Hands at 10 and 2 - still good advice?

Most people when taught to drive, are told that their hands should be at 10 and 2 on the steering wheel. For decades we've been told that's the safest position, and almost all steering wheels are designed with that theory in mind. The problem is that this theory was first proposed before power steering, when manual steering was the only option and cars were heavier to maneuver; having your hands at 10 and 2 provides good leverage to turn the wheel. The question is : is this still good advice?
I propose that it isn't, for three reasons. First, most cars nowadays have power steering. This means that it's far easier to turn the steering wheel, involving much less force. Having your hands at 10 and 2, in the old 'maximum leverage' position is at odds with power steering because you don't need that much leverage any more. In fact, I think it might be more dangerous because in the event of an emergency, people tend to do two things - step on the brake and yank the wheel one way or another. With power steering and your arms in the maximum leverage position, yanking on the steering can easily end up in far too much steering input. In the worst case - in a 4x4 or SUV - that could easily result in one front wheel tucking under and causing the car to roll. Yes there are computer aids to help prevent this now - dynamic stability control, anti roll control etc - but it's still a very real possibility.
The second reason I think it's not good advice is that the steering wheel already blocks part of your view of the instrument cluster. Having your hands at 10 and 2 blocks even more of it. Granted the manufacturers don't tend to put critical elements of the instrument cluster behind where your hands will be but you are still blocking your view of part of the display.
The final reason for not having your hands at 10 and 2 is crossed arms when steering. We're all taught not to do it, but a significant number of drivers will cross their arms when steering to turn a corner. If you do this when crossing traffic - turning into a street on the opposite side of the road for example - if you are unfortunate enough to have a collision with another vehicle, the airbag will propel your crossed arm into your face which has the potential to break your arm and your nose. EMTs and ER staff will back me up here - it's the most common injury in front three-quarter crashes. A broken nose and either a broken right or left arm depending on if you drive on the right or the left.
I would propose that 8 and 4 are better positions for modern driving. Less leverage because of power steering, not blocking the view of the instruments, and in the event of an accident, less likely to propel an arm into your face because being lower down the wheel, the temptation to cross arms when steering is reduced.

Elio Motors - another flash-in-the-pan?

If you're into cars, you might have already heard about Elio's plans to manufacture and bring to market an American-made three-wheeler. Apart from the opening comments where they imply that petrol in America is expensive (apparently they've never been anywhere else), there are some troubling facts about Elio that are glossed over in their promo video. First, that 84mpg figure. It sounds too good to be true, and it is. Want to know why? Because that's a theoretical number based on a theoretical three-cylinder engine that hasn't been built yet. In fact, the design hasn't even been finalised, so advertising 84mpg is a little rich given that the car is more likely to appear with a Suzuki G10 motor which is capable of a much less ground-breaking 34mpg.
Second, the 5-star safety rating. Or as they put it "anticipated 5 star safety rating". Again - with pre-production prototypes, there's not been any NHTSA testing done so claiming 5-star ratings is misleading. I anticipate making $10M in the next 6 months - that doesn't mean it's going to happen.
Third, no matter how many social networks they try to drum up interest on, they're currently $145M short of their funding goal. Or to put it another way, they only have 27% of the money they need to go into production. And that's even with the claimed 35,000 pre-orders.
And finally, they're extremely vague about important figures. Like performance. Saying that it'll get you on a motorway quicker than you can see "yeehaw" isn't exactly a 0-60 number. And saying that you can get many speeding tickets is pretty vague too. I could get many speeding tickets in/on just about any vehicle - it's not that difficult.
There are other issues too - they don't seem to have figured out their audience. From the design of the car, it's a divorced person with only one child and no luggage, or luggage (small) and no children.
And finally the price - $6800! But wait. If you order now, we'll send you a second one free! Ok so they don't say that but you get the impression that's the market they're aiming for here.
I respect that they want to bring manufacturing and jobs back to the US, but Elio Motors is not Tesla, and judging by what I've seen to-date, they're on target to become the Duke Nukem Forever of car manufacturers.

Audi RS7 Concept laps the Hockenheimring with no driver.

A couple of weeks ago an Audi RS7 did a "piloted" lap of the Hockenheimring with no driver. And once again the media were blinded by the shiny pretty thing and didn't bother to report the real story. I heard people talking about how "driverless cars are finally here" and other such comments. Even the commentary on the day kept making a huge point of how the car was "choosing" a great line in every corner, and how it never put a foot wrong.
Well d'uh. The car was running a software program, nothing more. A clear, dry day, on a grippy post-race track with no other vehicles on the circuit. The car had a millimeter-accurate map of the track in it's software and was using differential GPS to ensure it was at the right place at every millisecond. Braking points, acceleration points, kerbing, apexes - these were all planned in advance. Watching that RS7 lap the circuit without a driver was - in reality - no different to watching a computer animation of the same thing. The car wasn't "choosing" to do anything - it was merely running code. Millions of lines of software doing their thing, backed up by a pair of cameras to look for anything out of the ordinary.
Regular readers of this blog will know that I'm as excited to see driverless cars as I am to die a fiery death falling off a skyscraper mid root-canal. Yes I understand the day will come when all the joy is taken out of driving because of this technology. Yes I know there are people who just can't wait for this day to come, but I'm not one of them. I do however have some excellent news for everyone in the former camp though. The technology does exist right now to have you be able to get into a car and have it drive to wherever you want it to go while you relax and update your facebook status. It's called a taxi.
If you want to see the whole Hockenheim event, Audi Media TV should still have it available: audimedia.tv/en

Top Gear political correctness gone mad.

