Archive for October, 2013
Bumpy Trax: Holden's new baby SUV
Holden’s had a shot before at a small SUV; last time around it was the Suzuki Ignis based Cruze (yes there was a Cruze before the Cruze…confused?). This time around they’ve ‘roided up the Korean sourced Barina and called it Trax. I back to back the entry level LS and top spec LTZ.
The Driven Heart
Anyone that’s driven the Holden Cruze (the new one, not the old one) with the original 1.8L petrol engine will be instantly familiar with the heart of the Trax. It never received good reviews and won’t here. It’s underpowered, undertorqued and should be six feet under. There’s just 103kW at 6300rpm and 175 torques at 3800 rpm. With the option of manual and auto for the LS and auto only in the LTZ (auto supplied), the slow revver just fails to deliver pizzaz, pop and pow. The automatic transmission is fitted with six ratios which, at least, use what’s available (60kmh equals 2000rpm….) and the driver has the choice of allowing the ‘box to do its own thing or manually changing via the oddly sited switch (ala Malibu) on the top right hand side of the lever. There’s no real advantage to using the manual shift (slow, ergonomically awkward) nor does it make any sense (unless to NOT encourage people to use it) to place the manual selector switch where it is. Left to its own devices, the transmission offers an odd mix of short/sharp or hold and delay changes. One would hope that the 1.4iTi and 1.6iTi plants plus the diesels available overseas will make their way into the range, sooner rather than later. It’s coarse, thrashy, unrefined, even the 1.8L in the Camira sounded smoother.
The Sheetmetal
As you’d expect there’s a strong family resemblance to big brother 
Captiva. The haunches are bulbous and rounded, the proportional profile is not unlike the Captiva (moreso 7 than 5) whilst the front end, signed off by the international consortium as using the Australian nose design, which in its own right has a resemblance to the Malibu, is a shocker. Is it pretty? Hell no. The headlight cluster design is myopic, bland (black trim in the LTZ would 
have helped differentiate) whilst the actual nose is blunt, bluff and upright with the chin of the bumper given more depth than what looks nice, plus scrapes easily on the road coming off a driveway kerb. The rear is better integrated and the saving grace along with a sensible looking window line plus the LS gets full black plastic as opposed to the LTZ’s alloy insert. Overall look reminds me of the Suzuki SX4 or the original Cruze.
The Office
Straight up, what greets the driver’s view gives no doubt as 
to the vehicle’s roots; the dash display is an almost cut and paste from the Barina, with the same motorcycle style look plus a couple of tweaks to the colour. The centre dash console is clean, simple, well designed and comes complete with a seven inch touchscreen entertainment and MyLink system, complete with the Pandora, TuneIn and Stitcher and 
more apps accessible via a compatible smartphone, once they’ve been 
downloaded into the phone though. The USB port is hidden inside a small storage locker just in front of the passenger seat and there’s a centrally mounted spot high up in the centre of the dash for, presumably, sunglasses. Just to the sides of the screen are two holes where one would expect aircon vents would go, circled in brushed aluminuim plastic while the centre console doesn’t have a raised storage section but does have a power point (and FOUR drinks holders!!!!), only suitable for an overseas (non Australian)plug. If it’s not suitable for us, why bother fitting it?
It’s spacious enough inside, with room for four comfortably and plenty of head/shoulder room in the front while the rear seat squabs fold out and up to provide a flat load space with the uprights folded. The seats themselves are comfortable enough but aren’t outstanding either, lacking support to the thighs and around the thorax and the print is a simple square motif spread throughout the fabric in the LT while the LTZ gets the faux leather 
look and heating as well. Boot space is decent for the size of the vehicle and the load height is just about spot on. The actual dash structure mimics the Malibu with the double flying buttress design and doesn’t look all that bad, terminating in retro style airvents either side but the plastic itself is that old style hard crocodile print style. An interesting side point is the headlight switch, which on Auto, in the LS and LTZ, has a set of driving lights activated and based in the cluster as they’re not in the bottom corners of the bumper in the LS but you do get the normal bumper mounted lights in the LTZ. Simple yet smart. There is a reverse camera as standard but for navigation you need to download an app….huh?
