Archive for February, 2014
Automotive Dinosaurs: Welcome to Jurassic Autopark
There is no doubt that cars are awesome. Big ones, small ones, fast ones and slow ones, make your choice and still you will find a world of automotive awesome. In much a similar vein, ever since the release of Jurassic Park I have been convinced that dinosaurs exist in a whole universe of greatness. You have heard me tittle on about cars all the time, whether I am ranting away about drivers on the road, singing the praises of motorsport or reporting the dangers of hybrid cars on the market. If Private Fleet had a sister site named Jurassic Fleet, I can promise you I would be a regular contributor on there as well. Until that day however, you are all saved from my dino-love.
But what if I told you that on the wonderbox that is the Internet, there exists a whole new species. There are those who love cars, and those who love dinosaurs, but then there are those people who dreamed of a combination of the two. That sounds ridiculous, I hear you cry. And you would not be wrong in saying that, but hear me out, they exist. Witness now a whole new world…
“Dr Grant, my dear Dr Sattler… Welcome, to Jurassic Autopark”
The T-Rex looks angry, maybe she is against the size of the carbon footprint those 4x4s are leaving…
I have excavated through the fossils of the Internet and come across a selection of dino-car gems that I just could not resist sharing with you. I mean, I love dinosaurs. How can anyone not love dinosaurs? Having come across cars that have been dino-designed, I can very much say my life has just become a whole lot happier. If you are having a sad day then fear not, I have come to you with a carnivorous gathering of reptilian wonders. Or if you wish to follow current arguments that dinosaurs were closer to modern day birds than reptiles, then no need to (birds of) prey no more, I have got some avian-auto-ancestors here for you right now.
Hang on a minute, when I said the combination of cars and dinosaurs, this was not what I meant. People often ask me why the dinosaurs died out and why they did not become the dominant species on the planet. Well, is this not the answer you were looking for? Their motor industry never really took off.
Let’s try this again shall we…
To the person who saw this snow covered car and thought, “I want to turn this into a kick-ass dino-car”, you have to be one of my favourite people, and I wish to meet you so I can give you a hug. Most people see a car covered in snow and either write in it or use the snow for snow-ammo. But then there is that one person who wants to bring back the glamour of the stegosaurus to the modern world. This is greatness in its purest form.
This began life as a VW Beetle. I can say with almost full certainty that this is no longer a beetle in any way, shape or form. This is not something you will see crawling around in the undergrowth. This is now a brutal beast of burden. You would think of squashing this under your foot. With those chunky off road tyres, and those spines, you would not want to come across this while alone in the forest. Just hope it is in a good mood. But seriously, this is one amazing piece of machinery. I think I know what my choice of car will be on my busy London commutes from now on.
Artist Credit: Ryan McGuire
If Barney the Dinosaur ever had a car-cousin, it would have to be this little beauty. This may be one of the cutest things ever to pass by my eyes. When I see this I also get the impression that if Dino the Dinosaur from the Flintstones was brought back to life today, this would probably be how he would look. Playful, happy and fun. What more could you want from your very own dino-car?
This is truly a great example of a DIY-nosaur. If you loved my cheeky word play then chances are you will love the guy who came up with this dino-tricycle. I love the thought of someone sitting in a park, and behind the bushes you suddenly see the skeleton of a stegosaurus bobbing on past. Night At The Museum come to life. I told you dinosaurs were awesome right?
As with the traditional construct of any entertainment based presentation, I have saved the best for last. This was the very image that started my quest for dino-car greatness. We have seen dino-cars of all forms, most of which are still fully functioning automobiles. The reason I love this so much is that I have a feeling its creator is my kind of person. They did not just add the generic spines to the top of an old Beetle, they have most literally formed the perfect combination of car and dinosaur. This sculpture has been created from materials that are associated with road travel, including car parts, traffic cones and all that general nonsense.
Maybe this car is in fact a metaphor. Let’s deconstruct this and see what I can pull out of myself. The car is painted green, symbolising the need for greener modes of travel, considering that we are slowly destroying the planet. The source car is an old VW Beetle. The Beetle is a car that uses the fuel powered combustion engine. The Beetle was also made popular by none other than Hitler as ‘the peoples’ car’. Hitler was a Nazi. The Nazi attempt at world domination was crushed by the Allied forces. The Hitler-led Nazi movement therefore suffered an ‘extinction event’. The dinosaurs too suffered an extinction. However, as Jurassic Park proved, dinosaurs can be brought back to life and spread chaos and havoc across the land.
What more, the engine of the Beetle was in the back of the car, and we all know that when people think through their behinds bad things often happen. True fact right there.
Therefore, this sculpture stands as a warning; the traditional combustion engine is an automotive dinosaur in a world of hybrids and electric power. We must move forward into modern technology. Also, Nazis are bad and we should not let them rise up again. I bet you never thought I could mention Hitler in an article about dino-cars. But I did. It is all about the metaphors.
I told you I was going to pull something ridiculous out of my brain.
Sometimes, what can I say, I do not want to talk about a serious driving topic. We all need some light hearted happiness every now and again.
