Remember that time you had trouble getting petrol? Sorry about that.

If you're a reader in the UK, you'll likely have no problem remembering the fuel protests back in 2000. Did you know I was the instigator of what ballooned into a national crisis? A crisis that had fuel drivers blockading their own refineries? That had airports shut down because they had no fuel for the aircraft? That caused Blair to finally admit he was propping up the National Health Service with money fleeced from motorists? The crisis that, for the first and only time in the recent memory of UK fuel pricing, caused the government to drop the tax rate? Yeah you can blame me for that.
Late spring 2000, a colleague of mine and I were moaning one morning about the price of petrol at the time and we decided that apathy had ruled long enough and that it was time to do something about it. We set up a website called Boycott The Pumps and filled it with interesting facts and figures. At the time I was running the Speedtrap Bible - a site I later sold - so I had rather a large following of readers. One simple email to all those readers was all it took. We decided to organise a pump boycott - a mechanism that has notoriously failed to go anywhere every time it was tried before, because of apathy. "But if I don't buy petrol today, I'll just buy it tomorrow, so what's the point?". The point isn't that you're buying petrol on another day, it's that you're sending your elected officials a very clear message. And holy crap this time it actually worked. It went nationwide when the Daily Mail picked up the original email from me, and publicised it on the AP Wire and the front page of their paper on the same day. The Sun, Mirror, Star and Telegraph all then picked it up and it just ballooned from there. I must have given 100 radio and newspaper interviews and I was on TV for what seemed like 3 weeks straight from local news stories to the BBC nationally. What really caught the attention of the public though was when the farmers and truckers started to get vocal - rolling roadblocks on the motorways, blockaded refineries and such. At that point it had a much snappier name - wish we'd thought of this originally, but we didn't - it became Dump The Pumps. I had to distance myself from it at that point because the press were invading every aspect of my life, and my family's life, and the life of a lot of my friends. But by that point it didn't matter - the damage had been done. By September 2000 there were queues at petrol stations all across the country. WW2 jerry cans were the hot item to buy and military surplus stores ran out of them. Shortages were everywhere, the refineries were blockaded, trucks were being turned away in France, aircraft weren't landing. Blair even went on TV and told everyone not to panic, and that was brilliant because then people really started to panic. That was when the army reserve were called out to try to maintain some order and use their fuel trucks to supply forecourts across the country.
So what was the point of it all? On the day of the original protest, it worked - petrol retailers all across the country reported much, much less take than normal. I proved that one person can make a difference. Yes the price of petrol has continued to go up ever since, and the drop in fuel duty at the time was only 1p. But put that into perspective : no government before or since has ever lowered fuel duty. It's not the amount that counts. It's that I forced them to do it using a grass-roots campaign. Even today's UK government is extremely wary of what happened in 2000, to the point where I've seen it referred to several times since in a "we don't want that to happen again" sort of way.

An album of the various newspaper headlines is here if you're curious. Dump the pumps. The local paper - the Bracknell news - has the story of me giving up the initial protest.

If you can't drive on mountain roads, then don't.

Last weekend we went up into the mountains, "leaf peeping" to see the fall colours on all the trees up there. It was a popular weekend to do it so the roads were choked but none more so than the road we were on trying to get down from a popular destination. In front of me was a Porsche, and in front of him was a minivan with the most terrified, inexperienced driver I've come across in years. This wasn't just your typically bad Utah driver - this was a level of bad that was so dangerous this person should have had his license and vehicle taken away. For the 99.99% of the population that don't live where I do, open up Google earth an search for the Alpine Scenic Highway in Utah. It's a fairly narrow mountain road but it's easily wide enough to get two good-sized US vehicles past each other - pickups, minivans etc. From Sundance Resort down to Provo is about 18 miles and typically takes 30 to 40 minutes or so to complete in a car. Last weekend, it took us 90 minutes. The minivan driver would stop as soon as he came to a corner (there's hundreds of them) or whenever he saw a vehicle coming the other way. He properly had no idea how wide (or narrow) his vehicle was and seemed to be in permanent fear of "falling off" the road. When he was moving, we were crawling along at a good 8 to 9 miles per hour. When we got to the downhill stretch, he had his foot on the brake constantly for 40 minutes. The smell of his cooked brake linings penetrated the air in our car even with the a/c set to recycle. Not only did he have zero idea how to drive on a mountain road, but he also had no idea what he'd done to his brakes. Add to that he had no idea about local laws regarding how many vehicles you can tailback before you have to pull over, or even basic common decency to look in the mirror once in a while and realise what he'd done.
This highlighted an interesting point - people who are properly poor drivers are so bad they don't realise it. This guy had no business being on a mountain road - he was a danger to himself, the people in his van with him and everyone else on the road around him. But entitlement, ignorance, stupidity or selfishness put him there and he had no idea he was doing anything wrong. As someone once said - "you can't compensate for stupid".

