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Weird Stuff

So You Want To Be An Uber Driver?

Quite a few of you may have considered getting a few extra bucks out of your car by signing up as a driver for the rideshare scheme Uber or one of the similar schemes, such as Ola. But is your car suitable for this?  What’s more, if you are seriously considering the possibility, then what do you need to know when you go to buy a new car?

First of all, let’s get the disclaimers out of the way. I’m not affiliated with Uber, have never been an Uber driver, haven’t even been an Uber passenger, and get the urge to spell it the proper German way as Über.  My family members aren’t Uber drivers, although my son once thought about it and my brother used to operate a bicycle rickshaw taxi (and he’s not even Chinese). I’m not saying that you should be an Uber driver or that you shouldn’t be an Uber driver, or that you should consider some other rideshare service such as Ola or DiDi, etc.  It’s completely up to you whether you should or shouldn’t, and I’m not going to give you any advice in that direction. 

I get a strange feeling that this one won’t meet Uber’s eligibility criteria…

However, what I’m hoping to do with this article is to let you know what sort of car you’ll need if you want to sign up to the programme as a driver.  Because this company values its reputation – and no wonder, as it involves (a) getting into the car of a stranger (b) who you have only met online – it has strict requirements for the vehicles as well as the people who drive them.  So if your car doesn’t meet the grade, you won’t be able to hire yourself out as a driver.

The first requirement is that the vehicle in question has to be no more than 15 years old, with the age limit dropping to no older than 7 years for the Uber Comfort service and no older than 6 years for the Uber Premier service.  So if you own an old classic, I’m sorry: Uber isn’t for you.  However, if you own a classic car in good condition, you can still get into the car hire game by making your classic available as wedding car – something that really deserves an article of its very own.

The next thing that this rideshare company looks at is the number of doors your car has.  Sorry, but if you own a hot three-door hatch or a two-door sports car, it won’t meet the requirements.  The minimum number of doors is four.

Seating is also one of the factors that is important, for obvious reasons. Single-cab utes are out of the picture and not just because they usually only have two doors.  They’re also out because they can only seat a few people, and the minimum number of passengers that an Uber (or should that be “a Uber”? Depends on whether you pronounce it Oober or Youber) can take is four.  Surprisingly, there’s also a maximum number of passengers that eligible cars can have as well, namely seven, meaning that the car can have up to eight seats (one for the driver, of course).  If you own one of those minivans that seats up to 12 people, it won’t be eligible.

All cars have to be in proper working order, which includes the windows and the air-conditioning (which would have ruled out one second-hand van I once owned and was very glad to get rid of).  It also should not have any cosmetic damage, as nobody wants to turn up to a party in a shabby rustbucket.  It also has to pass its roadworthiness inspection, but that’s true of all cars. 

Safety, as you can imagine, is very important, so one of the requirements for Uber cars, in Sydney at least, is that they must have a five-star ANCAP rating.  If you’re not sure if your vehicle does or doesn’t, you can use the handy search tool provided by ANCAP.  

Quite a lot of vehicles meet the criteria, so a wide range of vehicles is part of the Uber “fleet” (you could quite justifiably call that a private fleet, but we’ve bagged that name!). Of the many cars that are part of the system, the most popular are the following:

  • Toyota Camry
  • Toyota Corolla
  • Mitsubishi Outlander
  • Mazda 3
  • Toyota RAV4

Well done, Sherlock… you’ve probably already figured out that this list of the most popular Uber cars overlaps with the most popular cars in Australia.  Which makes sense, statistically speaking. 

Different types of Uber service also have other requirements.  For example, Uber Premier likes not just late-model four-door saloons, but they also have to have extra legroom for passengers, take no more than four passengers and be what Uber calls “high end” vehicles.  What it considers to be “high end” is subjective, but all the usual suspects make the grade: BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Lexus, Porsche, Volvo… 

Uber has a list of eligible cars for each category on one of its information pages (you can find it at this link). This list is pretty extensive and quite frankly, if you own a Ferrari, then you probably don’t need to pick up extra cash by joining a rideshare scheme. Unless you want to, of course!