On The Road
Quick steering, a supple ride, a lack of road noise, a lack of crash thump from speed humps add up to be the surprise part of the Trax. It’s fingertip light in the steering, not requiring too much effort at all plus the ratio is fast, with what feels like a half turn lock to lock. It’s a lovely, smooth ride and the suspension is a delight, isolating speedbumps and helped, somewhat, from the Continental tyres at 205/70/16 in size (LS with 215/55/18s on the LTZ and five spoke alloys), with 
the sidewall height adding a measure of smoothness and, I suspect, the grip when punched hard 
into tight turns with a minimum of squealing. Although, ostensibly, a SUV, the LS is front drive only with no 4WD mechanism at all, not that it could with such a deep front dam anyway. Acceleration is leisurely, as mentioned, with the gear change slurry on the up shift whilst coming down a hill and under brakes, it will downshift and hold the gear which does aid in braking, to a point. Under full welly, the motorbike look speedo shows numbers changing marginally quicker than what it feels via seat of the pants, oddly enough, but with the aforementioned cacophony from up front dulling the aural experience the overall presentation is, as they say, meh. There’s a compass thrown in, for good measure, on the LTZ but in the simple old style LCD font only. It’s a strange mix, with a feeling of something good and something a bit confused.
The Wrap
If history is any guide, the Trax won’t sell well, based on looks; having said that, the old phrase “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” may have something to do with it. Ford and Mitsubishi found out the hard way that a physically average looking car hurts sales. For me, the Trax’s biggest issue is the front end and primarily the headlight cluster; it’s just ugly and simply does nothing, in my eyes, to help present the car to those that want a decent overall package. Sure, it’ll be bought by those that want a point to point carriage, much like those that think a certain small car from Japan is the bastion of high tech. The tight handling and above expectations ride will mean nothing to those willing to overlook the “take no prisoners” bluffness of the front end with its Clarence the Cross Eyed Lion headlights and the archaic performance of the 1.8L. Priced at (depending on where you live) around the $27K mark including ORCs for the LS manual and near nigh $30K for the auto with premium paint, with the LTZ over $32K, it needs a sharper set of numbers to be a serious temptation, considering the better Captiva 5 and 7 offers at the time of writing, with the 5 at $25K driveaway and the SX 7 at $28600 driveaway as well.
To find out more: http://www.holden.com.au/cars/trax
Car Makes By State!
Thanks to some collaborative work with our friends at Progressive Insurance, we’ve got the results of some very interesting analysis on the distribution of car makes by state or territory using the data from the 2012 Survey of Motor Vehicles by the ABS.
Simply select the car make you are interested in and the map will show you the total number of vehicles registered in each state and the penetration – the number of that model of car against total vehicle registrations.
Here are a few interesting examples:
South Australia is the hotspot for Holden ownership. In fact there are nearly 50% more Holdens per head of population, than you would find in Queensland. Loyalty to local manufacturing perhaps?
Are the British expats in Western Australia responsible for the high penetration of Land Rovers?
And if you own a Citroen and live in the Northern Territory… well you’re one of only 35!
It’s an interactive map so please have a play around with the figures and see . Choose a make on the left-hand-side, check out the numbers of vehicles registered then hover over each state to see the percentages.
Pop back here and let us know what you found!
Drivers In The Storm
First of all, I’d like to pass our best wishes and sympathy to the people in the Lithgow area of the Blue Mountains who are having to cope with all the bushfires and possible evacuations. If you have been evacuated, please take care on the roads, as traffic accidents are probably a bigger killer than fires. And those who live in the areas where the refugees from the fires have come to, mind out for the extra traffic on the roads with all the extra people.
In my last blog, I discussed the issue of lightning striking when you’re out driving. However, this isn’t the full story about what you need to know when driving in a storm, as the heavens can throw down a lot more than just a few bolts of lightning – and don’t we all wish that a good storm or three would pour down on all those fires! Heavy rain and hail can also be a bit tricky to negotiate if you’re driving in a storm.
Thunderstorms often bring startlingly heavy precipitation and it often dramatically cuts down visibility, even if you have your windscreen wipers going full bore. It’s often a good idea to put your headlights on during a storm, especially if you’ve got a grey car that’s hard to see against a leaden sky. If the precipitation gets really, really bad, pull over to the side of the road until the storm passes. The good news is that they often do pass by pretty quickly.
Hail can be a bit alarming to have falling on your car. In a really heavy fall, you start to wonder if it’s going to smash your windscreen, and you start thinking about hailstones the size of eggs (they’ve happened). It is possible that heavy hail could crack your windscreen and/or dent your bodywork. Thankfully, this is something that the insurance people are usually reasonable about.
Once the hail has fallen, you then have the hazard of pellets of ice all over the road until the stuff melts. Take extra care when there’s hail on the road, especially with braking and cornering. Hail is more or less extra slippery gravel, especially if it’s managed to pile up a bit. Even if you drive a car made where snow and ice are more common and which has all the safety features (e.g. Volvo, made in a country that reaches into the Arctic Circle), you’re going to need to ease off a bit. Make that a lot.
