did the ABS come on'? As most insurance companies won't insure you if you don't have ABS now, it seems like a safe bet that a data monitoring device should collect ABS data from the OBD-II port. The same could be true for cornering. Hard cornering isn't dangerous, but if the traction control comes on, that event could be stored for your profile.
Ultimately it's down to you as a driver. You won't get the full advertised discount, just like you can't ever get the advertised gas-mileage of a vehicle, but as long as you're not a total lunatic, you should see some savings.

Another year, another whole lot of nothing from Tesla motors.

I've spotted a trend with Elon Musk : he's the king of over-promising. If he were to be believed, the Model X is now available for all to buy, but it's not - it's been delayed now to the end of this year, after previously being delayed to the end of 2014.
He promised that supercharger stations would all be solar-powered by the end of 2014. Of the 280 installed around the world, only two are solar powered.
In 2013 he promised that battery-swap stations would be commonplace by the end of 2014. Not a single one has been built for public use (despite last week's announcement about an upcoming pilot program).
There's the much-demonstrated and over-promised autopilot system in the P85D which - despite all the cars (allegedly) having the hardware to support it - is still very much vaporware.
There's the CHAdeMO DC charging station adapter which has been "coming soon" since the Model S first appeared.
There's the empty promise of a battery upgrade for Roadster owners - something else due to happen by 5 days ago and something else we're still waiting for.
And finally the Gigafactory which - whilst grand in scale and intent - could take a decade to prove itself.
Tesla is successful, and Musk is a hyper-billionaire, but take everything he and the company say with a grain of salt because they have an established history of over-promising and under-delivering. If investors and customers weren't still blinded by the shiny bright light of the Model S, they'd have ditched the company 12 months ago with a performance record like that.

You really don't want a self-driving car for Christmas

I know I've written about this dozens of times before, but drone cars are really nowhere near ready for primetime. Again - Google's cars look impressive but realise that they're driving pre-mapped streets, mapped to the millimeter with GPS and LIDAR. Put them on the open road and you're stuck. Same with BMW and Mercedes. Same for Audi. Same for VW.
I've also written about weather before. Google, Volvo, Audi and others have all had plenty of problems with their test program in bad weather but they don't advertise it. Most manufacturers don't. Hyundai on the other hand? Well - watch these two videos. The first is their car performing in a competition on a dry day. The second is the same car, on the same course, with the same software, when it's raining. Everything goes wrong. Just stopping without warning, driving on the wrong side of the road, driving off the road, driving into ditches, up kerbs, around intersections the wrong way, nearly plowing down pedestrians and an overall hesitancy and nervousness that makes Utah drivers look talented by comparison. I've seen drunk drivers perform better than this.
Bear in mind that this is a mature test program - it's not like they started the project yesterday, and all the sensors can see everything they need to. Picture that video with leaves on one of the sensors in autumn. Or snow. For that matter, picture it on a snowy, icy course....
The videos : Dry run.     Wet run.
Merry Christmas - now stop reading this crap and go and be with your family....

Pedestrians and their idea of speed.

I have a simple rule for you when you're on foot - don't every try to pass comment on how fast you think a vehicle is travelling, because you're wrong. Trust me on this - unless you have a radar or laser speed gun, you have no idea how fast any vehicle is going. Not a car, train, bus, not even a scooter with Clarkson riding it.
This can be illustrated by what happens to most drivers from time to time. For example, I'll be minding my own business, driving through a residential neighbourhood - mostly on my way to or from my house - and someone will come running out into the road, flapping their arms and screaming about what an evil person I am for speeding in their neighbourhood. At that point, as a driver, I've pretty much already lost the argument, because no matter how slow or fast I was actually going, no matter what my speedometer said, the pedestrian who just tried to get themselves run over will be utterly convinced that I was travelling at a hundred miles per hour.
This most commonly happens in areas where the defined speed limit is ultra low, like 20 to 25mph. It doesn't matter if you are doing 15mph, as far as speed-judging pedestrians and homeowners are concerned, you're blitzing through their neighbourhood at suicidal / breakneck / irresponsible speed (take your pick).
You can try logic, math, physics, basic conversational explanation and any other technique you choose, but as I said - because you're a driver, you're in the wrong and you'll never win this particular argument.
I've found over the years that the best course of action is to not run them over when they flap into the road in front of me, keep my windows up and just drive around them at whatever speed I'm going. While I'll be the first to admit I break speed limits on the motorways, residential areas and school zones are my speeding taboo.
My advice to you if you're on foot and you think you see a car speeding is to not run into the road to try to confront the driver. To most of us that would be common sense, but it seems a lot of people still can't figure that out on their own.