Google's harbinger of driving doom

Google recently announced with some fanfare that their self-driving cars have covered more than 300,000 accident-free miles, and that "With each breakthrough we feel more optimistic about delivering this technology to people and dramatically improving their driving experience."
Counter argument: I don't want my driving experience to be "improved" by not having to drive my own car. Also, for the record, since I first drove a car in 1991, I've covered probably the same number of miles (if not more) also without a single accident or insurance claim.
It would seem to me that companies like Google are pouring billions of dollars into research simply to alleviate drivers from the responsibility of their actions. I know I've blogged about this before but I really, truly, honestly cannot imagine a worse future for car owners than cars that drive themselves. I don't know why we need them and I don't know why anyone would want them. However I'm equally sure they'll be forced upon us by misguided insurance companies who will start to penalise drivers for NOT having auto-drive cars. This is the ultimate example of attempting to cure the symptoms of a problem rather than the problem itself. Better driving education, more stringent driving tests and annual re-tests are all it would take to get a reduction in accidents. On top of that, fines for using cellphones in cars would have to be proper punishment. Not $50 here or there, but something more permanent like having your car impounded and crushed.
Here's a thought for you: auto-drive cars will have to have manual overrides. Computer technology is not infallible so the human will always have to be in the loop, same as with aircraft. So what happens when the next generation of drivers, equipped with less training, who are wholly reliant on their cars driving themselves, suddenly have to take control? Would you want to be on the road when that happens? I wouldn't.
One thing's for sure though - self-driving motorbikes won't ever happen so if self-driving cars become the norm, I'll just abandon them in favour of motorcycling. It's more fun anyway and the bike never meddles with what I'm doing. Actually, that does bring about an interesting point: will self-driving cars be able to see motorcyclists better than humans? They certainly couldn't be any worse, given that car drivers cause over 90% of motorcycle accidents. Maybe I do want self-driving cars after all.....
Google's press release: Self-driving cars log 300,000 miles

Win the AXA competition

AXA Insurance’s new prize giveaway will see one lucky person driving away in a brand new 2012 Ford Focus while three runner ups will receive £200 worth of fuel vouchers to be used at petrol stations throughout the country.
The new Ford Focus has proven to be a popular addition to Ford’s range of cars. Beautiful to look at, fun to drive and fuel efficient, the new Ford Focus has walked away with a plethora of awards from multiple car reviewers and car enthusiasts.

AXA Insurance will be giving away a Ford Focus Studio 85 PS S5 in the colour ‘Colorado Red’ with a 113 BHP 1.6L engine under the bonnet. This 5 door hatchback edition is capable of reaching MPGs in excess of 60 during both motorway driving and city driving while delivering a quick sub-10 second 0-60 time that ensures for smooth overtaking and quick getaways at junctions and traffic lights. The Focus will also come with 12 months worth of road tax fully paid and free insurance on the car up to the value of £500; if the insurance premium exceeds £500, the difference will need to be paid by the prize winner.
Winners will be able to arrange for pick up of the Focus from their local Ford dealership. A small prize ceremony will take place when the Ford Focus is picked up with pictures being taken and interviews with the press.
There are three ways to enter the AXA competition; either apply for an insurance quote through AXA’s website, buy a new policy with AXA or renew an existing policy to be entered into the prize draw. It’s important to note, however, that each prize entrant will only have one chance to win. So, an entrant who gets a quote for insurance from AXA and then buys the policy will only get one entry into the prize draw rather than two. It’s important to note that all entrants must be over 18 years old – entries from entrants younger than 18 will be instantly discarded.
The competition starts on the 25th July 2012 and finishes on the 30th October 2012 at 23:59. The prize draw will be held shortly after the finish of the ‘prize draw period’ and the Ford Focus winner and the fuel voucher runner ups will be notified soon after by telephone and email. If AXA is unable to reach the winner within 4 weeks of the draw taking place, the winner will forfeit their prize and a new draw will take place. A list of the winners and the runners up will also be posted on AXA’s website as well as on their Facebook and Twitter pages.
Don’t delay – enter the prize draw today. You might just be the lucky one who gets to drive away with a brand new Ford Focus.
Visit http://www.axainsurance.com/competitions/ for more details.

Stuck accelerator? Really?