You also need to take extra care if there hasn’t been any hail but just heavy rain. One of the downsides of living in towns with all the paved roads is that rain doesn’t sink into tarmac the way that it sinks into plain dirt. The upside of this is that city roads don’t turn into mud pools of the sort that a lot of back country drivers have seen in the wet season. The downside is that all that water has to go somewhere, so flooding becomes more likely.
The golden rules for taking it carefully when driving heavy rain of all sorts are:
- Increase your following distance – it should be double what you normally allow.
- No sudden movements for braking, steering or acceleration. Traction control and ABS brakes can only do so much.
- Avoid puddles and pools of water in the road – there’s no way of telling how deep they go or what’s underneath… a pothole, a brick…
- If you do have to go through a puddle because the road has been flooded, pump your brakes lightly on and off after you’ve gone through so you can dry the brakes out a bit so they work better. Water is a lubricant, after all.
Hidden Speed Cameras: Safety vs Revenue.
It’s a contentious issue and one that changes a simple conversation into full blown arguments: speed and speed cameras, safety device or revenue raiser? First up, what EXACTLY is speed? According to Wikipedia:
In kinematics, the speed of an object is the magnitude of its velocity (the rate of change of its position); it is thus a scalar quantity. The average speed of an object in an interval of time is the distance travelled by the object divided by the duration of the interval; the instantaneous speed is the limit of the average speed as the duration of the time interval approaches zero. Like velocity, speed has the dimensions of a length divided by a time; the SI unit of speed is the metre per second, but the most usual unit of speed in everyday usage is the kilometre per hour or, in the USA and the UK, miles per hour. For air and marine travel the knot is commonly used.
Or more simply, A cyclist who covers 30 metres in a time of 2 seconds, for example, has a speed of 15 metres per second. Basically velocity over distance in a time frame. In Australia, we measure our speed as kilometres per hour, so fifty kilometres per hour is fifty thousand metres of distance travelled every 3600 seconds. This equates to be 13.888 metres every second. 80 k’s per hour is 22.222 metres per second and 11o is 30.555 metres per second. Ok, we’re clear on that?
There are those that say that if you don’t speed then you won’t receive an infringement. True, undeniably true but it sidesteps what the argument is all about. There’s also the ubiquitous and well worn “speed kills”. Let’s put this into one context: if a driver travels at 60kilometres per hour in a rated zone of fifty kilometres per hour, that driver is, technically, speeding. If the driver is doing the same speed, sixty kmh in an 80 kmh zone, the same speed remember, they’re not speeding. So, according to convention, the media, the police etc, the first is dangerous yet, somehow, that same velocity over distance per time isn’t….back to “speed kills”….which speed, exactly?
Our residential roads are zoned at 50 kmh. Our highways are zoned at either 100 kmh or 110 kmh. Travel at 80 kmh in a 60 kmh and you’re speeding BUT in order to achieve a speed of 100/110 kmh you not only have to reach 80 kmh but EXCEED that speed. So what is dangerous, 80 in a 60 or passing that formerly dangerous speed to one that is deemed safe????
Ok, we’re told that speed kills. It’s a blanket statement, exactly like “the customer is always right”. The problem is the caveat part of those statements is missing. Speed doesn’t kill, it’s the sudden stop. This is where physics comes into play, with an object in motion possessing kinetic energy. That kinetic energy has to be dispersed when that object stops; also, a little more physics. You may have heard of “G force”; from Wikipedia:
G-force (with g from gravitational) is a measurement of acceleration felt as weight. It is not a force, but a force per unit mass and can be measured with an accelerometer. Since such a force is perceived as a weight, any g-force can be described as a “weight per unit mass” (see the synonym specific weight). The g-force acceleration acts as a multiplier of weight-like forces for every unit of an object’s mass, and (save for certain electromagnetic force influences) is the cause of an object’s acceleration in relation to free-fall
Under normal and everyday circumstances, a human is experiencing a G force load of 1G. Deceleration also involves G force and the higher the deceleration the higher the G force. To be slightly technical: The expression “1 g = 9.80665 m/s2“ means that for every second that elapses, velocity changes 9.80665 meters per second (≡35.30394 km/h). This rate of change in velocity can also be denoted as 9.80665 (meter per second) per second, or 9.80665 m/s2. For example: An acceleration of 1 g equates to a rate of change in velocity of approximately 35 kilometres per hour (22 mph) for each second that elapses. Therefore, if an automobile is capable of braking at 1 g and is traveling at 35 kilometres per hour (22 mph) it can brake to a standstill in one second and the driver will experience a deceleration of 1 g. The automobile traveling at three times this speed, 105 km/h (65 mph), can brake to a standstill in three seconds. For humans, death or serious injury occurs with a G force rating of >25G. So, clearly, it’s neither speed (to keep it simple, let’s presume a constant velocity therefore a G force of 1G) nor acceleration (as even the space shuttle was kept to an acceleration G force of less than 3G), that kills people, it IS the sudden stop. To use a somewhat graphic yet famous example, the crash that took the lives of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed was estimated to have a G force factor of 70G to 100G….
