Look, to be honest, I felt certain something would go wrong.

Too many links in the chain.  Too many uncertainties.

Driving from the Gold Coast to Brisbane airport. Catching a plane to Melbourne. Staying with friends for a few nights in Melbourne then catching the train to Wangaratta. Camping in a caravan park, then leisurely  riding bikes the 100-odd kilometres to Bright along the bicycle-and-joggers rail trail, following the path of the old railway line.

And then back again.

Camping each night. Finally, the train and plane and car back to the Gold Coast.

Complete all the way with two folding Brompton bikes, two folding Burley bike trailers, full camping gear – and two adults and one three-and-half-year-old.

Broken spokes, collapsing tents, exhaustion, mishap and injury. Gears that wouldn’t mesh, gears that were wrong ratios. Getting lost and misjudging basics like water or matches. Trains that didn’t arrive; taxis that didn’t appear. Broken chains, fractured towbars, irritability and anarchy.

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Here in Australia, major car modification workshops are generally well established. That’s said in the light of full knowledge that workshops come and go; but equally, others build a strong reputation and live on for decades. Some even span two or three generations of the one family.

I know that you can always find customers to denigrate any workshop, but places like Turbo Tune in Adelaide, Nizpro and Beninca Motors in Melbourne, MRT in Sydney, ChipTorque on the Gold Coast, and Romano Motors in Brisbane are longstanding workshops with good reputations.

And I wonder which Australian business – either these or others – will be first: the first to realise that there’s money to be made in specialising in a new-age of car modification.

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Despite what some might say in discussion groups, everything I ever write for AutoSpeed is carefully considered and thought-through, whatever the consequences of its publication.

So, for example, I was prepared to write content in Part 2 of our water injection series that showed, despite the good hardware, the results in some ways were disappointing.

“What a let-down!” said one discussion group poster.

That may well be so, but I don’t ever want to be in the position of claiming some modification benefit that others cannot duplicate.

In the same way, for our stories on advancing the ignition timing by tweaking the intake air temp sensor (see The 5 Cent Modification) modifying the action of the EGR valve (see Part 1 and Part 2), I was deliberately understated in my description of the potential benefits.

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Bought a car the other day.

Regular readers will know of my pictured Peugeot 405 diesel turbo, a car that I have discussed in AutoSpeed and which has been modified in an effective – but very cheap – way.

In the short time that I have owned it, the 405 has proved to be a very good car – extremely comfortable, competent handling, excellent ride, and very economical. With the boost, intake, exhaust and fuelling mods, driveability improved dramatically. For example, the time to go from 80 – 100 km/h in 4th gear was halved. It was this sort of change, rather than a massive increase in peak power, that made the car so much nicer on the road.

In fact, the 405 has been doing everything that we’ve been asking of it – and turning in fuel economy figures of 5.5 – 6.9 litres/100km.

So why the change of car? The greatest problem with the 405 is its old diesel injection system. It’s a purely mechanical system that controls fuel and turbo boost and fuel injection timing. That makes it simple to tune – all you need is a screwdriver and spanner – but it also considerably limits the modifications that can be made.

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In August last year I wrote:

http://blog.autospeed.com/2007/08/14/local-car-makers-accelerating-towards-their-demise/

Read it again.

Less than a year later:

–  Mitsubishi manufacturing in Australia has gone broke

– Holden has said that within 2 years it will release diesel, hybrid and possibly four cylinder turbo versions of the Commodore. The company may also build smaller cars in Australia.

– Ford has released a ‘going on as the same’ FG Falcon, and then – oops, gosh, the world has changed! – announced a diesel engine version within 2 years.

– Toyota has said that they’re eager to build a Camry hybrid in Australia.

I wrote then :

The local manufacturers – especially Holden and Ford – need to show with locally developed product in the showroom that they can produce cars that appeal to more than Ford/Holden performance car enthusiasts, that they not only understand but also actively embrace the significant social change that is now occurring. Otherwise the Australian car will continue down the road to anachronistic irrelevance – it’s already on that path and accelerating as fast as its powerful and thirsty engine can take it….

At last, at last, Holden and Ford are stirring. Hopefully it won’t be too late.

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The other day, on learning that I am an automotive journalist, someone asked me what is my favourite make of car.

I must admit the question rather stumped me. It did so for two reasons: firstly, I can’t see how any impartial automotive journalist could ever admit to having a favourite amongst car brands, and secondly, I am not even sure how anyone can logically have a favourite car maker.

I’ve owned cars made by Alfa Romeo, Audi, Austin, BMW, Daihatsu, Holden, Honda, Rover, Saab, Subaru, Toyota – and many others. I’ve driven cars ranging from Rolls Royce to Porsche to Ferrari. I’ve also driven many Mazdas, Mitsubishis, Volkswagens – and so on.

And really, despite brands developing their images based on specific advertised criteria, I have to say that the idea that certain brands have certain attributes is largely a myth.

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An interesting ABC TV Media Watch this week  on the future of journalism. (See it here.)

I guess it’s particularly fascinating to me, as AutoSpeed this year reaches the ripe old age of ten. For close to a decade (and so two-thirds of the time the Web has existed!) my full-time job as a journalist and editor has been working for this specialist website.

These days, like probably many of you, I read all my ‘newspapers’ on line and watch most of my ‘TV’ online.  (Inverted commas because they’re not really ‘newspapers’ and ‘TV’ are they?)

So what do you think of the future of newspapers (and of course, by implication, magazines)? And what do you think of the very important point made by the presenter that quality journalism needs a financial model that in the past has relied on the huge advertising revenues generated by newspaper classifieds?

One point that I think the program missed is that the breadth and reach of the web allows far narrower targeting of audiences, so making viable media that would otherwise not exist. I am quite sure that if the audience for AutoSpeed was limited to just a country like Australia, it would be too small to make AutoSpeed viable.

But what is the future of newspapers and magazines? What forms will (and should) automotive and popular journalism take?

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Back when the Holden VE Commodore was released, I was very disappointed that styling clearly dominated engineering in a way that I thought reflected the worst excesses of the past.

I wrote:

Quoted in Go-Auto E-News, designer Mike Simcoe had this to say about the exterior:

“It’s good, confident design. It’s well proportioned and it pushes quality to a level that we’ve never seen before. The interior package for VT was king of that in the market here – and this car continues that. The volume efficiency of the package – that’s the exterior volume to interior size – is just as aggressive as VT was. We made a big song and dance back then about that. And this car is the same.

“The track is a little bit wider with this new architecture, so from the ground up we’ve been able to put the wheels wider on the car.

“It’s an international design. You can’t say ‘European’ any more, because there’s no ‘European design’, or ‘Japanese design’ – it’s a truly international design in its form language. It’s genuinely a rear-wheel drive proportioned car which is something we hadn’t been able to push as hard in the past. And it’s much more formal. The form language that’s on the car is internal Holden. We’ve been trying to do something like this seriously for a long time.”

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All major companies and organisations use Public Relations employees. These people, effectively employed to put the greatest positive spin possible on anything to do with their company or organisation, send out an endless stream of press releases.

Ten or twenty of these press releases lob into my email in-box every day of the week, telling me all about the wonderful things the companies have been doing.

The trouble is, most of these press releases are just rubbish. In fact, the vast majority are rubbish.

I truly don’t know how so many PR people keep their jobs. As part of my Graduate Diploma in Journalism, I did a compulsory unit of Public Relations studies. (In some bizarre manner that I will never understand, in some people’s eyes, Public Relations and Journalism are allied trades. I fail to see any connection whatsoever.) But together with my journalism experience of something like 15 years, I am quite well qualified to be a PR practitioner.

But I’d rather dig holes.

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