5 posts tagged “motoring”

Honking, tailgating, excessive lane-changing—there are so many things that can drive you crazy when you’re behind the wheel. So tell us: what’s your driving pet peeve?

Tailgating would be the number-one menace for me. I don’t do it, and I certainly don’t expect others to do it. And when others do it to me, I slow down, for a very good reason: to minimize whiplash if the other driver hits me.
   I wrote on Jen’s blog that I am too stubborn to pull over unless I sense that the driver is in a legitimate emergency, because I can’t see how that would help either of us. If he is a dangerous tailgater, he will be a dangerous overtaker. And I am not sure if I should reward bad drivers—there’s my Mr Wheeler emerging.
   Honking is not a big deal for anyone who has ever driven in Italy, where they hook the horn up to the accelerator (kidding), and at certain times in Wellington’s Mt Vic Tunnel, you are expected to honk (it’s a form of greeting and stress relief). As to lane-changing: I have to do it in Auckland, since drivers there generally have not figured out that the inner lane is for slower traffic and the outer lane is for faster; though having said that, Auckland motorists tend to be all right at letting others change into their lanes.
   Sadly, overall, New Zealand drivers would rank near or at the bottom of any country I have driven in, as evidenced by the high per-capita road toll.

To the gentleman in the Toyota Caldina letting me out of the Harvey Norman (not Korman) car park at the intersection, thank you.
   To the other eight Lower Hutt assholes who were at a standstill and opted to block me, read the fricking road code.
   To the Chinese lady in the Toyota Vitz among the eight: you are giving us a bad name.
   Very unlike New Zealanders not to let people in at intersections. It’s either the crap weather or a Christmas-shopping panic.

I saw a Peugeot 407 next to a 1980s BMW 5-series today and noted how much bigger, in every dimension, the 407 is. The 407 is regarded as small down the back—which makes you think about the size of, say, the Ford Mondeo CD345, which is about the same size as the outgoing Ford Falcon.
   Here’s a wild prediction: in years to come, the equivalents or descendants of the Ford Focus, Mondeo and Falcon will all be the same size and differ only in body styles and engine sizes.
   At Toyota, Corolla and Camry are approaching similar sizes, and Toyota Australia’s full-size model, the Aurion, is actually the same size as the Camry, right down to wheelbase. In fact, in some markets, the car that Australians call the Aurion is actually called the Camry.
   Roads can only be so wide unless even Toyota gets in to the Hummer H1 game and in future, we wind up with a mega-wide Previa.
   This may sound daft but if you consider that the Peugeot 307 and 407 and Ford Focus and Mondeo have similar engineering roots, then the likely integration in future will happen.
   As niche vehicles develop, the mainstream models will become fewer. For example, Nissan in Europe pretty much retails only specialty cars now. Aside from the supermini, the Micra, every Nissan sold in Europe is either an SUV, minivan or sports car. That’s a far cry from the manufacturer of the Sentra, Altima and Maxima in North America.
   What may likely happen is that mainstream nameplates will wind up on some niche vehicles, or niche vehicles may be marketed as the successor to everyday models—one of the few ways to get sufficient economies of scale.
   We’re unlikely to see a TGV approach to cars: the same width, but differing lengths based on your requirements—though models like the Renault Kangoo and Espace, with their lengthier counterparts, make me wonder.
   We’re also bound to see more manufacture in cheaper countries: Romania, Hungary and the Czech Republic for the European market; Russia, Uzbekistan and Ukraine for their regions; and, of course, Red China.
   Whatever the case, at this present rate, the motor industry will have a very different shape in the next decade, assuming we haven’t given up on the internal combustion engine or seen some catastrophe.

Sad news for car nuts: automotive and technical writer Jeff Daniels has passed away, according to Keith Adams’ Austin Rover Online website. There’s a longer piece at Just-auto.com.
   There probably isn’t anyone of my generation who doesn’t recall the greats like L. J. K. Setright, Jeff Daniels, George Bishop, Phil Hill and Paul Frère.
   Jeff wrote a column called ‘Danspeak’ in Autocar for many years, and it is probably his style, more than anyone else’s, that informed me when I started my columns.
   I found him one of the more knowledgeable car writers out there and it is sad that much of this old style of journalism has given way to the Jeremy Clarksons of this world. Just as in television presenting, where the William Woollards gave way to the Jeremy Clarksons on Top Gear.
   While I love Clarkson’s style (since he could never get away with it without some actual research) and can be said to adopt elements myself, there is still room for the more technical, educated approach of Daniels et al.
   Jeff Daniels was 68 and continued working up to his death. He will be sorely missed.

I have been a regular reader of Autocar since 1980 but did not know about this hidden message in the 1992 Road Test Yearbook, which I bought 15 years ago. James May, of Top Gear fame, was one of the team that put the Yearbook together and was known for his regular column in the magazine in those days. He was fired over an incident where he put in a hidden message, using the initial caps of each road test summary in the Yearbook.

JamesMayAutocar

   It took Wikipedia to tell me—so it is good for something after all. The message is, with punctuation, ‘So you think it’s really good, yeah? You should try making the bloody thing up. It’s a real pain in the arse.’
   No one had spotted it internally, but readers eventually asked the magazine if they had won a prize.
   On Radio 2, May said in an interview, ‘So I had this idea that if I re-edited the beginnings of all the little texts, I could make these red letters spell out a message through the magazine, which I thought was brilliant. … It took me about two months to do it and on the day that it came out I’d actually forgotten that I’d done it because there’s a bit of a gap between it being “put to bed” and coming out on the shelves. When I arrived at work that morning everybody was looking at their shoes and I was summoned to the managing director of the company’s office. The thing had come out and nobody at work had spotted what I’d done because I’d made the words work around the pages so you never saw a whole word. But all the readers had seen it and they’d written in thinking they’d won a prize or a car or something.’
   Shame he was fired over this. I thought the British sense of humour would have seen him through. But then, he might not have gone on to do his other things.

PS.: I got out my copy of the September 23, 1992 issue and note that eight pages are missing from the above thumbnails. That makes 16 missing characters. The full message is, with punctuation: ‘Road Test Yearbook. So you think it’s really good, yeah? You should try making the bloody thing up. It’s a real pain in the arse.’