Ben’s Car Blog

Please re-direct your browsers and RSS readers to http://benkraal.supersized.org/. For car-specific posts, please read the cars category at my new blog (http://benkraal.supersized.org/categories/1-Cars) There are no new car-related posts there. Yet.

I love car magazines. I love free stuff. What’s not to love about a free on-line car magazine?

Winding Road is literally free, yet it’s a propper car magazine. It’s free because they have almost no distribution costs. All their costs are paid through their advertising.

WR focus on what could be loosely called drivers cars so the uncharitable could say that they’re avoiding things that they’ll have to say are awful. They’re based in the US so they’ll occaisionally feature things that people in the rest of the world don’t get (or are spared). I’ve often heard my US-based car-blogging friends complain that the US auto press are scared to say that “domestic” cars are any good or to criticise foreign cars, particularly Honda and BMW. The current issue of WR has a US v. Europe feature and if you think the results are obvious, it’s worth a read.

At the Melbourne Motorshow Ford Australia are previewing a bunch of interesting cars, all of which are enough to make Joe from My Ford Dreams green with envy.

First we have the Turbo Territory. 245kw or 330-odd horsepower in a BMW X5 sized urban assault vehicle. Why Ford North America dropped the ball on the amazingly dull Freestyle I don’t know. I can’t really see myself in a Turbo Terror but the press here thinks a reguluar Territory is a better can than an X5 so here’s hoping they sell a stack of them.

Memo to Ford NA: you want need the Falcon and Territory. If Ford.au can build these cars for the tiny Australian market (and teensy-tiny exports to NZ and South Africa) and price them well and spec them well (electrically adjustable pedals anyone!) then even if Ford NA have to re-tool a bunch of factories I’ll bet they’ll sell more Falcons and Territories than 500s and Crown Vics put together. (PS: our Fairlane is three times the car the Crown Vic is.)

Moving into cars that I’m more interested in, there’s the Focus XR5. Now that’s what I’m talking about! Who needs a Golf GTi?

Over at AusRotary there’s a great thread with a few pictures of 1960s and 1970s Japanese cars, most of which never made it out of Japan. Go on, have a look.

A couple of the cars in that thread are what I’d call “big iron”. More than 4 cylinders, fast and, well, big. In Australian terms most of the cars that we didn’t get (or at least didn’t get the interesting versions of) would be XP Falcon or EH Holden sized and intended for the top-end of the market. Things like Toyota Crowns, various big Nissans and so on. In the US these would be classified as “compacts”, I think.

At the other end of the scale are the things like the Cosmo Sports, the various Celicas (probably running interesting engines like 2TGs and 18RGs), the Belletts and the Lancer GTOs.

Oh, yeah. Ignore the first picture of the Alpine as that’s French.

Just thinking about a few things:

• Tarmac rallying, as currently implemented in Australia is a Bad Thing.
• What makes a car a “classic”?
• What gives a car “character”?

Oh, yeah. The thesis is with my proofreader and my supervisors for final checking.

I’m really, really, really busy finishing my Ph.D thesis right now.

Follow the links in my blogroll for more car-blogging goodness while I’m away.

T’other day, John Markos O’Neill posted his ambitious eleven point plan to eliminate the private car. This provoked Jalopnik to dismiss him out of hand and other bloggers, particularly, J G Halmayr from Ride (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) to take the time to carefully consider each point of the plan.

I might weigh in on specific points of the plan a bit later, but here’s some quick big picture views I have of it:

The plan, and the peak oil forum discussions that promoted it, assume that all cars polute, now and in the future. I am guessing, though it is not explicit that the view is also that cars take up land that could be otherwise used for housing, parks, etc. This is true, but that argument can also be applied to horses, bicycles, trains, busses, taxis, etc.

The plan makes the tacit assumption that everyone lives in a densly populated city. Croak from The Barvarian Falcon has already pointed this out. Public transport would not work for my in-laws who live only 10 minutes from a medium-sized rural town. Nor would self-propelled transport. Steep hills, stinking hot weather (this is Australia and it was about 30 degrees celcius when I was at their place recently and it’s late Spring here) and they’re both 60+ years old — remarkably fit for 60+ but, still.

The plan assumes everyone is white collar and disregards blue collar workers who, you know, make stuff in factories and must travel to where their work is. This point of mine specifically relates to the idea of telework which I will elaborate on later.

The plan attempts to solve an unstated problem. Why are cars so bad?