An Anti-Stick Spray To Stop Boy Racers?

There’s a small part of most drivers that sympathises with boy racers. However, this small part tends to become miniscule to non-existent when you’re kept awake into the wee small hours by screaming engines on what is normally a quiet suburban (or rural) road, when you have to pick up debris left behind after the local boy racers have had a meeting, or when you’ve had a close call with a souped-up Subaru Impreza racing an equally souped-up Nissan Skyline.

However, they may have found a solution to this problem on the other side of the Tasman, where one local council, fed up by complaints, has decided to try spraying the roads with an anti-skid spray surface that increases the traction. This, they hope, will stop boy racers (and girl racers – let’s call them street racers from now on) having their competitions that involve skidding and loss of traction, which, as far as I can tell, tends to cover most of their antics.

Certainly, having a high-traction anti-skid spray on the road will discourage dangerous skidding. It will also help cut down on burnouts (which are usually more annoying than dangerous unless a handbrake gives way unexpectedly). The only snag is that these surfaces will make drag races easier, as all that extra grip would make for better acceleration.

This spray is not some new invention that this town council has dreamed up. Instead, it’s something that’s often used on highways in areas where more traction is needed, like tight corners. These sprays are also used in urban areas on approaches to pedestrian crossings, where cars are likely to stop suddenly.  According to Austroads, such sprays and coatings use binders modified by polyurethane and epoxy, and they are best applied to very clean and slightly worn asphalt surfaces. They’re used around the world. The only reason why roading authorities don’t use them on all parts of the road is that they are quite expensive to apply (they require a lot of prep and can only be applied to a perfectly clean and dry surface) and take a long time to cure.

Is there any place that these street racers can go to do fun manoeuvres like doughnuts, snakies and skids without risking their own necks or the necks of others? I’ve come across the solution in rural communities, where paddock racing is fairly popular. Paddock racing is fully legal, although the cars used for this bit of fun are usually ones that have been taken off the road. Ideally, paddock racing should be done on a nice wet field that’s due for ploughing and reseeding. As an added bonus, all those moves tend to spray up mud in a very satisfactory fashion – although attempts at burnouts tend to end up digging holes and getting stuck (and everybody laughs). Perhaps we could make use of vacant sections in towns?

However, many of those in the street racing scene get a buzz out of defying authority and because they tend to trick out their cars to look good – which doesn’t suit the mud. Therefore, we’ll still have to put up with late-night engine revving mixed with heavy bass speakers (at least we get an audible warning to watch out for street racers). It remains to be seen whether the attempt to stop street racing by applying high-traction surface treatments will be successful – but at least it’s less intrusive to the majority of road users than measures such as speed bumps and the like.

Opening Windows Versus Air Conditioning

When the weather gets hotter, it’s important to stay cool when you’re driving.  However, these days, it’s important to consider fuel consumption as well and get the most out of what you’ve paid for – and what we’re going to talk about in today’s article applies to electric vehicles as well!

The two best choices for keeping cool inside the car are using the air conditioning system and the old-fashioned method of opening the windows (if you’re over a certain age, you’ll always try to pantomime cranking a handle to indicate opening a car window.). However, you may have heard people tossing around the idea that opening the window is less fuel efficient. Or you’ve heard that using the air conditioning increases fuel consumption. Which of these is true?

It is certainly true that running the air-conditioning puts extra demands on the engine and consumes more energy when it runs (and this is true of internal combustion engines, hybrids and electric vehicles). This means that when you ask the system for some nice icy-cool air to flow through the cabin and keep you fresh rather than hot and bothered, you increase your fuel consumption.

