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It’s A Record: Some 2012 Chart-Toppers
Managed to get hold of the 2012 Guinness Book of Records from my local library, and motoring enthusiasts everywhere are probably going to be quite pleased with the number of entries that tie in with our interests. Not only do you have the usual two-page spread with all the record-breaking or record-holding cars, but in this latest edition, you’ve also got a special “Petrolhead” category and an alternative energy category. Given what we know about (a) the dicey nature of Middle Eastern politics and (b) the fact that the world’s got only so much crude oil in its crust and when it’s gone, it’s gone, that page featuring alternative energy is probably likely to become more and more important.
Anyway, philosophical maunderings about energy sources, aside, what’s some of the great facts and records this year for the world of motoring? Take notes now – you never know when these facts might come in handy for a pub quiz trivia night.
Fastest electric car: This record is held by the Buckeye Bullet 2, which, unfortunately, isn’t a production car but a project by some engineering students studying at the Ohio State University. Its top speed is a very impressive 487.672 km/h, which is more than four times the legal road speed – is that fast enough for you?
Fastest solar-powered car: This record’s one that Australians can be proud of: it’s held by the Sunswift IV, and it can get up to 88.73 km/h. The Sunswift was made by the NSW Solar Racing Team.
Longest journey by coffee-powered car: This isn’t a nutty idea from the USA but one from the eccentric Brits instead: they managed to get from London to Manchester in an adapted VW Scirocco that has a way to convert coffee granules into carbon monoxide (not so eco-friendly) and hydrogen, and the hydrogen fires the engine. The journey covered 337 km and did it at a fuel economy of 1 km per 35 expressos.
Best selling-hybrid car: No surprises here: the record’s held by the Toyota Prius, which has sold over two million units since its launch in 1997.
Best selling production car: This is held by the Toyota Corolla, which was the first car to achieve 30 million sales. The first car to reach 20 million sales, however, was the VW Beetle. The first car to achieve 10 million sales isn’t one you’ll find in our car reviews page: it was the Model T Ford. To get a little more specialised, the best-selling sports car is the Mazda MX-5.
Greatest fuel range: Hold your head up high, Volkswagen: the Passat 1.6 TDI managed to get 2456.88 km on just one tank of fuel.
Largest vehicle producing country: this is held by China, which also holds the record for the country with the larges vehicle sales (it’s just managed to beat the USA for this latter record).
Vehicle with the largest mileage: a 1966 Volvo P-1800S managed to get over 4.5 million kilometres on the clock and it’s still going strong. Another record-holding Volvo is the XC60, which can proudly wear the title of the first car with a crash avoidance system.
Smallest roadworthy car: This is a home-made job knows as the Wind Up, and it measures 104 cm high by 66.04 cm wide by 132.08 cm long. This is not a suitable family vehicle…
Fastest caravan tow: a person driving a Mercedes Benz S600 in South Africa managed to clock 223.88 km/h while towing a caravan – on an Air Force runway. Cops tend to get a bit grumpy if you try doing this on the roads.
Fastest production car: This is still held by the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Super Sport with a top speed of 431.072 km/h.
Most expensive car: Held by a Ferrari 205 GTO. The most expensive production car is the Mercedes-Benx CLK/LM.
The Cheaper Sort Of Lamborghini
So the speed you can get in a Porsche 911 or the Italian style of an Alfa Romeo aren’t quite enough for you and you want something exotic, fast and with plenty of style? Most people look to the big name Italian makers: Ferrari and Lamborghini. Well, most people look but only a handful are actually going to be able to buy one.
I heard on the radio the other day that Lamborghini had launched something a little cheaper than usual. A car? Nope. Turns out that although Lambo have put out a number of new cars recently (which you won’t find reviewed in our car reviews page – we’re into cars that the average Aussie and the average business is likely to actually buy!) and have also put out a bike – a limited edition bike.
This is not a motorbike, in spite of the Italian thing with little scooters like the Vespa. No, it’s a pushbike, so it’s up to you what the top speed is. To be sure, the bike is made from super-light carbon-fibre and has all the design features that help a bike go faster. And yes, it’s got the bull logo along with very aggressive styling designed to match the Lamborghini Aventador – and a Lambo-style price tag to match. Quite frankly, you can pick up a decent new car from a more everyday brand (e.g. Toyota) for the same price, so guess which one I’d rather spend the equivalent of €20,000 on!
