George Michael Impersonator

Two different BBC car stories caught my eye today.

Ford have launched a car that can be driven hands-free on British motorways.

WHY!?

OK, so I suppose you  have to start somewhere - but not with this.

Apparently, you have to keep your eyes on the road ahead and "the driver is not permitted to use their mobile, fall asleep or conduct any activity that takes attention away from the road."

So what is the point?

Plus, this is a Ford Mustang Mach e that has a maximum speed of 80mph.

DON'T CALL SOMETHING THAT CAN ONLY DO 80MPH A MUSTANG!

I hate the way Ford are reusing classic car names on horrible SUVs - I'm looking at you, Ford Puma.

I don't normally like the comments under BBC stories - the ones I usually read tend to be full of angry Gammons still trying to defend Brexit.  But this one is lots of angry Gammons and angry non-gammons coming up with more and more reasons why this won't work in Britain.  Smart Motorways being a good one - this car is supposed to safely grind to a halt if the driver loses interest in the road ahead - you will have cars stopping all over the place on warm, Summer afternoons.

And will Police have to check whether or not it is the right age of Mustang when they see a driver doing jazz-hands while travelling at 70mph down the M6? And that his hands-free subscription is up to date?

Yes, you need to subscribe to this hands-free driving lark as well!

So why have I called this post, "George Michael Impersonator?"

Ah, well that's because of my second BBC story which combines my love of cars with my love of Swansea City Football Club.  Danny Graham made 54 appearances for us. This includes when we were in the Premier League, so I don't know why we are only a sub-note in the story of him crashing an expensive Jaguar-Land-Rover vehicle into a Co-op in County Durham:

Whilst over the limit.

I wonder if his hands were on the wheel at the time?

Colour Me Bad

If you've facelifted and relaunched a boring SUV that looks a bit tank-shaped.

Don't paint it in military green!

The new Audi Q5, as in this story, looks like it should be towing a big green piece of artillery on wheels.

 

Now, if you've relaunched a very unboring SUV - one with a military history, it would look pretty good in military green.  It also looks good in this harking-back-to-the colours-Land-Rovers-ought-to-be shade of blue:

Especially with those wheels.

 

That story is here.

 

Now, I've felt a bit indifferent about the new Defender.  It is very expensive as a farm vehicle or general utilitarian dogsbody vehicle - but then again, farm vehicles and general utilitarian dogsbody vehicles wouldn't sell in big enough numbers nowadays to be viable.

 

Which is why we have an expensive Defender that will sell to whatever Yuppies are called these days.

 

This one being described today is the commercial version which is coming soon but not here yet.  It will be about £35K + VAT (VAT which you claim back if you are actually using it as a commercial vehicle)  It lacks the second row of seats - but not the second row of doors and you can add an extra seat on the front row if you wish to get cosy with your colleagues.

 

Unlike with the Audi, I'm looking forward to see the green one - here's a clue:

Toy Story 2

Yes I know we are up to number 4 now but this is my second toy story.

It comes only 7 years after my first toy story.  That was when Hotwheels produced a model of a pre-production Dodge Viper while the rest of the world only had spy-shots to go on.

This time it is Lego and the forthcoming Land-Rover Defender.

Now I think it looks closer to this Defender...

...than to this spy-shot of the new one...

But I'm sure that Lego wouldn't have invested so much without getting some insight from Land-Rover themselves so maybe that is an accurate representation of what we will be getting from Land-Rover later this year.

 

Who'd have thought it eh? - a squared off Defender.

Government Powers - Off The Grid

This rather disturbing picture has been appearing on the Telegraph and the BBC News Websites a fair bit this week:

It is because the news broke that the Government is banning all petrol and diesel vehicles in 2040.

 

Except they aren't.

 

What they want to do is ban the SALES of all NEW petrol and diesel vehicles in 2040.

 

Like France do.

 

There may even be a clause allowing hybrids - like the Volvo story from last month.

 

And, given that this Government may not see the year out and that 2040 is 23 YEARS AWAY, I wouldn't be putting that dodgy pipe on my news website just yet.

 

It must be a library photo.  Here is another motoring-related library photo:

Meanwhile, Stateside, where they don't believe in climate change, they are still doing their bit for electric vehicles. Here is a story from Autoguide about a new all-electric ‘Sport Utility Truck’ from a  company I've never heard of before - Bollinger Motors - as in the champagne.  Meet the B1:

At first I thought it looked like the love-child of a Jeep Cherokee and a Land-Rover Defender.