However, opening the windows affects the drag and aerodynamics of your car. When they design them and test them, designers try to get the drag as low as possible, and they study the way that air flows around the vehicle at speed (usually using wind tunnels as well as computer modelling). This is done to reduce the amount of friction affecting the car, because the more friction that needs to be overcome, the more energy will be required, which requires more fuel, etc. etc. All these tests assume that the exterior of the car is rigid. However, when the windows open, all bets are off and the equations go out the window (almost literally). The open window affect the flow of air, which is how opening the windows cools you down, but it also increases turbulence.

The big question is which is worse in terms of fuel efficiency. Sweltering in the heat just isn’t an option – that’s downright dangerous, especially given some of the temperatures reached in some parts of Australia during summer. So what does the fuel-efficiency-minded person do?

The windows versus air conditioning debate has been going on for some time. In fact, the popular TV show Mythbusters had a go at it. They got both guys driving around a track in similar SUVs, one with the windows down and one with the air conditioning on to see which one ran out of fuel first.

The one with the air conditioning did, which looked like that case should be closed, but it’s not as simple as all that. Firstly, the Mythbusters test wasn’t a strictly controlled one. Even two vehicles of the same make and model will perform differently, depending on a range of factors, including the condition of the engine and the inflation of the tyres. Secondly, the two presenters have different builds and probably have different driving styles, simply because they’re different human beings. To be a more rigorous scientific test, the only thing different should have been the choice between air con and windows open. In other words, the test should have been conducted with the same vehicle driven by the same person with exactly the same conditions – which possibly wouldn’t be the case if you only drove the car once with the air con on and windows up, then with the A/C off and the windows down, as the operating temperature of the engine (cold start vs. hot start) also affects the fuel efficiency. Lastly, one test isn’t enough in the world of science – one result could be just a one-off exception. The ideal is to run test after test after test and see what the general tendency is.

It also gets more complex than that. It turns out that the more aerodynamic a vehicle is to start with, the bigger the effect of drag will be. In other words, in a smooth, sleek sedan, the effect of opening the windows will be greater in terms of percentage than opening the windows on a big chunky 4×4.

To cap things off, speed also has an effect. This is because the faster you go, the more air resistance your vehicle encounters, so the drag increases, and they increase exponentially. This means that if you’re driving at 100 km/h, the effects of drag are four times greater than what you experience at 50 km/h.

The problem was put to a team of actual engineers who ran a proper scientifically rigorous test* to solve the problem. They used two vehicles, a 2009 Ford Explorer to represent the big SUVs and a 2009 Toyota Corolla to represent the sedans. They were tested in the lab and on the road at a variety of speeds and at idle. Here’s what they found:

  • At 40–70 miles per hour (that’s 64.4–113 km/h), in both vehicles, turning the air conditioning up to the maximum (which is how they ran the tests) used more fuel than opening the windows.
  • Above 70 miles per hour (113 km/h), the two cars behaved very differently.
  • At 75 mph (121 km/h), in the Toyota Corolla, there was no difference between having the air con on and having the windows down.
  • In the Toyota Corolla, at 80 mph and above (that’s 129 km/h – did they test this legally on an actual motorway or did they have their own circuit somewhere?), having the air conditioning on was more fuel efficient than opening the windows.
  • In the Ford Explorer, having the windows down continued to be more fuel-efficient than using the air conditioning.

The study also tested the air conditioning at different settings other than full blast, but you have to pay to see those results!

Of course, not all cars are Toyota Corollas and Ford Explorers, and each has its own drag coefficient and intrinsic fuel efficiency. However, a good general rule of thumb is that if you’re travelling around town, windows down is more fuel efficient. In small sporty vehicles, using the air conditioning is best at open road speeds, but having the windows down is more efficient for big chunky ones.

Here, I will have to add that there are some other advantages of using the air conditioning rather than opening the windows. Firstly, if the outside air is already hotter than comfortable, you’ll only feel a small drop in temperature if you open the windows. It might not be enough to drop temperatures of 40° or more to a nice comfortable room temperature of 18°C. However, the air conditioning will really drop the temperature to this ideal level.