The plan tacitly assumes that all cars are equal and equally bad. A Toyota Yaris (that’s a Scion xA, I think) is the same as a Hummer is the same as a Prius is the same as a 65 Mustang in this plan.

Finally, and this is my biggest criticism, the plan assumes that cars are the problem. This is, I think, shortsighted. The problem is urban sprawl. The problem is dormitory suburbs. The problem is that cities have grown to be so big that people can’t live close to where they work or that places of work are undesirable as places to live near (it has ever been thus — no-one wants to live near a tannery). The “problem” is that some people don’t like to live in big cities (where things like car-sharing or home-delivery for groceries scale properly) for a whole bunch of reasons. Cars are a symptom.

Swade’s enthusiasm for Saabs has had me thinking about the “next car” for when it’s time to let the Mi16 go.

I’m thinking Saab 9000 Aero, or whatever a high-pressure turbo 9000 was called in any particular year.

Pros:

• Big-ish but not stupidly massive
• Roomy
• Safe
• Enough fasts to be interesting
• Small enough engine to be fuel efficient
• “Different”
• Annoys people who look down their noses at Saabs
• Cheaper than similar age Volvo 850 wagons

Cons:

• “Different”
• Expensive to fix? (Possibly spurious — my Pug hasn’t been expensive to fix)
• Turbo = expensive insurance (but I’m mostly past the age where that’s a real issue)
• alleged 1980s style turbo lag (eg: nothing, nothing, nothing… holy cow!)
• not a Mazda6, which is my wife’s current stated preference

I got an email from Bill Discher today about his research project. He thought that I was a “mechanic/body work” car blogger. This is what I sent him in reply:

I think you may have miscategorised me. This is not your fault, as I try to defy categorisation. Also, I think your categorisation scheme is good, though I have a few suggestions, if that’s OK.

First, a bit of background to establish my credentials in giving you this adivce: I’m a research student myself, studying IT, sociology and speech recognition. As well as being a car-nerd, I’m a geek. I’m into tech of all sorts from the web to cars to just about anything else. Because I have a Human-Computer Interaction background I’m also interested in design and Design (caps matter!) even crossing into architecture and industrial design as well as more ephemeral stuff like interaction, appropriation and so on. I blog about that sort of stuff at New Now Know How . I have a car-specific blog because I wanted to separate out my hard-core car-nerd stuff from my more researchy stuff (though I see them as interrelated at times).

My Dad is a straight out business dude, an corporate accountant actually. From a young age I was reading the Australian equivalent of the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times as well as mainstream car magazines. So I have an interest in the business side of cars, too.

I sort of see myself as crossing a bunch of boundaries.

I like old cars, like Harvey the 1500ss Maz-ota, just because they’re old. They’re sort of anti-technology at the same time as being quite high-tech. I mean, I understand more about the Document Object Model than I do about the basic working of a Weber (or even SU!) carb. I’ve often spoken with and debated people why old cars are interesting and it sort of comes down to character but a bunch of other things, too, that I can only really explain by dipping into some words and ideas from sociology (which I can do if anyone out there is interested).

That said, I have no idea at all what I’m doing with Harvey. My Dad, and a bunch of my friends, is/are the shade-tree mechanic(s) — I’m just the ignorant apprentice.

I like (old) Mazdas because on the whole they have that elusive thing, character. French cars, too. And British sports cars, and Italian… Well, you get the idea.

I like new cars because they’re new. I like them because they’re an expression of the Design Process and sometimes because they’re not and it’s fun to pick holes in things that had hundred million dollar budgets and a bunch of smart people working on them and they still turn out to be only 60-70% as good as they should be.

I like motorsports and the smell of burning rubber and walking the pits and peering into people’s engine-bays. I like rallying and dirt and everything that goes with that sport. I can’t for the life of me understand the enduring appeal of drag-racing as a spectator sport.

So, what does this have to do with your classification scheme? I think you need to open it up to being a faceted scheme, allowing people to cross the boundaries between the categories. Perhaps even a graduated scheme, with rankings on the categories for the degree to which each blogger sees themselves as belonging to each category. Or, perhaps you could stick that idea in a “future work” section.

The Dutton Rallies are basically a series of motorkhanas (that’s autocross if you’re from the ‘States) at various locations around a capital city.

They’re not cheap with entry being $1975 for a single driver team or $2590 (that’s 1295 each) for a two-driver team though you do get a stack of goodies when you enter and a general feeling of swanning about with the upper-crust.

I reckon Fro and I could organise something similar but much more downmarket for about 20% of the entry fee. Hmm…