The Bathurst 1000 event over the weekend of 11-13 October 2013 saw a number of crashes, including young drivers Tim Slade and Chaz Mostert. It was estimated that the G force shunts for both was around 30G. Now, here’s the rub; the vehicles they are driving are built and engineered with what is considered high speed in mind. Also, the safety mechanisms we take for granted, primarily airbags, are removed BUT they have super strength seatbelts in a configuration known as a four point harness. Relative movement or slackness of these belts is hugely minimal compared to the seatbelts in cars (http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/seatb.html) therefore their bodily movement will be severely reduced. As a result, a combination of that primary safety factor and car construction aided in reducing serious injury, to the point both drivers reported bruising and some aches, but nothing worse.
So speed kills? No, it doesn’t. Clearly, obviously, provably. Therefore the argument for restricting speed limits and using speed cameras has serious opposition. Therefore the argument for speed cameras to stop speeding is invalid. An example: a driver is travelling a road zoned at 110 kilometres per hour in dry conditions and 100 percent visibility (the caveat). It’s raining, it’s foggy and it’s dusk. Visibility, even with headlights on (a safety factor badly overlooked) is 10 metres. Remember that 110kmh is 30 metres PER SECOND. Is it safe to travel at 110 even though that’s what the signs say that driver can do? But if that driver DOES travel at 110 they aren’t breaking the law and therefore not subject to receiving an infringement. But is it SAFE? By no sensible reasoning should this be seen as safe. Road limits are set for the presumption of 100% visibility for the direction of road travel and road design and the surrounding area and in many areas they are too low.
So: speed cameras are used to restrict excessive speed, with posted limits set under what is presumably the best conditions, with one unassailable fact, the biggest chance factor of all: how good is the driver? Anyone that races at Bathurst is there because, not only can they race, they can handle speeds that the authorities would have us believe is dangerous. Remember, the majority of the year sees the track a residential road, with a posted limit of just 60 kmh. If speed kills, then why are all the drivers that raced this year still alive? No, it’s not a petty and frivolous question, as we are told, repeatedly, speed is dangerous…..but to who? Certainly not Mark Winterbottom, certainly not Warren Luff, certainly not Andy Priaulx. Speed cameras are used to control speed, they don’t control bad drivers. Well trained and educated and AWARE drivers are so much more safer to deal with and they can deal with speeds others can’t. There is no justification for speed cameras in many locations but yes, in some places they should be mandatory.
According to the Bureau of Statistics, in 2010, a staggering 44.2% of fatal crashes were a single vehicle crash, whilst 42% were multiple vehicle. The inescapable fact is these crashes have one common cause or factor and it’s not speed. It’s a bad driver. In the same year, at speeds of up to just 60kmh, the equation was 28.3% of fatalities occurred in that grouping, whilst in the sixty five to ninety zone it was 22.4%. What’s more frightening is the change of numbers in the Northern Territory; in 2009 it was 13 people per 100000 that were in a fatal crash. In 2010, it jumped to 21. Those numbers increased almost year by year after the unlimited roads were changed to a maximum of 130 kmh. Time of the crashes is also an important factor: in 2012 there were more fatalities in NSW between 12 and 1 pm (30) than at any other time of the day, with Victoria not far behind at 18 between 1 and 2pm. Neither could hardly to be said it’s peak hour traffic yet Allianz Insurance says the most common form of crash is the nose to tail. Guess when these are likely to happen? That’s right, peak hour.
Speed doesn’t kill. Speed cameras do nothing to reduce the reason people die in a crash: the sudden stop. The Victorian police say they’re going to hide their cameras so the operators don’t get hurt by the occasional twit that’s just been nabbed speeding, presumably because 1) they’re a twit for not slowing when the sign says there’s a camera or 2) didn’t slow because they were too busy looking at their speedometer. It’s commendable but I’m sure you can understand the cynical laughs from those that can do what the law, ostensibly, wants everyone to do. Drive, rather than steer, a vehicle.
Level 2, 9 Help Street