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SUVs and Utes Globally Unstoppable
Toyota RAV4 SUV
This year is shaping up to be an exciting and interesting year for car sales in Australia. Currently, the Toyota Hilux is selling well above even the second biggest seller: the Ford Ranger. With over 4,500 sales in March, Toyota and there owners are loving life. Ford Ranger during the same period sold 3721 units. But take a look at this list and you’ll see that of the top ten models sold in Australia six of them are utes and SUVs.
- Toyota Hilux
- Ford Ranger
- Mitsubishi Triton
- Mazda3
- Toyota Corolla
- Mazda CX-5
- Hyundai i30
- Mitsubishi ASX
- Mitsubishi Outlander
- Kia Cerato
What about in the rest of the world? Well, it continues to be true that more SUV and utes are being purchased than any other type of car in Australia and around the world. In fact, the world’s most popular ute was not the Hilux but the Ford F-series (light truck). Sorry Toyota lovers, but Ford takes you out globally!! With well over 1 million F-series sold last year, that’s very impressive! In New Zealand, Kiwis have a taste for the Ford Ranger more so than the Hilux, too. But this isn’t about Ford being better than Toyota – just saying…
Ford F-Series
Now for redemption time for me, so as to get back on side with Toyota fans. Last year the world’s most popular SUV was the Toyota RAV4. It was also the most popular SUV in New Zealand. Maybe all the rental car companies that love the robust and reliable nature of the RAV4 make up a big swag of those RAV4 global sales numbers. The roads between Christchurch and Milford Sound are teeming with RAV4s!
So why do you think that the SUV and utes are growing so much in popularity here and around the world? It could well be because a decade or so ago utes and SUVs were vehicles that had a bit of a hard nose to them, with a more practical bent to them. Some utes were tremendously good at carrying loads but hideously uncomfortable to travel any longer distances with. Today your SUV and ute still has huge practical merit but they are way more comfortable and sophisticated. And who can argue with the SUVs ability to accommodate seven occupants? It gets a bit difficult putting seven seats inside a stationwagon with room to spare; and just totally impossible trying to fit seven seats inside a sedan.
With these sort of stats rolling off car sales yards, one could easily say that SUVs and utes are very much taking over the world, and this regardless of rising fuel prices.
The EV From Down Under
We were all very sad when we got the news that those iconic Australian cars – Ford and Holden – were no longer going to be manufactured here and that the factories were closing their doors. However, we can all smile again for the sake of the Australian automotive industry: a new company in Queensland is going to manufacture a car from scratch. Great!
There’s a slight difference with this newcomer, though. Unlike the gas-guzzling Ford Falcons and Holden Commodores (OK, they were a bit better when driven on the open road but that’s another story altogether), this new company, ACE EV, is turning its eyes to the hot new sector of the automotive industry: electric cars.
Well, to be more specific, it’s going in for electric vans and commercial vehicles as well as cars. And, to be fair, the factory is going to be using some parts that were manufactured overseas as well as a few made here. The idea is to keep the costs down. They’re not out to produce Tesla clones at Tesla prices. Not that there’s anything wrong with Tesla per se and it’s neat to see electric vehicles that have bust out of the boring, crunchy-granola, wimpy image and become supercool. However, a brand new Tesla probably costs more than what I paid for my house. ACE EV, however, wants to make EVs more affordable for the typical tradie or suburban family.
ACE EV stands for “Australian Clean Energy Electric Vehicles”. Proudly Australian, their logo features a kangaroo on the move. This year (2019), they are launching three vehicles, targeting tradies as well as your typical urban motorist, although they’re only selling them to companies as fleet vehicles at this stage. These are the ACE Cargo, the ACE Yewt and the ACE Urban.
ACE Cargo
The Cargo is designed to, um, carry cargo. It’s a van that’s capable of carrying a payload of 500 kg and has a range of 200 km if it’s not carrying the full load. The Cargo is designed to be suitable for couriers and anybody who has to carry gear or people from one side of town to the other: florists, caterers, cleaners, nurses and the people who carry blood samples from the medical centre to the lab for analysis. Looks-wise, it’s broken out of the square box mould of traditional vans, probably for aerodynamic reasons, and resembles a single-cab ute with a hefty canopy.
Ace Yewt
Which brings us neatly to the Yewt. The Yewt is what it sounds like (say Yewt out loud if you haven’t got it yet). It’s a flat-deck single-cab ute and as it’s got more or less the same specs as the Cargo regarding load, charge time and acceleration. You’d be forgiven for thinking that t it’s the same thing as the Cargo but with the cover on the cargo area taken off. It’s something of a cute ute – and the contrasting colour roof is a nice touch.
Last but not least, there’s the Urban, which is no relation to the Mitsubishi with the notoriously weird name (Active Urban Sandal). This one’s still in the pipeline and they haven’t given us the full specs brochure yet (it’s due for release later this year), but this is a classic four-seater compact three-door hatch that looks a bit like a classic Mini but edgier.