This video surfaced a few weeks ago showing a "terrifying" ordeal for a woman in a car with a "stuck accelerator". You know from my blog that I'm not one for being politically correct, so let me just come out and say it: I think the chances of this being the car and not the driver are pretty much zero. My guess is that she had her foot hard on the accelerator all the time - for whatever reason - maybe thinking it was the brake. She only comes to a stop when the 911 operator tells her to step on the brake and the accelerator at the same time. My guess is that this was the first time she moved her feet in the footwell and discovered she actually wasn't using the brake at all, and when she did, the car (and this is a spoiler alert) stopped. When she gets out of the car, it doesn't zoom off either. If the accelerator was stuck open, as soon as she took her foot off the brake to get out, the car would have taken off again. It's also curious how, when asked if she could shift the transmission into neutral, she said it was "stuck". There's no physical gate or interlock in an automatic transmission that prevents a shifter from being pushed from "D" into "N". That's actually a safety feature - to be able to get into neutral without having to push any buttons or go around a gate. If it was a manual gearbox (unlikely), simply pushing the clutch would disengage the engine.
So why do I have this opinion? Because I've seen the state of driving nowadays and have no faith that claims of unexpected acceleration have anything to do with the car, but everything to do with the driver. This is borne out by countless studies that show that in most cases it is the driver at fault - they had their foot hard on the accelerator, not the brake. (ECU and black boxes don't tend to lie.) In over two-thirds of the cases, it was middle-aged women - exactly what we have in this case. That's not me being sexist, that's a simple fact. The politically-correct term for it is "pedal misapplication". The non politically-correct term for it is drivers who haven't got a clue what they're doing. So I'm sorry to seem heartless, callous and acusatory, but I don't think there's any chance - not a single shred - that this case is any different. I think this woman had her foot hard on the accelerator and only when someone told her to brake, did she brake. I could of course be proven to be wrong (I frequently am), in which case I'll apologise. But numerous studies and statistics are on my side here so I'm not holding my breath.
"Safety regulators, human-error experts and auto makers say driver error is the primary cause of sudden accelerations."
Driver error to blame for most incidents
Video of woman with "stuck accelerator":

Return to the car wash.

How technology has moved on. Last time I visited a car wash was probably 15 years ago - maybe even longer. Back then, you drove in to the wash bay and a gantry moved back and forth over the car doing the cleaning and drying. The main cleaning rotors had those awful plastic bristles on them that look soft but do a great job of scratching the clearcoat on the car, and in the drying cycle, the water dripping off the gantry meant the car was never properly dried and you ended up water spots. I did try one of the "touch-free" washes (brought on by litigious Americans who had mirrors torn off by the brush-style washers) and they were completely useless. Ever since then, I've been either hand washing my car or using a jetwash. The jetwash is pretty useless for actually cleaning - it moves the dirt around but you always end up with a thin layer of scum, so I mostly used it for getting under the car to clear all the crud off underneath (especially in the winter).
Skip forwards to 2012 and a friend of mine had been getting peculiarly enthusiastic about a local car wash place. When he mentioned that the main cleaning mechanism wasn't plastic bristles but a sort of chamois leather type brush, I was intrigued. So I went along to see what all the fuss was about. It's a conveyor washer where you drive a front wheel on to a conveyor system that then drags the car through a tunnel filled with all sorts of washing goodies. I've never used one of these before, let alone seen one - but then like I said, it's been over 15 years since I've been near a car wash. So I was dragged through all sorts of colourful washes, spinning brushes, sprays, rinses, wax waterfalls, underbody sprays and a bloody clever device that applied tyre shine only to the tyres (ie. not the wheels so it wasn't just a circular brush). The very last thing before being spat out into the sunlight was a collection of four jet engine style dryers that were so effective I imagine anything even slightly loose on the outside of the car would just get torn off. The best part of all this was the towel-monkeys though. Local college students earning a bit of extra cash who used super soft towels to give the car a final rub-down to get rid of any final water spots. A combination of buff blokes and hot girls tending to my car was well worth the extra cash tip and the end result was a car that was easily as clean as it is when I've done it by hand but for considerably less effort. I've since checked the clearcoat and there's no signs of the old tell-tale scratches and swirls that you'd get with the old style automatic washers. Colour me impressed.
Cost to me : $14 plus a tip to the towel-monkeys. The place I went to do everything up to a full-service $50 valet which is all the above plus a full inside clean and valet while you sit in an air-conditioned waiting area filled with decent vending machines, comfy sofas and chairs and modern furniture. Think I might be going back there.