Lambo aren’t alone in dabbling in the world of pushbikes, which are, after all, supposed to be the most efficient machines ever invented (amount of energy put out is about 99% of the energy put in, with minimal energy converted to heat and noise). According to one news website, BMW, Land Rover and Porsche have popped their characteristic badges onto top-end road bikes, with HSV and FPV also having a go with mountain bikes. It’s considered widely to be a bit of a branding exercise, although it could also be a recognition of the upswing in good quality road bikes as a form of zero-carbon transport, especially in Europe. Well, minimal carbon, anyway, as you still breathe when you’re biking, putting out CO2, to say nothing of the methane coming from other end if you’ve eaten a carb-rich breakfast to power your biking efforts.
The Lambo bikes (known as the BMC Impec Automobili Lamborghini Edition) are limited edition models and only 30 are going to be made, so we’re unlikely to see too many bull logos on the bikes in the racks around our cities. We’re unlikely to get any in Australia at all, so keen cyclists will have to just get Giants or the like.
Actually, if you are desperate for something with the Lamborghini brand on it and are based in a rural area, the way that you can get a cheap(ish!) Lamborghini for your business (assuming your business is in the agricultural area) is to get a farm tractor. Lamborghini started out making tractors, and they still do. Naturally, they’re top-of-the line machines with torque levels that make what you can get out of even the juiciest sports car: 820 Nm from one model. They’re very popular in Europe, where you’re more likely to see a Lamborghini in the fields beside the road rather than on the roads.
Smile, You’re On… Speed Camera
Love them or hate them, speed cameras are to stay. Actually, I don’t think that anybody loves speed cameras. Most of us would love to do what Rowan Atkinson does in “Johnny English” – fire a missile at that thing that’s just snapped us and blow it to smithereens. And in case you’re wondering whether this writer has recently had a wee picture of their car taken at an unexpected moment and is feeling grumpy about it, I haven’t.
The idea of speed cameras around the place is a way of keeping speeds down. We all know the horror stories and the physics about high speeds and high-speed crashes. No matter how many high-tech active and passive safety devices your new car has, once you get a certain mass involved at a certain speed (sorry, make that velocity – I was listening in your class back at high school, Mr Cook), the forces involved and the law of the conservation of momentum mean that there’s going to be one heck of a bloody mess. Literally bloody. However, even knowing about what will happen if you crash at speed, some people still do it. Hence speed cameras and speed traps – if the idea of having your internal organs reduced to pile of mince doesn’t put you off heavy-footedness, possibly the idea of paying out will deter you.
One thing that can be said in favour of the unmanned (unpersonned? unstaffed?) speed cameras is that they are unbiased. If a cop is manning the radar machine and taking licence plates, there is a risk that they will be biased by the style of car being driven. Hot sports car such as a Mitsubishi Evo or a Porsche 911 whizzes past? Whip out the radar gun and see what it’s doing. Little Mini Cooper or VW Beetle whips past driven by a silver-haired lady? Ignore it – even though said Mini or Beetle is quite capable of exceeding the speed limit.
Speed cameras work on a fairly simple principle of physics – one that was taught later on in the year back in Mr Cook’s class. It’s similar to the echolocation used by bats and dolphins. The radar emits an electromagnetic signal, which bounces off the car, like that squeak by the dolphin bouncing off a fish. In a classic radar camera, the receiver on the apparatus measures the frequency that the wave comes back at, which is changed thanks to the Doppler effect (it’s blue shifted). The difference between outgoing frequency and incoming frequency tells the doohickeys inside the camera how fast the car is going and triggers the camera. The camera picks up a picture of your car and your licence plate, and you get hit in the wallet. A speed camera of the classic radar type can only pick up vehicles going in the direction of the radar, so if you’re going at right angles to it, you won’t get picked up.
Can speed cameras pick up things that aren’t cars (and vans, motorbikes, etc.)? Yes, they can. The story about the UK cops picking up a NATO fighter jet on the radar, putting said fighter jet on alert and ready to put a missile into the radar system, is just a rumour, but speed cameras can pick up other vehicles. There have been cases of urban speed cameras picking up cyclists, especially if the cyclist is a fairly fit person on a modern bike with a tailwind going down a slope.
