I made an interesting mistake the other day.

My Honda Insight has a ride quality and seats that are nothing fantastic. The Honda’s rear suspension is poor indeed and in general, the car rides like a badly developed, very lightweight car.

The seats are thin and not well shaped.

Over a long distance, the upshot is that the car is a bit uncomfortable.

So I thought I’d improve the ride and the seat comfort by installing new seats. But that’s easier said than done.

The main problem is that the car is unusual in that both lower anchor points of the seatbelt attach to the seat. That is, the seat belt loads are borne by the seat, and then by the seat attachments to the floor. Therefore, any replacement seats need to be of the same design – and this is very unusual.

Honda S2000 seats are apparently of much the same design – and some Insight owners have fitted these seats. But S200 seats are typically very expensive.

So one day I spent a full two hours browsing the local wrecking yard, looking at the seats in literally every one of perhaps 300 cars. And I found only two models that had similar seat and seatbelt designs – the Holden (Opel) Astra and Vectra.

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I’ve done a bit of reading in the last few weeks – most of the books were bought secondhand.

Jet – the story of pioneer Sir Frank Whittle is penned by the man himself.

It’s always fascinated me how a relatively lowly officer in the Royal Air Force could, in the 1930s, invent the concept of the jet engine. After all, where were all the government scientists and private company researchers? 

Well, to cut the story short, and to paraphrase Whittle, they were largely just getting in the way of the engine’s development. I knew that Whittle had had some differences with the private company Rover, but that’s only a tiny part of the story. This book is submerged in the detail of gaining finance, fighting government backstabbers, overcoming ignorance – and trying to stop Rover inventing “improvements” (that never were) to the design.

And all in a time of world war, the country fighting for its life.

It’s an interesting story, told well.

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Look, I am sorry to say so, but I just don’t think the Lancer Evo X lives up to its hype.

In fact, as a driver’s car, I don’t think it even lives up to the (immense) promise that drives of previous Evos would lead you to expect.

There are four separate problems.

Firstly, the engine drives like an old-fashioned turbo. That is, despite the hoopla about variable valve timing, super lightweight turbo assembly and all the rest, the engine is slow to come on boost.

In fact, the engine really only gets going at just under 3000 rpm – say, 2800. Redline is 7000 rpm so that gives you just over 4000 rpm of powerband. Not terrible, but certainly nothing special.

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Whenever I have nearly finished writing a new car test, I have a quick look at what other testers have had to say about the car.

Sometimes I find points that I have overlooked – and I am not too proud to re-examine the car and see if I agree with that other perspective. Other times, I find comments that I completely disagree with – and I never change the test to match what a majority might be saying.

I always wait until my test is near-complete before looking at other tests; it’s the same logic that means I usually drive a car and decide what I think it is worth before looking up its exact price.

So when I’d just about finished writing the test on the Toyota Aurion AT-X, I did a quick web browse.

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I am writing this sitting in the Maryborough (Queensland) caravan park’s camp kitchen. My wife, Georgina, and our little boy and I are camping here, having driven up from the Gold Coast, a distance of about 350 kilometres.

I have stayed on and off in caravan parks since about the age of 16; camping in tents or staying in cabins or on-site vans.

Over that time, the biggest change has been in the nature of typical caravan park guests. Once, the people staying in caravan parks comprised almost entirely families with young children. But now, especially in non-holiday periods, caravan parks are dominated by ‘grey nomads’, older, retired people who have hit the road.

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As we covered in Analysing Road Car Drag, most aerodynamic drag of current vehicles is created by separation pressure drag. Put simply, this is reflected in the size of the wake – the cross-sectional area of the disturbed air dragged along behind the car.

The most slippery vehicles in the world – the solar race cars – have reduced separation pressure drag to the extent that the other types of drag (eg viscous drag, induced drag and interference drag) become more important.

But in all conventional cars, it’s separation drag that remains the big one.

Now this gives rise to a rather interesting idea. Imagine you’re standing alongside an empty road. The day is a still one – there’s not much wind blowing. A car is rocketing towards you along the road, travelling at perhaps 100 km/h. It will pass close by to you. It grows in size and then roars past.

Now – what do you feel?

Clearly, you will be able to feel the wake – the eddies and turbulent air indicative of the aerodynamic disturbance of the car. This disturbance will take into account the separation pressure drag and the frontal area of the car – the two when multiplied form the vast majority of the actual aero drag that’s experienced by the car.

And, equally clearly, the smaller the air disturbance that you can feel, the greater the slipperiness of the vehicle.

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I’ll let you into a secret.

I think it quite bizarre, but some people actually believe that the greater the driver skill needed to operate a car, the better the car must be.

The corollary of this is that is if a modification makes it easier to get more out of a car, the modification must be bad.

Now put this way you can see why I called the notion bizarre. But in the time I’ve been writing about car modifications, I’ve come across it quite a few times.

Here are just two examples.

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Here in Queensland the State Government has issued a discussion paper entitled Improving Sustainable Housing in Queensland.

The paper canvases a range of requirements the government is considering implementing for the construction of new houses and units.

I think it astonishing how little government regulation has been applied to the energy efficiency of housing. Especially in the context of the media attention given to fuel-efficient cars, there seems to have been a deathly silence on what is surely the far more important area of housing.

After all, a typical house is going to be consuming energy for something in the order of five to ten times as long as a car, and will be doing so most hours of the day and night.

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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.

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