If you enjoyed that, feel free to follow me on Twitter @lewisglynn69
Keep Driving People!
Peace and Love!
The More Things Change….
Being the circuit commentator for Sydney Motorsport Park has a few advantages; I’ve met quite a few of Australia’s best or more well known racing drivers and, occasionally, get to work and be involved in some pretty high profile events, such as the Top Gear Festival. Saturday 15th February was a big day as it was the official test day for Australia’s top tier racing category, the V8 Supercars and I was the MC for the event.
As is the wont of the weather, it was wet, wetter than standing underneath Niagara Falls, it felt like. It certainly didn’t stop the cars nor did it stop the crowd. Both built slowly; the crowd was considerable by midday and the cars times dropping rapidly per lap as the rain eased and the track dried. Of prime interest was the new entrant to the category, a revisiting of an oddly popular name for the sport: Volvo. The car is the S60, the team is Garry Rogers Motorsport, known for their left of field approach and fostering of young talent, in this case Kiwi born Scott McLaughlin, alongside experienced Swedish driver Robert Dahlgren. With GRM’s long term backer, Valvoline, prominently displayed on the sides, the cars looked the part but the party piece is the engine. A 60 degree vee configuration and of five litres capacity, it doesn’t have the same bass note of the rest of the field, instead it’s a higher pitch, certainly not unpleasing to the ear. With work being done by the Swedish company’ performance arm, Polestar, it’s a return to Australian tin top racing after a break of over fifteen years. Here’s a look at the car: http://www.volvocars.com/au/all-cars-my13/volvo-s60/Pages/video.aspx.
After the rain had stopped, times dropped and dropped quickly; at one stage there was a new quickest time every couple of laps before plateauing. To give an indication, laps were around one minute forty six seconds (1.46) to start off before bottoming out at one minute thirty!
Another highlight was the now traditional grid walk, with the cars lining up on the main straight and the crowd being able to walk around them. This was kicked off by a stunning announcement from the larger than life Betty Klimenko, head of the Erebus Racing team. Rather than spending a fortune on a media driven team launch, Klimenko decided instead to donate what she estimated may have been spent to the Westmead Childrens Hospital. The sum? A tidy $50, 000 thank you….
The Volvos performed well, perhaps better than expected; having said that, Dahlgren’s car was the only one to momentarily retire, with a power steering hose coming loose and spraying fluid onto the hot engine, laying down a sizeable smokescreen. Given the field, 25 cars in all, was spread by a mere 2.5 seconds at the end of the test day, it bodes well for the return of Volvo to Australian motorsport, with their first real test being at the fabled Clipsal 500, in Adelaide, covering the first weekend of March. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Welcome back, Volvo.
Timed Traffic Lights?
Have you ever had one of those days when it seems like you get caught by every single red light on your daily commute? Traffic lights have been annoying us for a very, very long time. Apparently, the first lights were set up in the UK back in 1868 (yes, in the country that also brought us speeding tickets). These lights used variations on railway signals and controlled the bustling traffic outside the British Houses of Parliament. London has had traffic issues ever since… The original lights exploded after less than a year of use, as they used gas for the lighting system. The USA then copied the idea but threw in electricity for lighting (thanks, Mr Edison) and added a yellow light.
Nowadays, we’re all familiar with the red-yellow-green system. However, a few people need a bit of a reminder that the yellow (also known as orange or amber) actually means “slow down and prepare to stop” rather than “put your foot down so you can get into the intersection before the light turns red”. j
I guess I’m not alone in sitting at an intersection waiting at a red light and wondering “How much longer am I going to wait for?” Other questions that flit through my mind is whether or not it’s going to be worth popping the gear into neutral or not while I’m waiting rather than sitting there with the auto still on Drive and the brake on.
And it looks like there are starting to be attempts to answer this sort of question. There are rumours on the internet of a new LED traffic lights system that has been designed by someone named Thanva Tivawong. This design gets rid of the traditional row of three lights (more if you’ve got a multilane intersection with left and right turn arrows, plus lights for bikes or buses or trams) and replaces them with an hourglass shaped display. The hourglass changes colour and “sand” trickles down, showing how much more time you’ve got left before the lights change. They also have a “get ready” yellow light between red and green – a sort of “ladies and gentlemen, start your engines” signal so you know when to start getting in gear.
Comments on the web have included queries about how colourblind drivers are going to cope, as you don’t have the usual red up the top, green down the bottom convention (which was put in place for the sake of colourblind drivers). I guess something could be sorted out – horizontal stripes for red and vertical stripes for green, maybe.
As far as a quick flick around the web can make out, it’s unclear whether or not these lights are actually installed anywhere yet. They may still just be a concept. Certainly, there would be a lot of legal hoo-hah and research before they actually get adopted anywhere.
This isn’t the first time a designer has tried to include time left into a traffic signal. There was the “Marshalite” design that came out in the 1940s that had an arrow that travelled around a circle like a clock hand, moving from red to green, with a brief segment painted amber. These were an Aussie innovation and several of these were around Melbourne until the 1970s. You can still find one on display somewhere in the Melbourne Museum.