The other problem is that it isn’t just air that can get through the window when its open. Having half a swarm of bees going through the window isn’t the best for safe driving. Nor is having a wasp fly through the window a good idea. Worse still are stones flying up. I’m not making this one up. Last summer, when we were towing a caravan with the windows down and had pulled over to let someone pass, a stone flicked up, glanced off the wing mirror and flew through the open rear window and hit my adult daughter in the face.  A freak accident, I know, but I know that from now on, both she and I will be using the air conditioning on the open road.

* Huff, S., West, B., and Thomas, J., “Effects of Air Conditioner Use on Real-World Fuel Economy,” SAE Technical Paper 2013-01-0551, 2013, https://doi.org/10.4271/2013-01-0551.

Spot the Difference?

Did you know that the Renault Koleos is very much a Nissan X-Trail?  Were you also aware that the current BMW 7-Series is the platform for the new Rolls-Royce Dawn?  These days car manufacturers are sharing a lot of the components that go into making a new vehicle.  A lot of the electronic systems and computer chips are shared between makes and models, even engines and an entire body platform.  As the costs of designing and building a complex new car rise, by getting together and pooling money, skills, assets, and sharing the costs of the new build, these are definitely clever ways for manufacturers to reduce their overheads, and the overall cost of designing and building a new vehicle.

Platform sharing between manufacturers and between models is, perhaps, more common than you may have thought; and particularly now more than ever.  In some cases, the similarities between a particular car, truck, or ute and its platform-twin are obvious.  However, at other times it’s not so easy to detect the resemblance.

A car’s platform is the base (including body shell, floor, and even some of the chassis and engine parts) on which it is built.  Not only can these components be common to more than one manufacturer, but they can also be shared between models in a manufacturer’s line-up.  The initial platform design and its production or engineering works can be shared across a number of different models.  Kia and Hyundai are some of the best brands at doing this sort of thing, and so too is VW.

Sharing componentry between different manufacturers/brands has to be built on an existing good business relationship.  So, when two or more automotive manufacturers with a good relationship have shared the same desire to save money, they can operate together and agree to share development costs and also essentially sell the same cars but under different badges.  Renault and Nissan are great examples of this.  Some of the most talked about illustrations of this occurring recently will have been the Toyota GT86 and the Subaru BRZ, which are essentially the same cars tarted up slightly differently.  Also, the Toyota Corolla station wagon and the Suzuki Swace (a less known model here in Australia) are exactly the same car.  Another illustration would be the awesome new Toyota Supra and BMW Z4 cars.  Also, Volvo has platformed shared quite frequently over the years.  The Global C-car Platform from Ford saw the Volvo S40 and V40 share much with the Ford Focus and Mazda 3.  Well known Hyundai and Kia have utilized several duplications of platforms for their small automobile line-up since 1997.

Having a shared engineering platform, where manufacturers build a basic foundation that can be used across many of its own models is an advantage.  The Volkswagen Group (VW), and the brands it owns, (Audi, Bentley, Lamborghini, Porsche, Seat and Skoda) are masters of this craft.  VW has a common practice where they will build a smaller number of platforms, but the benefits come when they will then re-purpose these platforms across their own different brands.  When VW designed and built the MQB (Modularer Querbaukasten) platform, it was shared across the Audi A3, Skoda Octavia, and Seat Leon.  Also, one of its SUV platforms is shared and utilized by the Audi Q7 and Q8, the Bentley Bentayga, the Lamborghini Urus, and Porsche’s Cayenne.

BMW’s 7-Series is the platform for the immensely luxurious and expensive Rolls Royce Dawn.  The new 7-Series is luxurious and sleek in its own right, but it is also much, much cheaper to buy – comparatively.

Some other new vehicles that are currently sharing platforms:

Cadillac CTS and Chevrolet Camaro

VW Polo and Skoda Scala

Mercedes Benz GLE and Jeep Grand Cherokee

Renault Koleos and Nissan X-Trail

Fiat 500 X and Jeep Renegade