 

And then I worked it out: 

Lego Landie

Pistonheads had this story yesterday about a proposed new Lego model - the Series III Land Rover Defender.

It has been designed by a father and son partnership, Terry & Ben Fisher and looks brilliant.  The detail is very impressive.

 

It looks a lot better than quite a few more famous recent Lego car models such as the Beetle & Porsche 911 but I suspect that that is due to the fact that a Defender is square - like Lego.

 

It needs 10000 votes to go into production and mine was number 5983.

 

It is a slight faff to vote for it because you need a Lego ID but it can be done from here where you will also learn a bit more about it.

 

There have been a few rumours lately that the Defender could be back from the dead and I suspect this isn't what they meant but it'll do for now.

Rugby Post

This Car+Driver story caught my eye today.

It is about a specially-build Land-Rover Defender that will be touring the British Isles promoting this year's IRB Rugby Union World Cup.

Looks nice doesn't it?  It even has a glass trophy cabinet constructed in the rear to show off the prize.

 

I particularly like the paint-job - it has a 1970s JPS Lotus feel to it.

Now being an American site, I could understand if Car+Driver felt the need to explain what rugby was.  But it looks like they actually need to explain what the UK is - to their author at least.

Alexander Stoklosa, for that is his name, describes "a 100-day tour of the U.K. and Scotland" - wasn't there something in the news last year about a vote or something?  Anyway he goes on to say "the trophy is merely touring England and Ireland, not the Sahara, right?"  He's now forgotten about Scotland and doesn't seem to know about Wales - a team that could do very well in the World Cup this year.

He's spot-on about The Sahara not being in the UK though.

Quiet News Day?

Most of the car sites today, like Autocar for example, are going with the announcement of the Vauxhall Insignia Country Tourer - a four-wheel-drive family estate car.

Not particularly interesting, even for someone like me who drives a four-wheel-drive family estate car.

It's brown:

 The Telegraph have been running two non-stories since the weekend.

A pointless review of the first episode of series 20 of Top Gear.  Pointless because it is written by someone more interested in repeating the fact that he is "not the target audience" for the show and then telling us that he didn't enjoy it.  Well, what a surprise!!!  Prat.  Some of the reader comments are suitably scathing though.

Their second non-story promises us the Top 10 Long-lived cars still on sale.

Only it doesn't.

I was expecting a list of cars that haven't really changed much in many years like the Land-Rover Defender or Porsche 911 (OK the 911 has changed a lot, but it still looks the same).

But no.  What we were given were a bunch of car names that have lived on - like the Ford Fiesta.  The early Fiestas bore no relation whatsoever to the new ones.  Pointless journalism.


Meanwhile, Autoguide have got hold of the story that "Ferrari is limiting its employees to only three in-house recipients per email."

This will cause problems if Fernando Alonso wants to send an amusing jpeg of a cat to Felipe Massa and all of their mechanics.

He will probably have to send the email several times to groups of three each time.

I'm not convinced that Ferrari have really thought this through.

It's a Steal!

What would you rather steal, a Prius or a Land-Rover?

Would you?

I wouldn't steal either - I'm not a car-thief!

According to The Mirror this week, the Land-Rover Defender is the most-stolen car (in Britain at least) in terms of numbers stolen per number on the road.

They quote a survey by Swiftcover Insurance which shows Land Rovers, Audis and BMWs are more likely to be targeted by thieves than ordinary family saloons, despite having state-of-the-art security. The Swiftcover bloke says, "Given that luxury vehicles are usually alarmed, well protected and parked in affluent neighbourhoods, it’s surprising that they’re still so likely to be targeted."

No it isn't.

Just about all cars produced this Millennium have alarms and immobilisers so if you're going to go to the trouble of nicking a car you'd best go for one you can sell for big money or razz around in at high speed trying to escape the cops. Which brings us, quite neatly, to the subject of the least-stolen cars. Swiftcover don't tell us what they are...

...but Fox do.