But I have to admit that the traffic light system that I liked best was the rather basic one that they had in La Paz, capital of Bolivia, in the late 1980s, when I lived over there. Most traffic lights outside the city centre were operated manually by a cop, except late at night when there wasn’t much traffic (not sure what they did then – I was never out that late). The cop would sit there flipping the switch up and down, with a brief pause in the amber section that showed yellow for all directions. There were no problems with hoons using the “get ready to go” signal as an opportunity for a drag race, as there was a cop there watching everything. The cop would usually change the lights when the waiting traffic on any road built up to a certain level. Usually is the operative word. Most motorists knew perfectly well that if a chauffeur-driven Mercedes swept along, standing out like a sore thumb in the middle of the Beetles, Ladas and Pajeros, the lights would be operated in its favour… after all, it could be a government official or the head of police in there. The human factor would also come into play if you were (a) good looking and female, and gave the cop a nice smile; or (b) had a heap of kids waiting to cross as pedestrians.
It probably isn’t the world’s most exciting job and it probably doesn’t have to be done by fully-fledged cops, but couldn’t this sort of system be a solution to unemployment problems?
Rise of the Machines: Problem with the 'Planet-Saving' Prius
The Toyota Prius has undergone somewhat of a metamorphoses over the years of its existence. It would appear that the Prius has left the automotive world in search of a new career, as a fashion icon. Since its inception back in 1997, the Prius has become the spearhead of a whole new generation of green motoring. In terms of hybrid auto-mobiles there was no competition (apparently). For nearly 15 years now, it has become the fashion accessory for ‘the celebrity’. They may own fleets of pointless 4x4s and multi-million dollar hypercars, but if they own a Prius they appear to have the ridiculous belief that they care about the environment and mother earth. The worst part is that the glossy magazine reading public actually believe this nonsense. I have always had my doubts about the Prius as a ‘green planet saving’ car, but it would seem that now there is a whole new problem.
News has reached my ears that Toyota has had to recall 1.9 million Prius hybrids due to a software fault that may be causing the cars slow down suddenly. The Toyota Prius claims to be saving the planet, and maybe it will achieve that by killing off the human population, driver by driver. The machines are rising up. This is the revolution we all feared.
Welcome to the kamikaze Prius.
The Toyota Prius – car or fashion star?
The cars in question are the current range of Prius’ that have been in production since 2009. Essentially, a software fault is causing a mass of warning lights to come flashing in the poor face of the driver. It has been reported that in some cases, it has caused the hybrid system to shut down which will stop the car even while driving. Even if this is not the case, the fault still causes the car to enter a ‘failsafe’ mode which will significantly reduce the power of the engine and the batteries.
It does not take a genius to work out that this could be massively dangerous in certain circumstances, whether it is in the busy city or on the open road. Toyota has said that there have been no accidents, injuries or fatalities yet reported by the problem. There is a very strong chance that this may be true, but I am always highly suspicious of this. If I wanted to preserve some form of credibility for my company, I would not disclose yet more bad news related to my product.
Is Toyota hiding something? Are they hiding a dark secret?
The world has proclaimed that the Prius was a revolutionary step forward in the automotive world. Technologically, the hybrid system was a breakthrough, but maybe Toyota discovered something else… They pushed the limits of the technology to a whole new level. What if the technology…came alive? They thought they could control their new power.
Did they learn nothing from Jurassic Park? If you try and create new life and you abuse the power of creation, it comes back to bite you…
Whatever the truth behind the matter may be, it does introduce a new and very important issue into motoring. As the years go on, we are relying more and more on computer systems within the cars we drive. As I am sure we have all experienced, there are times when the computer you are using will just freeze or shut down altogether?Can you imagine that while driving along at 70mph along a motorway?
“Your Prius has discovered an error and must close. Would you like to send an error report?”
I believe that the future of motoring should also look to the past for inspiration. Hyper-futuristic computer hard drives may not actually be the way forward. What ever happened to simplistic motoring? It is always good when it works, but I will forever be worried what happens when this computing power goes wrong.
On a more serious note, I am glad this has happened to the Prius. I do believe that it is proving that the car is not as perfect as the worlds’ media and the celebrity world has often made out. I have always had my doubts about the eco-friendly nature of the car anyway. It boasts better fuel economy, but fuel economy is, to the most part based on how well the driver can drive the car. If you drive the Prius like a lunatic, you will get no better fuel economy than you would from any other car. In fact, Top Gear have even explained how the Prius is just as damaging to the environment as any other car, and even proved that against a BMW in set conditions, the fuel economy is not that amazing.
I am never going to deny that the Prius was a step in the right direction, but I do hope that people will accept that it is in no way perfect. Preserving the planet should be the biggest priority for car companies in the future; hybrid cars are an elegant solution, as are electric cars. With the release of the McLaren P1, it proves that electric power can be harnessed with the traditional engine for astronomically mind blowing results.
The future is bring, the future is green (most likely).
I just hope that the Prius revolution can be stopped before they take over. It’s always the quiet ones.
Keep Driving People!
Follow me on Twitter @lewisglynn69
Peace and Love
Level 2, 9 Help Street