Defrosting an icy windscreen.

A few years ago I joined the 20th century and stopped scraping my windscreen on frosty, icy mornings. I was one of the millions who had all manner of scratchy, scrapy and ultimately partly-broken devices to clear my windscreen and every time I had to do it I would curse.
A friend introduced me to winter washer fluid, though, and I've never looked back. The brand I use is Rain-X and their winter formulation is bright orange. I put it in my washer bottle about November and keep using the same stuff until around April. Once it's in your entire washer system - pump, bottle, nozzles and hoses - you ought to be able to spray your windshield on an icy morning and have the ice begin to break up and melt without having to go near it with a scraper.
There's a couple of caveats though - the biggest of which is this : make sure your wiper blades aren't stuck to your windscreen before you get in. Burned out wiper motors or rubber blades torn from the metal supports is not something you want to be dealing with on a cold morning.
The other caveat is that you might still need an ice scraper for the side windows if you're not patient. If you're willing to wait a few minutes for the heater to blow warm air on the side windows though.....
Of course all this advice is pointless if you have remote start where you can sit cozy inside and remote-start your vehicle while having breakfast and then get in when it's all warm and defrosted. But I'm not that advanced (or rich) so I make do with the old manual methods :)

The annual winter tyre post

If was offered one of two options for winter - all-wheel-drive with all-season tyres, or front-wheel-drive with winter tyres, I'd take the front-wheel drive/winter tyre option every time, and if you live somewhere where it gets cold and frosty in the winter, you should too.
I say this every year, and every year I get emails and pushback from people who think they're a waste of money though. The simple matter is that once the temperature of the road surface drops below 45F / 7C, your standard "all season" tyres are really not very good. Most people will think they're just fine, but trust me - once you drive on winter tyres just once in poor conditions, you'll gain an appreciation for what a compromise all-season tyres are. (Summer and performance tyres are even worse).
It's all down to the rubber compound and the tread design. In snowy weather, the sipes in the tread allow for much greater 'grip' on snow. This doesn't mean you can drive like you do in the summer - it doesn't make you invincible - but it will certainly making turning and stopping much more predictable.
For non-snowy climates, the different rubber compound is the benefit - it is much more flexible at colder temperatures meaning better ability to flex and deform to the normal road surface, offering more chance for grip.
Summer tyres are designed to work in much warmer temperatures and the rubber gets fairly inflexible and stiff once it gets cold.
All-season tyres truly are a compromise. They're not very good summer tyres and they're not very good winter tyres. They're designed to be a jack of all trades but a master of none which is why they're standard fit on most cars.
If you do decide to go for winter rubber, there's two things to watch out for. First, if you have winter tyres and the person behind you doesn't, you WILL be able to stop on snow and slick roads much more quickly than they can, so bear that in mind.
Second, there's two ways to do the summer/winter switch. Either have the tyres swapped on and off your rims twice a year, or have a winter set of wheels with the winter tyres permanently mounted. If you do that, make sure the winter wheels have the relevant TPMS pressure monitors in them or you'll spend all winter driving around with a warning light on the dash telling you there's a TPMS error.