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Preserving Sanity and Safety on Long Road Trips With Children
This winter, you might be taking a road trip to a ski resort or somewhere similar. Now, driving along mountain roads are really quite fun from the motorist’s point of view. You get to put all the special features (or most of them, anyway) through their paces – winding roads give you the chance to really appreciate the car’s handling and steering around corners, while uphill and downhill stretches allow you to play with the gears to make sure that you keep the motor purring over at just the right rev level to run efficiently and at peak power. However, winding roads aren’t quite such fun for the passengers, especially those under a certain age occupying the back seats.
Bored kids on a long road trip are probably a safety hazard. They say that cellphones and GPS navigation systems can be a distraction to the driver and lead to near-misses or worse. However, you can turn off radios, ignore phones and turn off the GPS navigation – and some modern cars can do this for you automatically if they detect by your driving style that you are facing a demanding situation. However, kids don’t have an off switch, and bored kids tend to come up with the following, all of which are likely to drive you half nuts. (Add your own pet hates if I haven’t listed it here. They are listed from most stressful to least stressful.)
- “I’m going to be sick!” (usually said just after passing a “No stopping for the next 1 km” sign)
- “He hit me!” “Did not!” “Did!” “You started it by looking at me funny!” “Well, you looked at me funny first!”
- “I need to go to the toilet!”
- “I’m hungry!”
- “This is the song that does not end…”
Many of the standard devices used to prevent this potential cause of accidents won’t work on winding roads, as books, hand-held computer games and the new seat-back DVDs can really only be used on straight roads; on winding roads, they cause nausea (see Irritating Speech #1). And if the road is out the back of nowhere, old favourites like Licence Plate Cricket/Bingo and Yellow Car can’t really be played. Squash Each Other Going Round Corners loses its novelty fairly quickly, especially for the person in the middle rear seat. However, the following can occupy small (and not-so-small) minds on long, winding roads as well as at other times:
- CDs. Think beyond music, as there’s only so many times through that you can really listen intently to a music track before the mind starts to wander, and there’s only so many times that drivers or those over the age of ten can tolerate The Wiggles or The Fairies. Talking books tend to appeal to a wider age range, especially audio versions of classic books.
- Family history. Every family has a collection of stories like When Uncle Jim Sold His Hair, The Go-Kart I Built When I Was Your Age, How Grandma Lived During The Depression etc. Long car journeys are the perfect time to bring them out and pass them on to another generation.
- Pass-it-on stories. Someone starts up a story (e.g. “Once upon a time, there was a pirate called Bob who lived on a ship with a cockatoo named Billy”). After a few sentences, the story is passed on to the next player, who continues it as they see fit and passes it on again.
- Verbal word games. There’s oodles out there and you don’t have to have a PhD in English Literature to play them.
Enjoy your winter road trips but, as always, keep safety uppermost and drive appropriately.
British Racing Greens, Carrots and Potatoes
They say that the race track is the place where new technologies are given a trial by fire before being applied to ordinary, everyday cars like you and I drive to pick up the kids from school or to buy groceries. From an environmentally friendly perspective, this is good news, thanks to the hot new number from World First Racing that is leading the world of Formula 3 racing – in green performance if not in overall speed and handling. This British racing company is certainly putting a new twist onto the traditional concept of “British Racing Green”. The University of Warwick is behind this project, and if all goes well, I’d like to see some of this car’s features incorporated into the cars reviewed by Private Fleet one day.
The idea was to make a race-capable car from recycled and/or renewable resources as much as possible, inside and out. WorldFirst’s car, with the carrots on the side instead of chequered flags, features the following:
- The front wing end plate is made from a potato starch core and a flax fibre shell, as are the wing mirrors.
- The side pod is made from glass fibre (which can be sourced from recycled materials) and resin from recycled bottles.
- The lubricants inside the engine are all based on vegetable oils rather than on mineral oil.
- The seat is made from a flax fibre shell over soy bean oil foam and recycled polyester.
- The steering wheel is made from a polymer created from carrots and other root vegetables. This is designed to be light and tough, and
- Sexiest of all, the engine runs on biodiesel that is refined not just from the usual vegetable oil but from chocolate oil.
- The radiators have a catalyst that converts ozone (which is great in the upper atmosphere where it does a wonderful job of stopping us getting sunburned but is downright vile lower down where you can breathe it) into oxygen (which you should breathe regularly if you want to stay alive).
The car is still undergoing testing, but hasn’t quite hit the race track in a formal race, although it has been put through its paces at the track – see the video of it in action.
The car doesn’t just use vegetable and recycled odds and ends. For example, it uses cast iron for the brakes, as this gives maximum stopping power but from a recyclable source, rather than from carbon, which is harder to recycle (but not impossible – other parts of the racing car use recycled carbon). At the moment, though, they’re working on brake pads made from cashew nut shells.
Find out more about the World First car and keep track of how it’s going at the official website, http://www.worldfirstracing.co.uk/index106a.html?home.
The environment and all that stuff.
It is quite remarkable just how tragic the BP oil disaster has become. The expanse of the oil spill has played havoc on nature’s balance. But it is events like this that makes you question – just how far will humans go?
Isn’t it about time that we made some massive changes to the phenomenal rate at which we are using up the globe’s natural resources? I mean, we all love to drive cars but where on earth are we going to draw the line when it comes to unsustainable usage of the earth’s natural resources?
Oil is just one of the significant resources that humans have, perhaps, overused for decades now. Logging of native timbers in the Amazon is another example of unsustainable exploitative use of a finite resource. And the timber issue is very serious! There seems to be no significant exercise of restraint used on the logging of timber from out of the Amazon. Again, like oil, the logging of native timber is a money-driven exploitation.
It is wonderful to see the steps made to improving carbon emissions from vehicles. Particularly over the last five years, this has been evident. There is still a long way to go; however, the prominent motor-vehicle manufacturers are making a credible improvement on shrinking the carbon footprint globally.
Is it a foregone conclusion that the oil resources around the globe will be completely used up by 2050? How long will it ever take to create them again?
This is sobering science to contemplate. So, where to from here? Can governments around the world actually unite on conserving and protecting our natural global resources?
A number of quirky ways of conserving our resources have already revealed themselves through some very interesting and distinguished people. Solar-powered cars, solar panelling on roads to generate the energy to move vehicles, wind power, going back to sail boats (but with today’s technology), hydrogen cars and steam-powered cars to name a few.
And have you heard of the newly developed cars in America to be run on water? By using sea water from out of the Gulf, cars just might be getting some quite good mileages!
Environmentally friendly motoring: where the rubber hits the… glass?
More and more of us are becoming environmentally aware in the choices we make and in the way we drive. Car manufacturers, politicians, city planners and transport experts are all finding ways to make motoring more environmentally friendly and sustainable. The methods they use range from up-to-the-minute and “sexy” to some that sound downright peculiar.
The really “sexy” idea in environmentally friendly motoring is hybrid cars or electric cars that don’t just use petrol or diesel but use electricity to power them. You just have to see the interest generated by the new Toyota Hybrid Camry to see how sexy this idea is. And this idea, on the surface at least, looks pretty good. If you burn less petrol, you release fewer particles and nasties into the air, which cuts down on pollution. However, as the editor of the Dog and Lemon Guide is quick to point out, this isn’t such an eco-friendly idea if the source of this electricity is from a coal or gas fired power station – all a hybrid car does in this case is to shift the point of pollution from one place to another. If your power comes from a sustainable source such as wind, solar or hydro electricity, then hybrid cars look a whole lot better. In fact, in the US, some researchers are looking at a way of creating “solar road” – roads made from solar panels that generate electricity (to run the hybrid and electric cars?) while still being safe to drive on. Well, we’ll see if this idea works!
The next hot topic in greener, more sustainable motoring is biofuels. While these still put out a few greenhouse gases, they don’t rely on fossil fuels to be produced, and when it comes to carbon dioxide, they probably cancel out, as the things used to make them take carbon out of the atmosphere. Ethanol is one readily available alternative fuel in Australia – it’s a by-product of our sugar industry – and biodiesel is also catching on. Biodiesel is produced from waste vegetable oils or even from a type of algae that can be grown in a septic tank. Many European car manufacturers are cottoning onto the appeal of biodiesels and biofuels, and Saab (among others) has put out models that are designed to run on these fuels. Besides, diesel engines, which can take biodiesel, just keep getting better and better.
Transport planners have their ideas, too. There’s a big push towards encouraging people to take public transport to work, get involved in car-pooling schemes, and to walk or bike for short journeys (i.e. 2 km trips). There’s something to be said for some of these schemes, but if you’ve got a heap of gear to cart about or its pouring with rain, most of us will probably take the car rather than the bike or the bus.
And even the roads we drive in are becoming more sustainable. Roading experts such as AUSTROADS have been looking at ways to make the roads themselves more sustainable by using fewer raw materials and more recycled material. You never quite know what’s in the lower layers of the road you’re driving on. Materials recovered to be used to make the roads we drive on include slag ash and other waste from our mining and metal industry, the bits of road they’ve pulled up to make repairs, scrap tyres, crushed bricks and even old broken glass. Funny to think that you might end up driving on the beer bottle you’ve drunk out of – about the only link there ought to be between drinking and driving. But that’s another story.
Level 2, 9 Help Street