Many people argue that speed cameras are just a way of filling up the police department’s coffers. However, they do keep speeds down, as folk have a tendency to go lightly on the accelerator if they think that there’s a speed camera in the area. There was a (true) story from New Zealand about a guy in a rural area who got fed up with the hoons speeding past his place, so he rigged up a fake speed camera involving a couple of boxes and a pumpkin in the open boot of a white stationwagon that looked like the Holden Commodores beloved by the NZ Police. The speeds of passing cars dropped considerably when this was parked on the road side.
And now it’s confession time. When this writer was a uni student, we thought it was a hoot to be a fake speed camera. This involved parking up on the side of the road in an area where speed cameras sometimes lurked after dark. Switch the lights off but when a car goes past at a reasonable clip, waggle the controls to make the headlights go on and off quickly. All our victims would see was the flash and a parked stationwagon, and we’d snigger as the brake lights flared and the tyres squealed as some poor sucker thought they’d been clocked. Bet they spend several weeks wondering when the nasty letter was going to come in the mail. I don’t know what the cops would have said if they saw us – were we contributing to road safety, cheating them out of bagging a fine or simply pulling a harmless prank that was better than some of the other things uni students got up to?
When Bigger Is Better
OK, there’s been a lot written about small cars with small engines and how they can save you wads and wads of dollars because they use less petrol. And there certainly are some thrifty little numbers out there, plus some amazing hybrids that are easy on the environment and on the fuel. You might even wonder if the days of big cars with big engines are numbered. Will we still see the likes of Land Rover and the Mitsubishi Pajero, not to mention all the big-engined Ford and Holden utes and stationwagons in years to come?
Yes, we will, and we’ll probably see some new numbers, too. There are times when a small hatchback just won’t do, no matter how frugal it is. So when is bigger better?
1 When you do a lot of towing. Small engines just can’t cope with the hard work involved with towing heavy loads and if you try to lug something around, the motor is going to work so hard that it’s not going to be particularly frugal, and it will probably add a bit to the old wear and tear. Truck companies know this, and realise that you don’t send your smallest unit out to tow a road-train, as this isn’t the most fuel-efficient way to do things. While your average little Suzuki or Peugeot will probably handle a trip to the garbage dump – oops, make that the recycling and waste recovery station – and can probably take a three-piece lounge suite across town if you’re helping a mate shift house, if you tow a big trailer on a regular basis, it makes better sense to get a bigger vehicle that can handle the harder work. This applies to owners of boats and horse trailers, and also to contractors.
2 When you have a big family. And these days, “big” means three children or more, or two children plus a dog. OK, you can cram three kids and two parents – just – into a Nissan Micra but it will be a squeeze, especially if you add in school bags or the shopping. Double the squeeze if the kids are teenagers. You might save on petrol but you’ll probably drive everyone bonkers instead. If you really are pinched for cash and are trying to save petrol, there are some frugal sedans out there that will save you getting frazzled (which can potentially cause accidents) by the continual “Get your elbow out of my guts, you idiot! You just trod on my foot. I’m telling! Ouch! Muuuuuuum, he hit me!”
3 If your work requires you to take stuff around with you. If you are a contractor, as mentioned above, you probably want something that can tow a trailer on a regular basis, but you probably also want something that you can store gear in so light-fingered passers-by don’t help themselves to your paintbrushes, weed trimmers and hammers. Utes and 4x4s are classic favourites for contractors, along with vans, and there are plenty to choose from. Sales reps, providers of mobile services (e.g. hairdressing, dog grooming and cleaning) and even childcare workers often have to take lots of bits and pieces with them. It’s more convenient to you and to any passengers you have to take (and we all take them from time to time, whether our work is suitable for car pooling or not) if you don’t have to shift your boxes of whatever, a diary, an invoice book and twenty biros off the passenger seat. Something with a generous boot or a stationwagon is likely to be the best bet here.
4 If you actually need to go fast at times and need the extra oomph. You will still need to be legal, but if your work often means that you have to go against the clock or else (midwives, for example, especially those specialising in home births) then having a bit of grunt for when it’s needed is always reassuring. Or keep an eye out for a small engine with a lot of grunt – they are out there.
Level 2, 9 Help Street