Happy New Year. Now get out of that handicap space.

If you're one of those perfectly healthy, able-bodied drivers who has a relative with a handicap parking permit, I'm talking to you. You know who you are - the ones who take advantage of the permit to park in handicap spaces because you're too bloody lazy to walk from the regular parking spots. I don't know why these people think that somehow being in a car with a displayed permit entitles them to park there. The permit does not apply to the car - it applies to the handicap person who applied for the permit. But there's a percentage of the population who think that it's just fine and dandy to borrow a car with a handicap permit and abuse that permit to park where they want. These are the same people who have entitlement issues - people who believe wholeheartedly that everyone else owes them something.
You know what? There's no difference between you abusing your relative's handicap permit, and just parking there in your normal car. It's callous and uncaring, and if I was the mayor of a town where I saw this happening, you'd be fined and spend a night in jail. This is yet another barometer of the continuing fall of society. You should be ashamed of yourselves, but of course, you don't think there's anything wrong and you certainly don't care what anyone else thinks.

Auto Drive Cars - why they'll never happen

A few weeks ago at lunch, one of my colleagues made a remark that sparked off a heated conversation. He said "I can't wait for auto drive cars to get here". Another colleague backed up this sentiment so I waded in with my big wooden oar and asked what possible benefit they could see from a car that drives itself. They gave me the usual answer most people come up with - they want to get from A to B but they find driving a chore. I pointed out that they could take a taxi, or public transport right now and it would give them exactly what they wanted. They could sit there sending twits or facespace updates and not have to worry about the act of driving. Now one interesting part of this debate came about when we got to the area of responsibility. The two in question are both tea-party supporters and have opined regularly about how personal responsibility seems to be a thing of the past, how people seem to ready to blame and place their own responsibilities in the hands of others (by which they mean the government). So I pointed out that auto-drive cars are the pinnacle of abandoning personal responsibility. By wanting an auto-drive car, you effectively want a computer to take responsibility for the two ton weapon you're sitting in. And this is why auto-drive cars will never happen. Our society is too litigious for this to ever come true. People will place too much faith in technology and the first time an auto-drive car mows down a child in the street, or causes a multi-car pile-up, the lawyers will get involved because the owners (you can't call them drivers at this point) will simply say "but the car should have stopped itself!"
At this point in the debate, my two colleagues, knowing I'm also an aircraft nerd, decided to try to be clever by pointing out that every time we fly, we're quite happy to let the aircraft fly on autopilot. Didn't work, obviously, because first of all, I don't own the aircraft and I'm not a pilot so I have no responsibility for the aircraft or where it goes. Being a passenger on an aircraft is akin to being a passenger in a bus or a taxi. But secondly, look up - do you see commercial airlines packed 10ft apart, nose-to-tail, wingtip to wingtip in the sky? No you don't.
For auto-drive to even be vaguely feasible, the various manufacturers must first agree on a common system whereby all the cars can talk to each other and thus communicate their intentions (in the same way that collision-avoidance systems work in aircraft). That system also needs to be ultra-secure to avoid remote tampering. History has proven that competing manufacturers can almost never agree on something like this, and coupled with the lawyer issue, auto-drive cars will never happen.

Anyway - I can't imagine a more joyless world for motorists than cars that drive themselves.

Don't claim glass chips on your insurance.

A lot of car dealers and glass chip repair shops will claim that they do free repairs as long as they can bill your insurance. Don't do it. Ask them how much it would be for you out-of-pocket first. Typically it will be something like $20 or £15 for the repair but if you let them do it 'free' and charge your insurance, guess how much the bill is? Most US shops will bill your insurance $120 for a $20 repair. Whilst its filed as a no-fault claim, it is still a claim and it can and will be factored in to your premium at the next renewal. If you have any morale fibre, you'll also realise that that is insurance fraud, although most people choose not to think of it like that. Apart from that, glass chips is not what insurance is for. You should always cover small things like that yourself. It's why you have a deductible on the policy. One other point - now it's properly winter, if you do have a decent sized chip in your windscreen, do go and get it fixed. Winter is the best time for cracked windscreens. Water gets into the chips and then freezes, expanding, and stressing the windscreen. Well - have a Merry Christmas at the end of the week. Next week's entry will probably be automated as I'll still be in a turkey-induced torpor.

Full beams are not a substitute for a blown bulb

Public service announcement : if you have a blown headlight bulb, change it. Using your full beams and fog lights is not a substitute. Replacement bulbs are cheap and it'll take you seconds to do it. Now we're all commuting in the dark every morning and evening, this is particularly irksome. Drivers who could care less about their car, bumble along on autopilot blinding everyone in front of them because they're too bloody lazy to spend less than a tenner to fix a problem on their cars. If I was a police officer I'd pull everyone of these goons over and ticket them. Why? Because driving on full beams in traffic is dangerous - it blinds everyone coming towards you, and anyone in front of you with a rearview mirror. I think the only thing that's worse is drivers with a blown bulb who don't drive on high beams, but also don't bother to fix the bulb. In the dark, it's now difficult to tell if you're looking at a car or a motorbike because there's only one headlight. Either way - don't be lazy. Just fix the damned thing. It's easy to do, just make sure you don't handle the new bulb with your bare hands - wear some cotton or rubber gloves. If you touch the glass on the bulb with your bare skin, the grease you leave behind will cause a hotspot and the bulb will crack and fail. The only exception to this is if you have HID lights - those are a lot pricier to fix because it means either a new arc discharge unit, new control unit, new ballast, or all of the above. But then you knew that when you paid an extra $1000 for them on the car when new, right?

Chevy's problems go from bad to worse with the Volt

Regular readers of my blog will no I'm no big fan of the Chevy Volt, right from the beginning when Chevy kept insisting it was an electric vehicle when it is, in fact, a Hybrid with very little difference (electro-mechanically speaking) from the Toyota Prius. They lied about the whole electric vehicle thing and now I wonder if they bit off more than they could chew. Toyota have been producing the Prius for ages and there are no worries about battery pack fires or leaks. The design is nearly a decade old now. Yet Chevy's all-new Volt has apparently got some design flaw in the battery pack that can allow it to catch fire after an impact. This hasn't happened just once - it's happened several times now and Chevy are so worried about it that two weeks ago they offered to provide free loaner vehicles to owners worried about the battery fire problem. Now they've stepped that up a notch and are offering to flat out buy back the cars from their owners.
So why the sudden change? Why would a company the size of Chevy, not famous for it's customer care, now be offering to buy back cars from owners? My guess - C.Y.A. I think they've discovered some sort of critical design flaw that they know is going to embroil them in a huge lawsuit and they're trying to limit the damage ahead of time by offering the buyback scheme.
Let's face it, GM doesn't have the best reputation with electric or hybrid vehicles, dating back to the whole EV1 fiasco where they forcibly cancelled leases, and literally stole the cars back from their owners to destroy them. If you're interested in that whole nauseating mess, Who Killed The Electric Car is a great documentary on that very topic.

Idiots who get what they deserve.

Happy Thanksgiving to all my American readers, and a short post this week with a treat. Two idiot Corvette owners, overflowing with testosterone, wrecking their cars because they don't know how to drive. Seriously - why do people buy overpowered monstrosities like this and then figure they can drive them simply because they own them? Any hugely powerful RWD like this should come with an training class for the new owners to teach them not to be dicks. Anyway, enjoy the specatular and totally predictable results of two idiots drag racing on a public street in cars they shouldn't have been allowed to own.