Check out the latest posts
Archive for May, 2007
|
| Whatdyamean it's a bit blurry? |
|
I went to Autostadt last week, the vast theme park built around the VW factory in Wolfsburg (think Disneyland for petrolheads). We had dinner in the Phaeno Science Centre, where 250 ‘experimental stations’ allow visitors to try out scientific experiments with their hors d’oeuvres – quite bizarre.
My fave was the reaction-time experiment. You sit and stare at ten buttons and when one lights up, you hit it. After ten tries, the monitor calculates your average reaction time. With practice, you should get it down from around 0.4sec to 0.1sec, but I only had time to reach 0.3sec when we were called through for the main course.
After a couple of glasses of wine, I had a jolly good idea. This sequence of events has caused all sorts of trouble in my life, but in this case it was fairly tame stuff. I went back to the reaction-time experiment, pressed start, and after the ten flashing buttons had been duly hit I knew without doubt that I had beaten my previous reaction time by a substantial margin. I was relaxed, confident, and realised that the wine had honed – rather than dulled – my reactions. Then the machine flashed up the result – 0.55sec. Worse than I had been on my very first attempt, with no practice.
So next time someone tells me that they actually drive better after a couple of glasses of wine…
|
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
I believe it was H G Wells who wrote “In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”
I’m not so sure about that. One lens of my driving glasses fell out this morning and the local drivers, who normally can see no further than the ends of their bonnets, had me at a disadvantage.
But it got me thinking: drivers who rely on satellite navigation are in a sense driving ‘blind’. How many people, I wondered, arrive at their destination without having a clue how they got there? I concluded that most of them, for the greater part of their journey, must be lost. In that respect they can be likened that famous tribe of short people who live in long grass. Until I get my glasses fixed, I know how they feel.
|
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
The provisional figures for casualties on our roads last year have just come out, and once again there’s no cause for celebration. Or is there? It seems that provisionally, just two per cent fewer people were killed on our roads last year than in 2005 – about 3150.
While over 3000 people dying is hardly good news, let’s put that figure into context. There are around 60million of us in the UK, and on any single day most of us move about in some way – whether it’s as pedestrians, cyclists or drivers. There are hundreds of millions of movements every day, yet fewer than nine people die each day during the process.
In terms of the potential versus actual risk, that’s a phenomenal achievement, yet the prophets of doom who run this country want ever tougher measures to reduce the toll further. While being complacent isn’t an option, neither should the continuation of a set of policies which have so far been an abysmal failure. Quite simply, the government’s road safety policies of the past decade have failed to save lives to any great degree – if at all.
The biggest culprits are the self-styled road safety groups, such as Brake and the Slower Speeds Initiative, which have demanded ever more draconian speed limits and ever greater enforcement of them. There are a million drivers on the brink of a ban thanks to these groups’ wishes being implemented, but all their policies have done is destroy lives through lost licences and the consequent loss of employment.
In the wake of the new figures being released, Brake is (as usual) calling for more of the same. Instead of accepting that the medicine isn’t working, it demands an even stronger dose. Such a situation would be laughable, if it wasn’t a matter of life and death.
|
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
When my father ordered his first new car, he was horrified to find that the letters on the registration plate would correspond to his initials. He cancelled his order and re-ordered from a dealership in a different area, purely to avoid this embarrassing co-incidence. “It would look as though I’d done it on purpose, to show off,” he said with a shudder.
Like father, like daughter, and I too have cherished a lifelong horror of personalised plates. I simply can’t understand why people want to force the letters and numbers into something vaguely resembling their name, or a faintly suggestive pun, or some other convoluted joke. And as if the ‘joke’ weren’t unamusing enough the first time you see it, presumably the personalised plate holder needs to enjoy the same joke day in, day out, every time he goes out to his car. Ugh.
Yet, come June 5th, the DVLA Personalised Registrations scheme will, apparently, see thousands of motorists buying humorous combinations of letters and numbers from the new 57-series registrations. Oh well. Each to his own.
|
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
Make the most of your CDs. If the In-Car Entertainment (ICE) industry gets its own way, playing CDs in a car will soon be a thing of the past.
Indeed Alpine has already revealed to the motor industry a non-CD music player, which instead is equipped with a USB port that enables music tracks to be outsourced. Expect car manufacturers to take note: a USB port weighs but a few grammes; a CD-player more than a kilo, and in the drive to save weight (and ultimately fuel consumption) a kilo is worth its weight in gold.
But what to do with all those unwanted CDs? There’s a website that offers ‘101 things to do with unwanted CDs’, most of which are predictable and boring, but one guy suggests sticking flies to them to make UFOs. His own experiment using 8 flies resulted in a flight time of 52 minutes. I believe he is an American.
|
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
As I write this we will have just released our 65th video road test. Since we uploaded our first video at the beginning of last year, we have put ‘in the can’ more than 500 hours of filming and more than 20,000 miles of road-testing, and so I thought it was about time I took you behind the scenes and gave you a brief insight into how the films come into being.
We do not use any stock footage: every second of every video is shot by our own team and edited in-house at our production facility in north London.
The film is shot on public highways, mainly in Surrey and Sussex, using two high-definition cameras. Circuit footage is shot at the Lotus test track in Hethel. Some of the public roads you may recognise although many of them are tucked away in places where the traffic is light and we can work largely undisturbed. (Yes, there are still such places, but they are well off the beaten track.) The cars are the same ones that appear in my corresponding written road tests: for example, the Nissan Qashqai video corresponds to the Qashqai road test.
We use a combination of filming techniques: rolling footage from our film car (a Range Rover G4); drive-through and pan shots; and static footage, often filmed at a farm in Surrey. We have a second camera mounted on-board the test car, on which we capture cross-car and over-the-shoulder footage. Sound is always ‘live’ and not dubbed from other sources.
We have a film crew of three. I drive the film car; Terri Dean, another experienced motor journalist, drives the test car; and our cameraman is Ed Morris, one of the finest young cameramen ever to be associated with Ealing. (That’s Ealing Common, not Studios.) All sequences are co-ordinated car-to-car using hands-free radio. In addition to the actual film crew, we also have a backroom team whose job it is to edit and voice the video, using a script written by me.
Quite apart from the editing and post-production work, it takes a full day to shoot enough material to compile a single 3-minute video. Before filming, I spend the best part of a week with the car so that I become entirely familiar with its handling, ride-quality and salient features. My impressions result in a virtual story board from which we plan the various sequences. I hope you agree that the results speak for themselves.
|
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
|
|