It’s certainly nice to see some new vehicles made in Australia for Australians, especially given that in a recent poll, about half of all Australians in an official survey by the Australia Institute would support a law that all new cars sold after 2025 should be EVs. However, let’s not rush things too much yet. For one thing, EVs are only one of the Big Three when it comes sustainable motoring (biofuels and hydrogen are the others). The other thing is that all energy has to come from somewhere, even electricity, as stated by the First Law of Thermodynamics. This means that in order to charge your EV, you’re going to have to generate the electricity somehow and get it to the charging points. Before we go over lock, stock and barrel to EVs, we will need better infrastructure, and I don’t just mean more EV charging points around town and in our homes. We’ll need some more generators. Otherwise, it would be like setting up a bowser but having no petrol to put in it. If everybody were to try charging their EVs at home overnight, there would be a massive drain on the national grid and we’d be getting brownouts and blackouts all over the show –which means that watching TV, catching up on your emails, having a hot shower and cooking dinner would get rather difficult – and you wouldn’t be able to charge your EV either. Guess where the power companies will have to get the money from in order to build new power plants – that’s right: your power bill.
May I humbly suggest that before you invest in an EV for your commute that you also consider installing a solar panel or three on your home? Or a wind generator? Not one of those petrol or diesel-powered generators – swapping an internal combustion engine in your car for one in the back yard isn’t better for the environment now, is it? Unless you run it on biofuel or hydrogen.
Traffic Sign Recognition: What Is It?
What’s one of the more common scenarios for picking up a speeding ticket besides simply being leadfooted? Apart from accidentally letting the speedo creep up because you’re looking at the road ahead rather than at the dial (avoidable with cruise control, of course), the other time speeding tickets happen to nice well-behaved drivers who weren’t meaning to go too fast and wanted to keep to the limit is when you’re driving in an unfamiliar town or (even more annoyingly) a part of town that you knew but has recently been redeveloped.
You know how this one goes. You’re toddling along through town and then you get to a bit that looks like the houses are coming to an end and you’re getting into more rural areas so you press the accelerator down a wee bit to get up to 70 km/h. Or you know that there’s a town coming up ahead but it still looks like you’re in market garden and lifestyle block land so you keep your pace up a bit. but next thing you know, there’s disco lights in the rear view mirror and you’re getting a ticket. Because what you thought was now a 70 km/h area actually wasn’t one at all and you should have been doing 50 km/h. Dagnabbit!
The problem in this situation is that you either didn’t see the sign or you thought that you’d gone past the sign without seeing it, and instead, you relied on the visual landscape cues around you to decide on your speed. Traffic psychologists say that most experienced drivers rely on these visual stimuli all the time and if the Powers That Be could afford to do it, this would be the most effective way of making sure that the typical driver stuck to the speed limit (we’re not talking about those leadfoots that scream through quiet streets at 80 km/h, making you worry about every single dog, cat, cyclist and small child in the neighbourhood). In fact, I’m sure I’m not the only person who drives through certain small towns at 50 km/h thinking “No way should this area be a 70 km/h zone! Too many houses and shops! I’m going slower.”
However, they can’t afford it and they probably need the revenue from those speeding tickets (we all know this happens) so they rely on the traffic signs – the lollypop signs, as we call them in our house. What every driver needs is a navigator in the passenger seat whose job is to keep an eye out for said lollipops and remind the driver. This is precisely what traffic sign recognition is supposed to do for you when you’re driving alone. It keeps a lookout for those traffic signs and displays what the current speed limit is on the dashboard display.
When I first heard of traffic sign recognition technology, which is now a safety feature or driver aid in a lot of high-end luxury cars like Mercedes and BMW, I groaned a little bit. Not because I didn’t like the idea of having a feature that let me know what speed I’m supposed to be going but because I had this dread that the technology would pick up on every single sign on the road ahead and display that. Information overload isn’t good for decision-making processes so this sounded like more of a distraction than a help. The cynical part of me also wondered when they’d monetize this so that certain ads or signs would pop up, notifying you of particular businesses ahead – the dreaded golden arches, for example.
However, I needn’t have worried. The designers are all too aware that most modern roads are awash with signage, which is why it’s so easy to miss those lollipops in the first place. The tech uses pattern recognition technology, so that it only picks up on actual traffic signs – the ones with the white backgrounds and a red circle around them, with the number displayed in black. The software and the front-facing camera home in on these patterns and can recognise the numbers, and it’s this that gets displayed on your dash. The software can also pick up useful signs like Give Way, Stop and No Entry – and warn you if you go ahead anyway!
The exact tech goes through a very complicated process to extract the necessary data at the right speed – my eyes started crossing while trying to wrap my head around it, so I won’t attempt a simple explanation here. If you’re the more nerdy sort, then here’s the low-down.