They have this story this week quoting The National Insurance Crime Bureau or NICB for short. The NICB throw the following dodgy numbers at us: Of the 1.2 million Prius cars (that's a very big number) sold since the Year 2000 (in America at least), only 2439 have been reported stolen. They say this is one in 608 vehicles (I calculate it as 1 in 492)

They go on to say, "Even more incredible, 96.7 of the stolen cars were recovered, leaving only about 80 unsolved cases over the past 12 years." - that is incredible - especially the .7 - it would actually mean that 2342.3 of the cars were not recovered. I think a per-cent sign is missing from their story.

The NICB spokesman agrees with the Swiftcover person - "the above average income level of Prius owners could play a role, as the cars are often kept in safer neighborhoods and under better security" - they don't agree on the spelling of "Neighbourhoods" though.

I'd have thought that it was more to do with the fact the Prius is only really going to appeal to the environmentally friendly joy-rider.

Defending The Faith

Autocar today are reporting that Tata are definitely going to replace the Land-Rover Defender, or, as it was called when I was young, the Land-Rover.

The BBC also had the story but I'm not linking to them because I'm still really annoyed at the way they are not responding to the flood of complaints about their dirty deal with Murdoch over the F1 rights.

Here's a picture of the DC100:This is still just a concept but is a clue as to what the Defender replacement will look like when it goes into production in 2015.

It's a hard act to follow:but I like what they've done so far.

The current Defender isn't selling brilliantly at the moment but I bet any run-out editions will do well. It still has a certain coolness - Richard Hammond has a couple for example - but the old design is expensive to build and poor reliability (which has affected the entire L-R range for quite a while) has led the Toyota Land-Cruiser to easily establish itself as the world-leader. I wonder where they got the idea for the name "Land-Cruiser" from?

The replacement will need to be reliable, tough, good off-road and, most of all, utilitarian. Definitely not trendy. This isn't one for Victoria Beckham to endorse, maybe Marilyn Monroe? Or, if you fancy someone a bit more alive, Rick Stein and the Dalai Lama are Landy fans

...and so is Ronan Keating (Ugh!)

Going Round in Circles

It's been two weeks since my last post. Normally I just wait for a suitable story to come along and then I comment on it. But, since it has been two weeks, I've gone out looking further.

I've found a very good American site, Autoguide.com, with probably the best car news section on the Web. They had a good story yesterday about how the LAPD are asking that celebrities tweet road congestion news.

Twits.

They also make some reference to a couple of Star Trek actors which went completely over my head. Levar Burton played a blind man who could see with the help of a futuristic hairband and Wil Wheaton played an annoyingly precocious boy and then went on to parody himself brilliantly in The Big Bang Theory. But I don't get the traffic news angle.

I then found this story in Autocar about the new Porsche 911. It was something I was going to comment on in March when I saw this picture on the CAR&Driver siteheralding the first spy-shot of the new Porsche 911. I mean what the hell is the point of a spy shot of a Porsche 911!? Everyone knows what it will look like - every other Porsche 911!!

And the story in Autocar goes on to prove it. I'm sure that under the skin, the new 911 is very different to the outgoing model but on the outside, you won't know, when one screams past you on the motorway, just how old it is.

The big story will be when they finally make it look like something different, like when Volvo stopped making cars that looked like the 144, or when Land Rover change the Defender - it is happening soon and it will be the end of an era.

But, the story I have chosen for my July 1st Post - is from the BBC Website. It is entitled "Is the British roundabout conquering the US?" I drove around a couple in New England on my first trip Stateside in '92 and I couldn't get to grips with going around them the wrong way. I was very glad that they were very rare. Strangely enough, I never had any problems after that when I drove around Majorca - another drive-on-the-right kinda place.

The article is about how the city of Carmel, Indiana, is ripping out traditional intersections with traffic lights and replacing them with good old-fashioned European-style roundabouts.

The locals seem positive - traffic moves better and fuel is not wasted although this idiot in Georgia has a different view. Any person who will willingly be quoted as saying, "The universe is out of whack when roundabouts are constructed and the economy suffers. Not one, but two industries are suddenly out of business. There’s no longer any need for stop signs or traffic lights. I ask you, in this economic climate, is this a time to put all those people out of work?" is clearly a few sandwiches short of a picnic. I bet he believes the nonsense Fox News put out.

Maybe if he had a few driving lessons he'd be less scared of them.

It's not like the Americans will ever have to deal with this: