I’ve always been a little scornful of those parents who proudly proclaim their children’s knowledge and interests, knowledge and interest that are only a reflection of their parents’ particular knowledge and interests.

You know: “Benjamin can name all the players in the Adelaide Football Club”, proudly says the football fan – and stuff like that.

But now in having a child of my own, I can see that it happens rather naturally – the child is interested in what the parents are interested in, and that knowledge is transferred without effort.

So the fact that my four year old, Alexander, when looking over my shoulder at a book on cars that I am reading, can identify the old Citroens, Jaguar E-Types and Porsches, is perhaps not much of a surprise.

But this familial socialisation becomes interesting when you consider change, and the future.

• » Continue reading or Comments (5)

We’ve recently made a few changes to AutoSpeed. Most are in response to comments that we’ve been receiving in the new feedback facility, but others have been in the pipeline for a while.

Here are the changes:

Articles will henceforth be released in a different way. Now when you receive the newsletter, you can immediately view all the articles in the weekly edition, rather than only being able to see them as they are released day-by-day.

The tag line that appears when you put your cursor over ‘AutoSpeed’ in the browser tab has been changed to ‘Technology, Efficiency, Performance’ – something that much better matches our current direction.

• » Continue reading or Comments (15)

I have a strong disinterest in handyman work.

Not for me, painting walls or fixing woodwork. Gardening, hanging doors, putting up shelves, making a new letterbox – nope, nope, nope.

So when the washing machine started producing dreadful noises, I feigned great interest in working at the keyboard.

This keyboard.

And, anyway, was the washing machine really making any more noise than normal? I dunno. Didn’t it always fill the street with the sound of a steam roller crossed with a jet engine?

In fact, when it went on to make clunking noises (still mixed with a steam roller and a jet engine), I figured that maybe there were just some coins floating around in the mix, coins that had come out of pockets.

Even if it did sound like the coins were as big as billiard balls….

But then the edifice came crashing down: the washing machine stopped working.

A five year old Korean-made LG front-loader, it no longer rotated, no matter what was done with the switches. In fact, as my beloved wife Georgina pointed out, there were also signs that the stainless steel drum had been rubbing on the outer plastic drum: abrasions were apparent.

So I got out the tools.

• » Continue reading or Comments (16)

I am starting to wonder if the problems that Ford and Holden are facing in this country with their large cars – the Falcon and the Commodore – are going to be possible to remedy.

Holden is now talking a whole range of environmental and fuel-efficiency measures – from E85 compatibility to reducing weight – and Ford, despite having just released a brand new model, has already made public the next engine option, a diesel.

As I have written previously, both companies have only themselves to blame for their current woes – they were happy completely ignoring the changing marketplace and blindly heading down an ever-increasingly irrelevant path. It’s obvious they expected the market to change to suit them, rather than build cars that suited the buying public. That applies especially to Ford, a company that with the FG Falcon, had years more time to prepare for the changing times than Holden had with the VE Commodore.

But what makes me think that they may have lost it big-time is what I am seeing more and more: Holden and Ford are rapidly losing their loyal long-term potential car-buyers.

Now, self-evidently, they have lost some of these already; otherwise Ford wouldn’t be sacking production workers and releasing a market-special FG seemingly only minutes after the new Falcon was released; and Holden Commodores wouldn’t be being outsold (let’s talk private buyers) by a helluva lot more than just a couple of other car models.

• » Continue reading or Comments (25)

Perception of any crisis in world affairs has always followed much the same pattern.

Those who say it isn’t happening and never will happen; those cautious but observant who say it might happen; those early adopters who say it is happening well before a majority agree; and those who like to see it unambiguously demonstrated before acknowledging it is actually happening.

Or – and this is really important – not happening.

Trouble is, at the ‘it might happen’ stage it’s difficult to decide on the right course of action. Do nothing and any action might be too late.

Or, conversely, do nothing and in fact the action might later prove to have been correct.

Think CFCs in aerosols and the ozone layer for the first; think Y2000 bug in computer software for the second.

And the eminence of the ‘early adopters’ counts for little: remember the 1970s predictions of a world overpopulation crisis, and how widespread famine would result in a catastrophic reduction in the population by the year 2000? Despite some very highly credentialed experts arguing vehemently – and with apparent logic – that we were doomed, it didn’t happen.

And now to global warming. 

• » Continue reading or Comments (9)

An Australian company has launched a car insurance scheme where your annual insurance cost depends on how many kilometres you travel.

This is significant for those who drive only to public transport, and also for those who choose to own multiple cars and drive each only for its best purpose.

The website is self-explanatory and I found the quoting quick and easy – and very interesting!

As you’d expect, it is beneficial only if the car does less than the average number of kilometres, but for those cars, it looks like insurance costs can be way lower than the current norm.

• » Comments (9)

Our new AutoSpeed feedback facility keeps operating – and the feedback keeps rolling in. For a bit of a giggle, I’ve decided to run here some of the, er, more ‘interesting’ feedback we’ve received.

About You > The car you drive – ADASDASDLAS DJLAKA

Nope, dunno that car.

Our Content > Content we should have – More titties

How can we have more when we have never had any?

Our Content > Performance cars – Where is the cheese

Hmm, dunno.

Our Content > Performance cars – I think there should be some reversal of the latest autospeed changes to include high perfornance cars, show cars, drag cars, DB drag cars. etc The used to make some fantastic reading. I also think that new car tests need to be an important feature, regardless on how difficult it is to obtain press cars

Rather interestingly, the only respondent so far to ask for more of the old-style feature cars…

• » Continue reading or Comments (12)

I’ve never been on a fast train. Despite being interested in trains for longer than I’ve had any interest in cars, all my train trips have been pedestrian – at least in terms of pace.

The other day I travelled from Melbourne’s Southern Cross station to country Wangaratta, a train journey I immensely enjoyed. But – and here’s the pity of it – I actually thought it was reasonably quick, cos it was keeping up with cars doing 100 and 110 km/h.

In Europe, where my parents have extensively travelled, my father talks of cars on freeways being left behind so rapidly that they look like they’re going backwards. That happens when you’re in train that’s doing 300 km/h…

• » Continue reading or Comments (5)

If you haven’t already done so, I encourage you to spend the 60 seconds (or less) it takes to fill in the feedback facility (top-right corner) that we’ve currently enabled on every page of AutoSpeed.

The feedback option has been running for (as I write this) a few days and, as would be expected when one of the categories is ‘content you hate’, a host of major negatives is coming in.

Let me take a look at some, and perhaps in part reply to them.

Why do you re run so much OLD stuff…have you run out of content ? or Run out of time …not fair to FILL UP your monthly leter with old stuff…people are capable of searching your files to find it if they wajnt it DONT REUSE OLD STUFF…it makes it look like you have run out of ideas or time…or both

Well, it’s very simple. Our ‘old stuff’ rates very well in terms of reader numbers and reader ratings. In other words, most of our readers have not seen the ‘old stuff’ before.

• » Continue reading or Comments (6)