The recent incident with the Top Gear crew being attacked and having to flee from Argentina highlights how stupid political correctness has become. Clarkson was in a 1991 Porsche that has had the license plate "H982FKL" since the day it was first registered. There are photos of the original car back in the 90's wearing that plate. To suggest that Top Gear, or Clarkson, somehow either made up that plate, or went out of their way to find a numberplate that was - and this is a highly tenuous suggestion - designed to irk the Argentinians, is just stupid. To say that H982FKL resembled "1982 Falklands" is a real stretch, and I think I smell the foul stench of the Daily Mail in this story.
That paper has it in for Clarkson. They're the ones who dug up the deleted clip on the edit suite and used it to claim Clarkson was a racist because he used the 'n' word. Bear in mind that was a deleted clip - it never made it into the final edit. Yet somehow that paper managed to generate outrage about something that never aired. Something that nobody would have known about had they not gone looking for dirt.
Similarly his comment in the Burma special about the bridge having a slope on it was also taken and used to cause outrage. Watch the clip - the bridge is warped, bent, tilted, sloped - call it what you will. But again - to rake up dirt and further their bizarre campaign against Clarkson, the Daily Mail suggested that "slope" was referring to a racist term used to describe one of the locals who happened to be walking across the bridge. Again - a highly tenuous link if you ask me.
And that's the problem today - too many people are too ready to be offended by everything. It used to take a few days for the outrage to appear because people would have to write letters. But in this day and age of instant-everything 24-7 with all the social networks and always-online connections, people can spread fake outrage instantly - before a show has even finished airing.
Which brings me to my final point : if you watch Top Gear in the nature in which it's intended (three dickheads arsing around with cars) then it's a great TV show and it's funny (unless it's the US version in which case it's a seriously unfunny train wreck). If you watch it wanting to be offended, then yes - you're going to be offended. I don't think there's a race, country, manufacturer, celebrity, political group or religion that Top Gear has left alone across all its series.

Has Formula 1 become complacent about safety?

After Jules Bianchi's awful crash in the Japanese Grand Prix a few weeks ago, I saw the headline I used as the title of this post - "Has Formula 1 become complacent about safety?". I found this to be a knee-jerk comment by an uninformed journalist. F1 doesn't like accidents. The governing body and the drivers association work hand in hand to ensure that F1 is as safe as possible but it is, in the final analysis, a motorsport, and motorsports are by their very nature, dangerous.
There hasn't been a death in F1 since Imola in 1994 - when Roland Ratzenberger and Ayrton Senna were both killed in separate accidents. Jules Bianchi's crash was the result of a series of unfortunate coincidences that happened to line up badly. The change in weather, the wear rate of the tyres, the locations of the cars on the track, the puddles, the prior accident, the presence of the recovery vehicle - nobody would ever predict that series of events aligning unless we'd seen it happen first-hand.
You can't make an F1 car capable of surviving the sort of crash he had because it's so rare - in fact it's the first time it's ever happened. How do you make a super lightweight F1 car capable of plowing into a 5 ton tractor without injury to the driver? You can't. You can attempt to mitigate the chances of it happening with new recovery vehicle rules, and modifications to the recovery vehicles themselves - for example adding skirts to the sides of the recovery vehicles so that the F1 cars can't submarine "under" them.
But to look at what happened to Bianchi and then come up with that headline, I thought that was irresponsible - flippant almost. That headline implied that something the driver's association, the FIA and Formula One Management did contributed to the accident and injury. Clearly it didn't - none of those three groups were involved in any decision that affected the outcome. It's not like they decided on some design decision of the vehicles that caused the accident, or contributed to it. It was a tragic accident - nothing more. Steps will be taken to try to ensure it doesn't happen again but nobody can predict every eventuality, and the simple truth of the matter is that F1, today, is as safe as it's ever been given the nature of the sport.

Oh the irony.

A couple of weeks ago, a colleague of mine was reading an article about Tesla's new gigafactory that they're going to build to manufacture batteries. It was mentioned that the entire roof of the facility would be covered in solar panels to offset the running cost. One hapless commentator then posted this :
"D'uh - solar panels only work in the day time - what's the point of that?"
To which the first, only, and best reply was: "I know. Wouldn't it be amazing if there was some way to store all that power generated in the daytime so it could be re-used at night?"
Well - I thought it was funny.
But it did raise an interesting point about internet trolls - how can you tell nowadays if the commenters are trolling, or if they really don't know the answer to the question they're posing?