Traffic sign recognition (aka traffic sign assistance or TSA) is quite a handy little feature and it’s no longer found exclusively in high-end executive saloons. It’s found in new versions of familiar little family cars like the Ford Focus. In fact, there’s a rumour going about that this will become mandatory on all new cars sold in the EU from 2022 (2020 is just next year, so this is no longer the Big Benchmark and planners will lose their favourite pun about 2020 vision).
At this stage, at any rate, the vehicles are sticking to the basic signs rather than adding in all the safety warning signs. This is partly because traffic signs around the world vary somewhat. Software that recognises a Swedish polar bear warning sign would be useless in Australia, where we have kangaroo warning signs, for example. What’s worse is that even signs that mean the same thing vary slightly from country to country.
But what happens if the sign in question is obscured by vegetation or has been shot out of recognition or knocked down by some hoodlum? Well, the software can’t recognise what it can’t see, so once again, you’re back to your visual cues. At least you can try arguing that the sign was obscured to the cop. It sometimes works, especially if you did see the edge of the sign but couldn’t read it thanks to a tree. If you’re unlucky, they’ll spend your speeding fine on clearing that vegetation or upgrading the sign.
The Right Cars For Your Inner Geek
This BMW that makes you feel like you’re driving the Batmobile is just the start…
Quite a few of us are geeks at heart, even just a tiny bit. We might not spend our spare time putting together outfits so we can cosplay at conventions or be able to quote all of the script of Star Wars off by heart, but who among us hasn’t, at some point, said “May the Force be with you” to a friend, called somebody a muggle (hey, even my spellchecker doesn’t flag that one, which shows how engrained it is) or enjoyed a good superhero movie (let’s not get into the DC versus Marvel debate here – it’s as heated as Ford versus Holden). So there’s a little tiny bit of a geek in all of us – and a loud, proud and enthusiastic geek in some of us.
Of course, when you select your chosen set of wheels, you should consider a range of practical factors. However, if you’ve got a range of possibilities to choose from, why not please the heart of your inner geek and get something that’s appropriate for your particular fandom (fandom, for those of you who aren’t up with the lingo, is the particular branch of pop culture that you love).
Just to get you started, here’s the shortlist for vehicles that fit in nicely with some of the more popular fandoms out there. Apologies to any fandoms I’ve left off the list – for the simple reason that I’m not familiar enough with them to come up with an appropriate set of wheels to match – but if I’ve left out yours, then feel free to include it in the comments along with the car makes that work.
Game of Thrones: Well, Ssangyong translates as “double dragon”, so any from this Korean marque would be the obvious choice!
Marvel Universe: Thor was originally the Norse god of thunder and lightning, so if you can get your hands on a Saab with the Viggen badge, you’re in luck, as this is Nordic and Viggen means Lightning. Otherwise, try out an Alfa Romeo Spider or any Jag that comes in black (a black panther being, of course, either a leopard or jaguar with black colouring).
DC Universe: the DC-verse is lucky in that one of the stars actually drives an equally iconic machine: the Batmobile, of course. An old racing version of the BMW 3-series was known as the Batmobile when in full body kit, but anything sleek, black and powerful with lots of tech can be your very own Batmobile. The more modern BMW i8 or one of the sporty Zs would work well. However, I have to say that the current version of Citroen’s logo is reminiscent of Wonder Woman’s logo… makes you wonder (ha!) if the designer was a fan.
Once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it.
Lord of the Rings: Either a Ford Ranger to take you on an epic journey through the wilderness, or a nature-loving Nissan Leaf if you see yourself as a Child of Leaf and Star. However, anything that has performed well on the Nürburgring qualifies as a Lord of the Ring. If you’re one of the diehards who know the books (like me), then you may know that the brother of the Lord of the Eagles is called Landroval, which I always misread as Landrover.
Sherlock: This calls for an iconic British classic of some variety – your choice of either Mini or Jaguar. Maybe the Mini for Watson and the Jag for Holmes?
Harry Potter: If you can get your mitts on a classic Ford Anglia as owned by Arthur Weasley, then you’re very lucky indeed. If you want something more up-to-date, then your best picks would be either Peugeot (which has the Gryffindor lion as a badge) or Alfa Romeo (green + white + serpent = Slytherin).
Star Wars: Really racked my brains about this one. Oh for a marque called Jedi or Skywalker! The best I can come up with is a Ford Falcon, as a nod to the Millennium Falcon (piloted by Han Solo, played by Harrison Ford, so that works).
Star Trek: What else but the Chrysler Voyager , helping you to boldly go, etc.? Well, maybe the Landrover Discovery , depending on which era is your favourite. We’ll have to wait until someone calls a make Enterprise (which would make a pretty good car name, actually).
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