Racing game camera views

I've recently been putting a lot of time into Forza Horizon 2 on my Xbox One. And by a "lot" of time I mean it's quite likely I've spent more time driving cars in the game in the last couple of weeks than I have spent time driving my real car in the real world.
The game itself is great - like the original Forza Horizon but with most of the annoyances taken out. But it reminded me of something that I've never quite understood : the above-and-behind camera view. I'm not sure why the game designers continue to put this view into the games. It's pointless, it's not realistic, and it makes the game much, much harder to play. The in-car or on-hood views are by far the easiest camera views to use, and both are a huge improvement on the helicopter-chasing-my-car idea.
It comes down to how you experience the world. In your own life, you don't see yourself in the 3rd-person - you see out of your eyes - 1st-person point of view. This means that when a game presents you with a 3rd-person point of view, it's unnatural and awkward. I said above I don't understand why the game designers do this - I suppose I do really - it's to let you see the car you're driving in all it's detail. Looks nice, but it's counterintuitive.

There's another videogame series that suffers the same problem - Metal Gear Solid. It's a shooting game (like) but the camera is above and behind the player (not like) which makes aiming the gun and hitting anything with any accuracy completely impossible.
If you enjoy driving/racing games, surely the point is to have fun and try to hone your skills? If you have a camera that presents an unrealistic fish-eye view of the world from behind you, you can't place the car properly on the road and you spend most of the time fighting the awkward camera view.
Apparently though I know nothing about this because it seems the best competition and career racing gamers all use the above-and-behind camera views, which makes me wonder how much faster they'd be if they used the 1st-person view instead? Personally, on a circuit race somewhere like Catalunya, my lap times are a good 1.5 to 2 seconds quicker when using the correct camera view.

Wash the unseen parts of your car

If you're in the northern hemisphere, it's winter up here and in a lot of places, winter means ice, snow and salt on the roads. This is also the time of year when you'll see people jet-washing their cars and cleaning up all the glass and paintwork without ever bending over to jetwash under the wheel arches or underneath. At this time of year, the paintwork and glass isn't the important part - it's all the stuff underneath that is caked with road salt and the other cocktail of chemicals used to keep the roads clear. You really don't want that stuck to all the metal parts underneath so if you're jetwashing, bend over and spray the underside of your car and under the wheel arches. Or go to an automatic car wash that has underbody jets. Your car will thank you for it.

Warming your car up on a winter's morning.

I watched a report on my local news channel a couple of weeks ago where they had an 'expert' tell everyone that the advice to warm your engine up before driving was out of date and that for any vehicle made since 1996 it was a fruitless exercise. He explained that the various sensors and other parts of older engines that benefited from being warm to work properly had been superceded by OBD-II and its ability to finely monitor and adjust all the functions of your engine under pretty much any condition.
That's true, but what he spectacularly failed to mention was that if you drive it like you stole it right after turning the key, your engine oil is still cold and thick and even with a decent 5W40 oil, you won't be getting the benefits of really good lubrication right off the bat. Ok sure you might not need to let the engine run for 10 minutes before driving it in the winter, but don't just start it up and blast on to the motorway. Have some mechanical sympathy and give your engine a chance to get some temperature in it before you start. After all - it's why people in northern climates have sump heaters and core heaters to pre-heat their oil and coolant before driving.

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....