St.David's Day has been Postponed

But only by a day.  It's happening tomorrow now due to today being Leap Year Day.

It gives me an extra 24 hours to find a daffodil.

It is also a chance for certain people who look 80 to celebrate their 20th birthdays.  The only famous person I can find (who is still alive) who is celebrating a birthday today is the 13 year old ex-Coronation Street actress Wendi Peters:

She'll be able to apply for a driving licence in 16 years time.

This is only the second time I've posted on February 29th - the other one was this one in 2016.

It's not like St.David's Day was ever going to be cancelled - unlike lots of other things right now - like today's Tranmere Rovers v Fleetwood Town - waterlogged pitch.

Also cancelled this year is the Geneva Motor Show.  This has nothing to do with calendar anomalies or with the current freak weather events but is as a direct result of Coronavirus.  Or more precisely, Covid-19 which just beat Diseasy McDiseaseface in the public vote to name this particular strain of Coronavirus - that being a generic brand that has been around for half a century.  I tackled Coronavirus last weekend.

Autocar are showing us, in true Jim Bowen Bullseye style what we could have won seen.  The article is here.

A lot of Chinese manufacturers were hoping to show off their goods and a lot of non-Chinese people were worried about meeting them.

One such manufacturer has the confusing name of AIways which, apart from being bad usage of English capitalisation, in a lot of fonts looks like the word "Always" - in fact, I had to change the font of it to make this sentence readable in Blogger.

The car itself is yet another SUV - and of course electric:

We really, REALLY, don't need another one - especially one that people will read as a female sanitary product.

Let's just cancel SUVs - it might just cut down the number of events cancelled due to freaky weather events.

Things...Can Only Get Better?

Well they can't get any worse than the Website I accidentally stumbled upon this evening called "The THINGS .Com"

They have a writer called Chris Flynn who they claim, "is a proficient reader and writer. He has written for many publications including TheRichest, TheClever, TheQuiz, and ListVerse. Cars are his passion."

I can read - and write.  I can even do them proficiently.  I have never heard of any of the publications listed but suspect they are Websites not actual publications.  Cars are my passion too.

But when I write about cars, I don't simply produce lists of 15 things about them all day.

But that does seem to be what the whole THINGS website consists of.

To be fair to the lad, the item that I stumbled upon was actually a list of NINETEEN things.  Allegedly, a list of "19 French And German Cars We Wouldn’t Touch With A 10-Foot-Pole" headed up by a picture of James May modelling a KV Mini 1:



Only problem is, the list consists of 10 pretty decent German cars and 9 arguably crap French ones.

 

No mention of the Trabant or the NSU Ro80 or the Messerschmitt KR200 - just Mercs, Audis and Beemers - does the passionate car man have a problem with the prestige German brands?

 

Then maybe he should be learning about DS - the Citroen offshoot who produce far from crap French cars.

 

Remember the Citroen C6? 

Beautiful, quirky and luxurious - much like the CX before it: 

And the SM and the XM?  All decent large barges that only seemed really popular in France.  French presidents have always been driven about in large Citroens.

 

Which was good news for people looking to buy them after they had depreciated.  This is possibly because the Citroen brand never had the luxury cachet outside of France.

 

Well hopefully the DS brand will have it as this Car+Driver story about the DS9 heralds in the next French luxo-barge and it looks bloody good too: 

 My next article will be a list of 15 Websites I must remember not to visit again.

Viral Stupidity

Eek!! Four of the people recently shipped to my local hospital have tested positive for Coronavirus!

What am I going to do!?  Does this mean I'm going to die of it!?

No.  That would be stupid.

The chances of catching it is negligible and the fatality rate is 2%.

The virus has, however, caused a rise in racism.  And in stupidity.  The Daily Show Correspondent Ronnie Chieng highlights the issue:

Those of you who are members of Facebook can enjoy the whole brilliant segment here.

But what, I hear you ask, has the Coronavirus and stupidity got to do with cars?

I refer you to the most popular comments under this BBC story and its equivalent Daily Mail story.

The story is about Jaguar Land-Rover flying in car parts in suitcases as they prepare to run out of Chinese-manufactured parts produced in factories that have been temporarily shut down due to Coronavirus.

That pink one has a couple of alternators in it.  Hope they don't get an excess charge.

 

All of the BBC and Mail Gammons are saying that we should be manufacturing the car parts in the UK and adding that this is proof that it will be OK after Brexit because we aren't getting our car parts from Europe after all.

 

OK, except buying British parts would currently make the cars more expensive and therefore uncompetitive.  A reason the Chinese parts are cheap (ignoring the crap wages and conditions) is that they come in at EU tariff rates - this differential (that's in the yellow suitcase) may well come down after the Brexit Transition period but we'll still be producing uncompetitively priced cars.

 

Oh, and if you think the term "Gammon" is racist, remember Boris is in charge now SO WE CAN ALL BE AS RACIST AS WE LIKE - SUCK IT UP SNOWFLAKE!

Gear Change - Two to One

The Guardian's Stuart Heritage has two items of Paddy McGuinness news for us this week.

I haven't worked him out yet - Heritage not McGuinness - I do know he's better than Keith Watson of "The Metro" - but that's not difficult.  I think for one thing, he does actually know about the show he is talking about.

Always useful in a media journalist that.

In the story that Top Gear is to be moved from BBC2 to BBC1, he makes some very valid points including that the move has been designed to “attract younger viewers and safeguard the future of the licence fee” but younger viewers (and myself) tend to watch shows on catch-up so won't associate it with a particular channel anyway.

But, in the story that ITV are scrapping "Take Me Out" he says, "...you would have to be a monster not to be a little sad about its death."

Guess I must be a monster then.

I still don't approve of the current TG line-up but have to agree with Stuart that this series is very successful - possibly because it is now no longer a "mouldy old car show".

His words not mine - I like car shows and want more of them so would never stick the adjective "mouldy" in front of one - unless they were really crap - like the last two series of Driven or like "I Want That Car"

But Top Gear isn't crap.

It's just lost its way as a car show.  The bungee last week could have been done sitting in a bathtub (although I did enjoy the deceit that leaving the handbrake on would stop him).

The rear axle coming off the Firebird was very funny - please tell me that wasn't faked.

But having just the one motoring expert is restricting.  Don't tell Michael Gove,

 

...but we need more experts.  Otherwise, dumb stuff that is popular comes to the forefront:

We Don't Have a Pink Bathroom...

...so we don't buy the Financial Times.

I also don't subscribe to it online.

But fortunately for those if us with a thirst for news, Car+Driver are reporting the FT story about Ferrari suing a charity over the use of a name that they decided to use despite the charity having it first.

It sounds a bit like when Posh Spice tried to stop Peterborough United from trademarking the nickname "Posh".

She lost.

The name Ferrari is fighting for is Purosangue which translates as "Pure Blood".  This should be popular with racists.

Every man and his dog is speculating what the Ferrari SUV will look like, just type "Ferrari SUV" into Google Images:

Here's my guess:

It comes from this story which points out that they all look much of a muchness.

Still, I guess that ALL car companies have to have an SUV in their line-ups nowadays.

Good job Reliant aren't still around: