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New Young Driver Regulations and PenaltiesComments Off
Paul Ritchie posted in News on April 1st, 2007

The story that is closest to my heart which is concerned with the safety of younger drivers - keeping them alive, basically - has come to its conclusion with the passing through the legislature of tough new regulations for junior operators and greatly increased penalties for wayward young drivers.

Speeding tickets

(up from $50 fine)

Suspend license 90 days.
$50 fine.
Completion of State Courts Against Road Rage program.
Completion of an attitudinal retraining course.
$500 reinstatement fee.
Escalating fines for violations of more than 10 miles per hour:
— $10 for each mile per hour over the limit.
— $50 surcharge.

I have no idea what a $50 surcharge is supposed to be. An extra slug on the ticket for getting caught speeding while the police are doing overtime or on weekend penalty rates? Oh well. The idea is not to speed.

And to obtain a junior operator’s permit…

Training requirements

Beginning Sept. 1, drivers with a learner’s permit must:

Spend at least 40 hours driving with a parent or adult (up from 12 hours).
Spend 12 hours behind the wheel in driver education classes (up from 6 hours).

40 hours is an improvement on 12 to be sure, but I would have been happier to see something really definite like 100 hours. Driving, after all, is all about habits. We take the same routes to the same destinations, we listen to the same cds or radio station, park in the same places and we all drive according to with what we feel comfortable.

100 hours with a parent is ample time to have good habits inculcated into young drivers - unless the parents have their own dreadful habits.

12 hours behind the wheel in driver education classes is still pretty slack, but that’s what was around when I went for my license and I’m one of those nauseatingly safe drivers. Boring. I don’t run red lights, I do actually stop at stop signs and slow down in feeder streets. I don’t drive 5 mph slower in the fast lane though - that’s asking for trouble and is driving a different kind of dangerously.

Young drivers might consider me an old fashioned, boring, tyrannical old road Nazi and that may well be true. But as long as they still hate my guts when they’re 21, 22, 23… and I read fewer news stories of tragedies with which I find it difficult to cope - then it’s all good. Hate me well. Hate me long. Hate me with all your friends. Hate me when you’re teaching your own kids how to drive. Hate me at parties. Hate me at raves. Hate me at the football. Hate me on your way home from work. Hate me until I’m 80 and can’t even register it any more. The point is, you have to live in order to hate me at all. Or you can ignore me until I’m 80, it’s all the same to me. The point is, you’re alive and that is all that matters.

Ford on the nose in a big way0
Paul Ritchie posted in News on April 24th, 2006

Thank goodness the saddle was kept warm during my absence.

Anyway, as I type, the news according to the Boston Herald is that Ford’s financial woes look like matching those of General Motors, but instead of maximising opportunities in China, Ford’s boss announced the company is going to focus on doing more of the same as what caused the financial crisis in the first place, with the exception of the shedding of 30,000 workers between now and 2012.

Smart money has removed itself from the influence of the board at Ford in a bid to multiply in volume elsewhere. Who can blame its owners? In a word, Mr Ford, DUH!

Did I mention GM? I’m sure I did. Eric Bryant at Autoblog is asking if a GM public relations rep offered NPR a bit of cash to say nice things about their employee buyout plan. Eric thinks this is noteworthy. I am of the opinion that public relations people did that sort of thing as a matter of course. As long as NPR says it’s sponsored by GM, there’s no subterfuge. And let’s face it, if people wanted GM vehicles in high enough numbers, there wouldn’t be a problem. It’s not like Fox News being in bed with the Republican Party now is it? There’s a massive difference between a vote and splashing out $30,000 on a new car.

Speaking of dollars, how, may one ask, can there be any justification for a difference in the price of gas of $0.35 a gallon? We’re talking regular here, none of this fancy stuff about which I was writing before I got scriptus interruptus and to which I shall return by this time tomorrow when I can find all my links again.

All I can say is those at the top end of the scale better have some damn fine chocolates in the shop if they’re charging that much for gas.

Here they come…0
Paul Ritchie posted in News on April 9th, 2006

Still haven’t had any word back from those lovely people who produce bio-diesel or ethanol. Way to go guys.

Before I get on with all that though, and since GM has been in the news recently and therefore on a how’s-your-mother kind of a level, China has also been in the news, mine eye was captured and gulpage occured when news.com.au filed a report that the big C is eyeing off the big island in the south as a potential market for hatchback cars sneaking under the $10,000 price barrier.

That’s $5,500 to make plus freight and duties and all that, totalling a smidge under $10,000. That’s roughly US$7,200 per car.

Kia Motors Australia spokesman Jonathan Fletcher said the Korean brand, which made its name with cheap cars, did not intend to compete with Chinese and Indian makers on price.

“We know the Chinese are coming and we at Kia don’t intend to remain at the cheap and cheerful end of the market. Instead we’ll be concentrating on value and innovation,” he said.

Source: http://finance.news.com.au/story/0,10166,18744636-462,00.html

No doubt, if they’re successful in Australia, the next destination will be shores of the U.S.A.

Big Brother on our side for a change?0
Paul Ritchie posted in News on April 7th, 2006

Those clever Japanese tech people are working on vehicle to vehicle transmissions which would alert drivers of traffic snarls and possibly collisions. If that were not enough to interest motorists, the boffins at Nissan have mooted the possibility of children carrying the devices in congested areas with blind turns to alert drivers there’s congestion ahead and they should slow down.

The obvious question was asked - do we really want kids broadcasting their whereabouts to motorists?

So a good idea takes a turn for the absurd when our boffinmeisters suggested a panic button could be installed in the walkie version to alert parents their kids are in danger.

Nice try fellas. Let’s just stick the things in cars, huh? Let the cars talk to each other and the infrastructure networks and let the kids take the walking bus home.
Source: techsearch.

More on General Motors and this isn’t going to please anyone who firmly believes that company is in as much trouble as it’s making out. Remember I told you just on two weeks ago that GM is the largest car manufacturer in China, well news out of Abu Dhabi this morning says the ACDelco brand of batteries is the biggest brand in the entire middle east region, commanding an impressive 30% of that market with their maintenance free batteries. You know the ones - drop ‘em in and forget about them until 3 years after you’ve sold the car…

But this is old news and new news is strangely difficult to come by. I got this from an old link at ameinfo, an Arab/Middle East news source.

I don’t know what the financial arrangements are between GM’s US operations and all these subsidiaries, but if they’re owned by GM, they must be paying dividends of some description and so far, the subs seem to be doing remarkably well.

Not so for Tower Automotive, and this strikes me as typically stupid left-wing commie pinko insanity on the part of the unions “protecting” the workers. Tower, as is fairly common knowledge, has been trading under bankruptcy protection since last year. They have to cut costs if they’re going to trade their way out of their financial woe. They want to cut wages and benefits to employees, the unions won’t have a bar of it.

The unions say they’ll go out on strike rather than let Tower cut wages by 23% and if that happens, production at the Ford plant could be jeopardised. The Chicago Tribune is carrying the story, but how happy are thousands of employees at Ford going to be if a good-for-nothing union kills one industry and hurts thousands of people in a client facility?

What will the unions do if Tower goes out of business altogether and those employees find their wages cut by 100% and their entitlements reduced to a bus fare home?

Not happy, Jan, and we mean it.

Rep Brad Hill says…0
Paul Ritchie posted in News on April 4th, 2006

(My comments to Mr Hill’s response are italicized in parentheses.)

Dear Mr. Ritchie,

Thank you for your recent e-mail regarding the different proposals being
floated by the Legislature dealing with the junior operators license. I
believe better education, more experience and more parental involvement
will help our teen drivers become better.

(Without doubt, Mr Hill, without doubt.)

What I am proposing is to increase the hours that are mandated for behind
the wheel experience in driver’s ed from 6 hours to 12 hours. I am also proposing
that the parental driving within the learners permit phase of driving be
increased from 12 hours to 30 hours and that parents fill out a log that
will show that the kids have driven and they must sign the log before
the child can take the road test.

(It’ll work for the honest ones, but I was forging my mother’s signature for
school stuff from the time I was 14. (Homework diary and getting out of sport.)
The news crews will pick that up as quickly as I have. I would hope they see
the point of the exercise is the lives of our teenagers and focus on that positive aspect
rather than take the negative view that it’s just one more impost on those poor old
parents. The experiences of truancy monitors might come in useful here.

Again, I would hope such a system would not be abused, that parents would take
the issue of the safety of their kids seriously enough not to short circuit this system,
but I’m afraid I don’t have that much faith in some of them.

You can lead the horse to water, but you can’t make it drink, and all that. But
having said that, it’s the responsibility of elected representatives to create the
framework, not to see to it that every individual dots their i’s and crosses
their t’s. My apologies for the two metaphors.)

I also propose that we increase the penalties for those who do not obey the child
and time restriction laws. We also need to give the police the tool of a primary
offense in enforcing the current law. The way it is now is that police cannot pull
over these jol offenders without first pulling them over for another
offense.

(Commonsense! It seems absurd to see one offense occuring and not be
able to act on it until another offense has been committed. I hope they see that.)

My proposal also looks at the curriculum of driver ed courses
and how we can make change to better educate our young drivers.

(The first thing my driving instructor told me was he will teach me to get my
license and that getting my license and actual driving are two different things.
It would be a good move to do something about that mindset.)

I do have some concerns with the proposal that is being forwarded by the
Committee on increasing the age to 17 1/2. The Studies I have seen show
that the more experienced the driver the better he or she is. I feel by
increasing the age may give an incentive for kids not to take drivers ed
and therefore would have no experience or education before getting ones
license.

(Good point, though I’m inclined to disagree. I’m afraid I don’t
put a great deal of stock in driver ed classes, but I’m happy to defer to your
experience on that point. It seems 17 being the mid point may turn out to
be the compromise which is reached.)

Please know that I am working with the Leadership of the House and
Senate on this issue and I believe working together that a bill that we
can be proud of will make its way to the Governor’s desk for his
signature. Thank you for your comments on this issue and if I can be of
further assistance to you do not hesitate to contact me.

Sincerely,

Rep. Hill

I would like to point out that so far, Mr Hill is the only representative who has
contacted me and I’m taking this opportunity to express my thanks. I will also
go on record as saying I knew Mr Hill’s position before I contacted him by email
to offer support for his position and coverage in this blog. Yep, I’m biased as a lawn
bowl on this issue and unashamedly so. Mr Hill did not make any comment about
coverage or this blog, as you see. The reply he sent has been posted here in its entirety
and unedited.

Mondayitis0
Paul Ritchie posted in News on April 3rd, 2006

I just thought I’d tell you about my adventures in peak hour traffic going home from work on a stinking hot afternoon on a Monday.

Four lanes of bumper to bumper traffic going absolutely nowhere and even with the air conditioner on, the sun coming through the windows is making every square nanometer of exposed skin morph into pork crackling while I listen to it.

It’s days like this, except there has never been a day like this, I feel like just getting out of the car, finding the nearest McDonalds and comparing my burger with the one in the picture on the wall over the high school drop-out’s head.

But, of course, I don’t because (among other reasons) I’m not Michael Douglas.

But the stereo is noticeably unfriendly. My favorite tracks are marvelous when I’m driving, I could listen to them for ever. When I’m driving. When the only thing moving is the heat haze from the tops of the endless otherwise stationary river of cars in front of me, my favorite tape starts to give me the unmistakably sinister impression of conspiring with the traffic and Ra the dashboard splitting sun god to mock me as I slowly broil in my own perspiration.

The alternative is listening to KRUD Yet 99.9 FM where the dj who thinks he’s it and a bit reminds me it’s hot outside and a bad day to be stuck in traffic, but I should stay tuned because coming up there is going to be 20 minutes of ad-free hit music courtesy of Burnham, Black & Ashe Barbecues, the hottest shots in the cook-out business. That’s right, no ads, but they’re going to tell me loudly and with as much sincerity as a “Welcome” sign on the door of Slickfingered Sam’s Clip Joint that this is 20 minutes ad free until I’m begging for ads to break the monotony of being told it’s ad free so many times.

Despair sets in and as my eyes wander, movement in the rear view mirror catches my eye and my sensibilities are assailed with the realization the guy in the car behind me has his index finger buried two knuckles deep in his left nostril and it looks like he’s trying to tighten a loose screw or adjust the height of his left eyebrow.

Dear God, no.

Stuck in traffic, heat haze threatening to hypnotize me into a coma, an autolobotomist behind me trying to disembowel his head, hits coming out of the radio that I’ve never heard before in my life (ad free) my tape even less attractive, with mounting despair, I turn the air-con fan to maximum and stereo off altogether. It’s bad enough having one station play song after song of obscure rubbish interspersed with Fozzie Bear on crystal meth and extreme smugness pills, but station surfing the radio is worse than channel surfing the television.

Over the dull hum of my car’s motor, I can hear the dull thudding of the stereo coming from the car next to me. Naturally, I cast my eyes in the direction of the thumpity thump and there’s a mid to late 40s something guy tapping the steering wheel gently in sync with the beat. I think it slowly dawns on me because of the difficulty I am having coping with this nightmare I’m living. Had I been relaxed, it would have struck me as fairly funny. The guy is tapping merrily away to Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.”

How sweet.

“And that was the latest chart topper from the new grunge band Avril Lavigne Eats Worms with “Fry Your Eyeballs”, and watch out for the new CD coming out on Thursday at your local Rocksnot Music store. You’re listening to K, R U Dead Yet, it’s 99.9 degrees outside and a cool 65 in the studio as we rock your afternoon on the way home with 20 minutes of back to back hits, ad free….”

I can hear that from the car to my left. The girl with a purple stripe in her hair and 16 bits of metal in her face starts fighting with her seat belt for permission to headbutt the steering wheel to the next ‘hit’ to be totally forgotten in 3 short weeks.

(I think the guy behind me has just brought forth a nose monument big enough to have its own social security number.)

In my distraction, some jerk has squeezed their stationwagon into the space in front of me.

Just when I think things couldn’t possibly get worse, there are two kids sitting in those seats that face backwards. They’re staring straight at me. This just isn’t fair. Nobody offends God that badly. Not by error or omission anyway. I must somehow change lanes like 5 minutes ago.

The headbanger chick next to me on one side has edged up to within one quarter of an inch from the back of the guy in front of her. Well that must have been pure chance. The middle aged woman in drag on the other side of me - the one pretending to be a man listening to “I Will Survive” on repeat - is trying not let anyone else know she’s tending her eyebrows in the mirror. The facial expression, however, is a dead giveaway. It’s the same look I make when I’m eating something that’s way too hot and I think going “Huhhh Huhhh” is somehow going to save the top of my mouth from third degree burns.

Perhaps if I smile nicely and express my interest in getting my car into her lane, she might just be accomodating of my need. If only she’d leave her face alone so I could catch her eye.

The kids stare blankly. Maybe they’re just convincing looking manequins.

The guy picking winners behind me appears to be thinking he’s giving birth to twins, or he’s found a baseball in there…

The psychedelic headbanging android woman next to me continues to go completely nuts and…

I just realized I’ve left my ThinkPad at the office and I need to pee.

In 35 minutes, I appear to have traveled the best part of a mile, though it feels more like 17 feet.

There’s an exit not 100 yards ahead and I put my indicator on. It’s amazing how many trees a man notices when he can’t actually get to one.

But I’m sure I have an empty soft drink bottle on the floor behind the passenger’s seat amongst the burger wrappers, chip packets and Coke cans.

So, nonchantly I begin the back seat fish. Easing down in my seat slightly, looking at anything but the two kids in front, my hand lights on several items of indeterminate nature before finding that blessed cylinder of plastic which I bring to the front. The kids continue to stare at me but they can’t see what I have in my hand. Headbanger girl hasn’t missed a beat and the she-man has produced a pair of tweezers and a compact mirror and is tending his/her eyebrows with more conviction now. God only knows what the nasal fruit picker behind me is doing, I’m too disgusted to look and morbidly fascinated with what I’m about to do next.

I remove the lid from my soft drink bottle, cursing the fact I didn’t get one of those sports drinks with the big opening. It’s just one of those half inch jobs. Too bad. Still slouching and trying to look nonchalant, I suck in my guts and ease the lidless bottle into my trousers and down my right leg.

The traffic inches forward and the make-up man has graciously allowed me to get in front of him. Either that or she/he wasn’t looking. I take advantage of the space, nevertheless. However, tactically, this was a bad move. Those kids are now next to me, they’re still eyeing me steadfastly and it doesn’t appear they’ve so much as blinked for the last 12 minutes.

I have an empty soft drink bottle in my pants and it’s getting to the stage I really need to get a connection happening with it before I have a single vehicle accident whilst stationary in traffic. So I edge close into the door to obscure any activity from their view. Now I’m ready to start the docking manouevres.

Yes, there’s the top of the bottle, now hold steady. For the benefit of those two guards, I give the impression I’m listening to classical music allowing myself to get completely relaxed. They can’t see what my other hand is doing and I doubt they can see the sweat building on my brow.

It’s gotta be an exact fit though or else I’ll flood the driver’s seat of the car, so with much prodding and poking and twisting to make absolutely sure I’m in the right place, I’m as satisfied as I can be that all is well and, to the relief of my lower abdomen, I let it rip. Success! I can hear the bottle filling.

Fast.

Um… yeah, how full before it overflows?

Can’t wait to find out, time to shut off the flow and so with what amounts to super human strength, I clench every muscle in my body. Hell, even my ears have pinned themselves back with the strain. Finally it’s over.

Now all that remains is to get the bottle out of my pants without spilling it. I was slightly slouched in my seat before, but in order to get the bottle to a reasonable level of perpendicularity, I had to sort of arch up in the middle so it could fit sort of underneath me a bit. It meant I had to jam my foot into the brake pedal, but I wasn’t going anywhere anyway so that didn’t matter. All of a sudden, we are moving again and I have to do something about it. Jamming my left leg into the floor to hold myself up, I bend my right knee slightly to ease the pressure on the brake pedal. The trouble is, it looks like I’m trying to get a basketball out from underneath me and those two kids are right up next to me now and they might as well be sitting next to me.

I’ve got one hand on that bottle but that’s not what it looks like from their point of view, and they appear to have told their mother in much lurid language. She’s got the window down and is craning out of it screaming some sort of barrage of obscenities at me and that’s attracted the attention of everyone else as well. The whole world, it seems, is looking at me all arched up in the driver’s seat of my car with my hand gripping an unholy bulge in the front of my pants.

I can’t move that bottle quickly and safely in this condition, there’s only one thing for it before I get to panic stations, and that’s to get the lid back on it while it’s still in there.

So I grab the lid, throw my other hand inside my pants and fumble for the top of the bottle which I’m holding from the outside. The kids are ecstatic - they’ve busted a pervert. Their mother is on her cellphone screaming at it, and looking at me. I’ve dropped the damn lid.

I’m still gripping the top of the bottle with my right hand, but I’ve had to reach around the back of me to find that wretched lid and that involved a lot of squirming on my part, the sweat is now running down my forehead and dripping off my nose. Finally I find the lid, withdraw my arm from the back, shove it back down the front and manage to secure the bottle. Sod it, it can just stay where it is until I’m somewhere a lot more private. After that several minutes of frantic activity, I let my body relax completely so I can get on with the task of getting myself home. I grab a napkin from the glove compartment and wipe my brow. I even light up a cigarette.

Those kids look serious now. Their fun appears to be over and their mother is ready to chew a hole in my car to tear me limb from limb. For twenty minutes as we crawl along the highway, that woman is cursing me. She didn’t get out of her car and actually try to assault me though, maybe she thought I might have a gun - who knows.

I’m at a turn off point and I take it. In the blessed mercy of a side street, I remove the bottle from my pants and turn the radio on and they’re telling motorists to be on the lookout for a bronze Ford Taurus with MY LICENSE PLATE, that the police are going to want to talk to me about some indecent behavior involving her two kids.

WTF?

In a moment of outrage, I call the radio station and tell them straight up, I was peeing in a bottle I had stuffed down my trousers, and if they like, I’ll mail it to them. A shortish conversation ensues during which the person on the other end finds much about which to be amused and I think finally I can make the rest of my journey home in relative peace and quiet. Ten minutes later, as I pull into my driveway, a new broadcast goes out to the effect of the conversation I had with the operator at the radio station and I’m made out to be the ultimate in unfortunate fools.

At least I’m not a criminal pervert anymore. That’s one thing. I just wonder what the people at work are going to say to me the next day.

Oh, and the cause of the traffic hold-up? A cute blonde broke down in her Corvette and 28 guys stopped to help her put water in her radiator. Who said chivalry is dead…

A fishy smell?0
Paul Ritchie posted in News on March 31st, 2006

Ok, moving right along, bio-diesel is the third of four alt.fuel items about which I’m curious. You have to have been paying attention almost right from the start if you’re going to guess what the fourth is.

Basically, bio-diesel is filtered waste cooking oil. As long as there are donuts, you’ll never run out of juice again. For every Chinese restaurant that opens in your neighborhood, that’s another 600 miles per week of environmentally non-hostile driving you can do.

Now, because I was just at Reuters getting the low-down on ethanol, I searched their archives for the latest on bio-diesel and though articles weren’t nearly as plentiful as those on ethanol, one at which I looked amused me not a little for its scope of pure ambition. I mean this is oops-there-goes-another-rubber-tree-plant, high apple pie in the sky hopes kinda stuff. But anyone that ballsy deserves more respect than any humble blog will ever be able to bestow.

I’ve emailed the people behind this monumentally upstartish start-up and if all this is beginning to sound like free plugging, consider yourselves lucky I’m not doing a music blog, because I’d be thumping out Chris Brown news like there were no other musicians on the planet if that were the case. It’s stories like this that restore my faith in the future of… well everything really. It’s just gold medal winning gumption and frankly, it makes my frossets wipple.

No news is good news.0
Paul Ritchie posted in News on March 31st, 2006

Take that any way you like. Is all news bad news? Depends upon which side of the fence you sit. Also depends which fence it happens to be.

Today though, no news is good news for politicians and industrialists and you can take that both ways because there’s both plenty of news and none of it is good for them. Not the traditional industrialists anyway. For those with an eye for adaptation, it’s all good news.

News like this:

While politicians and/or industrialists say that a choice must be made between a healthy job economy and a healthy environment, Americans disagree. In fact, 49.4% of respondents slightly or strongly disagree that low prices and more jobs today are more important than protecting the environment for the future (vs. 15.9% who slightly agree and 5.5% who strongly agree).
(Source: http://www.mrweb.com/drno/news5351.htm)

Where do I sit on all this lefty greenie filibustering?

On the fence of course.

There’s no point harping on about having a clean environment if you can’t put food on the table. There’s also no point harping on about having jobs that make you too sick to work or eat or.. well.. you know.

Wake up, kiddies, there’s no point harping on about anything at all. Look at the problem, come up with a solution and work towards it in whatever way you can. Look for people who think the same as you; they’re out there. Think of homeschooling as just one example.

Now, you can join a rally and bitch at the government with 500,000 other people about anything you want, but the only language politicians (and industrialists) understand is money. When the price of oil hit $40 per barrel, a world wide conspiracy hit the internet. They called it “Don’t fill up day.”

They told us to fill up a day or two before “Don’t fill up day” so we wouldn’t be left high and dry, but the economic impact of hundreds of millions of people not filling up their tanks would ring some pretty serious alarm bells. The pollies and oil execs played it down, but they were scared. How dare consumers actually act in concert as a protest against being screwed on a day-to-day basis. How rude!

Now, I made a brief mention two days ago of a Reuters report which basically said the ethanol industry is pumping out its alternative to fossil fuel as fast as it can and is struggling to keep up with demand.

This is what Reuters said on the 29th:

Concerns about supplies of ethanol, a corn-based additive which refiners will blend into gasoline instead of MTBE to reduce smog, have also helped support markets.

Producers are ramping up ethanol output to meet the growing demand, but the EIA said supplies could be tight during the U.S. summer season, when gasoline demand rises as vacationers take to the road.
(Source: Reuters (The link is 4 lines long, you don’t need the whole thing.)

One day earlier, they had this to say about ethanol production:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. ethanol fuel makers “will be able to adequately supply ethanol to the markets that need it,” an industry trade group said on Tuesday, trumpeting another monthly record in output.

(Source: Reuters 1 day earlier)

I’m a bit unhappy about the figures quoted by Reuters. Someone’s not paying attention. The RFA, according to Reuters, is talking about producing 4.5 billion gallons of ethanol from the 97 operational production facilities. Gallons, not barrels. (A barrel contains 42 gallons.)

As I mentioned last week, motorists slurp through that much oil every fortnight. When the ethanol industry can start producing in terms of billions of barrels, the greenies can celebrate while the rest of us sit back and wonder what we’re supposed to do with trillions of surplus jumbo packets of Corn Flakes.

Ok, I’m getting a tad carried away here. Ethanol is just one of the alternatives to fossil fuel. Hydrogen is still in its infancy but it will, I believe, supercede ethanol because nobody wants every square inch of spare land turned into cornfields - no matter how excited the Amish get.

Another day, another hmm.0
Paul Ritchie posted in News on March 29th, 2006

First up, Orien Greene arrested and charged, driving 90 mph in a suburban Boston street.

After the headlines of the last two days, I just have not the words. None I care to repeat here anyway.

Stunts like that and cupidity? Bin ‘em.

Reading over the most recent entry to this blog, it seems I may have given the impression of a major left wing bent with an almost surreal tinge of green about it. It ain’t so. I’m a token gesture greenie. I reuse plastic bags by taking the ones I already have when I go shopping, I turn lights off when I don’t need them immediately and I’ll walk, rather than drive to the shops.

I don’t get worked up over pandas or glaciers or obscure beetles that live under rocks in far flung corners of Patagonia. I don’t get excited when some species makes a comeback and I don’t coo and gaa over pictures of small furry creatures. To me, if it’s smaller than a sequoia, it’s a weed and if it’s smaller than a leopard, it’s an insect. Fish don’t exist.

I get moved by mankind. I love it when someone achieves something or creates something. Right now, I wish we had ethanol cars yesterday. I mean lots of them. I really want ethanol cars on the road and nobody is paying me diddly squat to say so. I so badly want ethanol cars on the road, you have no idea. I want them so badly because every time I go hunting for information on new technology to do with the automotive industry, I get stuck in the eye with that P word.

Ethanol supremacy means P extinction and that’ll be a date to celebrate. P is a gas/electricity hybrid. Not an ethanol or ethanol/gas hybrid.

I have nothing against Toyota per se, let’s be clear on this. The MR2 is a nifty little beast and Landcruisers, especially those dirty big khaki things they drive around in African Safari films, they’re brilliant. I really like them because they run on diesel and if you think I’m enthusiastic about ethanol and hydrogen, I’m ecstatic about diesel developments. Those 5 cars that outdid the Prius in Germany last week were all diesel/electric hybrids.

Fancy having the temerity to test cars on the open road instead of the tv studio type thing! How was the poor Prius supposed to compete with *ahem* reality.

Anyway, following on from Sunday’s bit about the driving age, I’ve emailed half of Massachusetts with my opinion on that one, from the Governor’s office to the Boston Globe and anyone else I could find. The replies and subsequent discussions which went to and fro centered around two issues - driver education and experience versus the maturity of young hopefuls hoping to pilot their very own missiles.

Knowing the disinclination of parents to spend one minute more with their kids than the law requires is the deciding factor for me. I’ve had kids asking me to drive with them so they could get their hours up because their parents wouldn’t. Bear in mind, these are kids I’ve known most of their lives, so it’s not like I’m a stranger to them. Do I let them drive my car? Absolutely.

It staggers me the parents are more worried about what their kids might do to my car than anything else. They trust me more than they trust their own kids. What the hell is up with that?

So for all those with whom I’ve discussed this issue who’ve made clickage upon links I’ve left and now find yourselves here, when you can tell me parents are bursting at the seems to sit quietly in the passengers’ seats of their own cars while their kids gain that all important life saving experience, then I’ll back you up if you want to lower the age to 15. I agree 100% the main issue is driver education and experience for our kids. I couldn’t agree more. But the reality is too many of them can’t get it and unless that experience can be guaranteed, I won’t be happy knowing 16 year olds are unleashed and killing themselves. Somehow, I think parents can’t accept the fact their little darlings are that old already. Nearly 18 is almost an adult, 16 is not even half way through puberty.

It didn’t kill me waiting until I was 21 to get my license and that was by choice, not by law. I won’t say I was more mature than any of the younger drivers who got theirs the first day they were able, one look around my other blogs will confirm that. But I’d been in accidents when my friends were driving and I was well cured of the need to speed or act like Batman by the time I decided I did need my license.

The difference between a safe trip home and a fatal accident is less than half a second.

They did it1
Paul Ritchie posted in News on March 28th, 2006

Well, GM has turned its engineering department on its head and on the street.

The Detroit Free Press tells a very sad tale. Associated Press provides the whole story, but as soon as GM denied it would happen, we all knew it was a foregone conclusion.

With management practices like that, is it any wonder the company lost 10.6 billion in the last 12 months?

Oh the stories I’ve told over 5 years of blogging…

Reuters says it’s crunch time for the ethanol industry with farmers, it seems, unable to meet the increasing demand for crops necessary to supply the industry. (Just thought I’d drop that in, since everyone’s concerned about the rising price of gasoline.)

Anyway, I’m well overdue with the continuing saga of alternative fuels, bubbling away amid all these side issues and just to show you against what I have to struggle to bring you the best info available, whilst poking around Associated Press for the GM update, I had a look for hydrogen fuel news. What’s the latest, according to Associated Press…

Climate analysts do believe that water vapor in the atmosphere — mostly due to natural evaporation from bodies of water — is already contributing significantly to climate change. According to the International Panel on Climate Change, atmospheric water vapor exacerbates warming caused by the emission of fossil fuels by as much as 50 percent.

However, the additional water vapor that might be created by millions of fuel-cell vehicles running on hydrogen — while it may sound like a lot — would constitute only a drop in the bucket compared to that which naturally occurs.

How tempted they were to say “a drop in the ocean” instead of a drop in the bucket is anyone’s guess. I wouldn’t have gone near that similie in the first place.

In news only 5 hours old at the time of my writing this, fresh out of Minsk if you don’t mind, “Iceland plans to become the world’s first all-hydrogen economy by 2030.” I have to cast a wry smile here. Minsk is in the news for more dire reasons than posting news about Iceland’s economy. It’s the capital of Belarus, into which Dubya has stormed because of rigged elections which I blogged elsewhere about 10 days ago and again last night.

Here’s the whole snippet:

Issues around energy infrastructure are raised in the technology card set and the question is asked: When will petroleum disappear from our energy maps? In 2004 fuel cells began to replace batteries in some portable electronic devices. It is predicted that hydrogen will start being used as a back up power source in remote locations, and in industrial and large commercial buildings over the next two to three years. By 2008, hydrogen could power specialised fleets of vehicles such as buses. By 2015, hydrogen-fuelled cars might be available to the mass market. Source: http://home.nestor.minsk.by/build/news/2006/03/2803.html

It seems like an eternity ago I brought you the news “a hydrogen-powered version of BMW’s current 7 Series will be on showroom floors within two years.” The source for this quote is South African, but what the hey. BMW are denying it so that means it’s going to happen, predictably when suppliers of hydrogen fuel get their acts together. Source: http://motoring.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=3169727&fSectionId=&fSetId=381

I also mentioned the other day Mazda have released the street version of the hydrogen fueled RX8. What I didn’t tell you is they’ve been messing around with hydrogen fuelled cars since 1991.

Why am I as enthusiastic about hydrogen fuelled cars as I am about the future of ethanol fuelled vehicles?

In a word: emissions.

Gasoline usage is making the planet sick. When China gets off its collective bicycle and behind the wheel of its collective Party version of the Lada Niva or whatever, can anyone envisage the pollution the world’s most populous nation is going to create? Sheesh. Maybe Duncan Armstrong can persuade them it’s not such a hot idea.

Did I mention emissions? Yeah? How about glaciers? Just to give you an idea how much the geological, meteorological and all those others with a slightly green bent are fretting over global warming, go to google and search glaciers. There are just too many sources to name, the good ones less than a week old, cowing on about disappearing glaciers due to warmer air and sea temperatures.

Glacier National Park in Montana had 150 glaciers 150 years ago, now they’re down to 26. A change of name is in the offing there, methinks. The Park formerly known as Glacier Park will now give you its very own rendition of Purple Rain.

Hmmm…

Ok, so what’s the real story on hydrogen today? Not all that easy to determine because so many people are having their say on the matter and about a dozen sources are all quoting the one example, that of Schwarzenegger failing to refuel next to LAX after hopping about the hydrogen highway in August of last year. Even Iran Daily is reporting that story verbatim from its orginal source.

This little number appeared in Littlespeck.com way back in 2004, which was when I first started getting interested in hydrogen fuel, having put aside water as a substitute for gasoline a lot of years earlier.

“By the middle of this century, all Icelanders will be required to run their cars only on hydrogen fuel, meaning no more gasoline.

Do you think I can find anything to back this up?

But once again, it’s 4am and maybe the road ahead is getting out of focus. I’ll be back tomorrow hopefully with more news on hydrogen fuel. Something more definitive. I can’t wait ’til I start delving into water as fuel.

Oh yay.

Driving age news.2
Paul Ritchie posted in News on March 26th, 2006

Ok, so I lied about calling it a day at the end of the last entry. Only because a final check of emails found the late edition of The Boston Globe leading with the story of raising the minimum age for the holding of a driver’s license to 17 1/2 years.

Where I’m from, it’s 18. And even then they’re on pretty stringent restrictions for the first 2 years. One passenger maximum, unless accompanied by a fully licensed driver, zero blood alcohol content for the first two years, demerit points for speeding are doubled, and there is a maximum power-to-weight ratio allowed which, if breeched, can lead to the confiscation of the vehicle.

This is a personal bug-bear with me. Having seen many kids grow up and show off their new wheels to me over the years, I remind them, as any responsible adult would, to be careful on the road. They assure me they’re good drivers - as any teenager thinks they are. That’s when I tell them most earnestly, they could be the best driver on the face of the planet, but it’s those 4 million idiots out there whose sole purpose in life is to wipe you out - they’re the one’s of whom you have to be careful.

Lately, I’ve started telling them that all road builders are the ultimate in slack lazy toerags. They lay a bit of bitumen and think the job’s done. You onlyhave to look at all the car-scarred trees at the sides of those roads to realize that the bit of bitumen to which you’re entrusting your pride and joy - not to mention your life - is scarcely fit for a goat track.

Teenagers think they’re indestructible, if only they thought of themselves as indispensible, politicians might not have to be falling all over themselves imposing driving limitations. One method of tackling the problem which has been adopted in my burg is the concept of driver education before a kid even gets a licence.

Previously, all you had to do was know the road rules and prove you could control a car. Now you have to know what to do in an emergency situation, whether that’s when some duffer pulls out in front of you without looking or how to assist injured persons if you are involved in a stack.

Previously, you could apply for your learner’s permit at 17 years, 9 months and you only had to have your Ls for a minimum of 3 months and have had a minimum number of driving lessons in that time. Now you can get your learner’s permit at 17 but you can’t drive without a fully licensed driver in the vehicle and you have to have had your Ls for 12 months before you can go for your probationery license.

Harsh?

Humbug. Take them for a walk through any hospital trauma ward and see how many times you hear the words “I didn’t think it could happen to me.” Then come back and tell me what’s harsh and what’s just a bit inconvenient.

This is the sort of driver education campaign we’ve had in my neck of the woods for more than a decade:

TAC Media releases

These ads are quite often made by high school drama classes. Trust me, they work.

Another week at the wheel…0
Paul Ritchie posted in News on March 26th, 2006

Very very - no, make that HUGELY pleased to see Prius outperformed in the fuel economy stakes by no less than 5 vehicles after testing in Europe on - of all things - actual roads instead of dynamometers. Let’s just be absolutely clear on this; Prius didn’t outperform the others by a margin of 5 cars, that’s absurd. Prius was only 6th in the rankings of green cars of all those tested.

Saab reckon they’re going to have the greenest hybrid vehicle in the history of everything by 2010 but nobody doubts Toyota will come up with something better by then. I personally don’t care - as long as it’s not the next generation Prius. Anyway, the new Saab hybrid will be on display at the Stockholm Motor Show next month. Being somewhat enamored of the old Saabs, before Chrysler took them over and turned them into the EuroToyota generic design tinfoil roller skate, I’ll let you know what I think of Scania’s new brainchild.

Old news, but it strikes me as amusing that a particular corporate website, replete with messageboard appears not to have had any activity since 9/2005 and they haven’t updated the site - it looks like - since 2003. Most amusing to me is the appearance of 3 job advertisements. I feel like applying for one, just for the hell of it. Then again, the old saying applies; if it looks and smells like an old prawn cocktail, don’t ask it onto the dancefloor.

I also love it when someone poses a stupid question in a message board. “Which is your favorite gas station?”
I’m waiting for someone to say “The one that rips me blind and sells rancid milk.” Personally, I like my gas with artificial sweetener because sugar tends to mess with the engine’s guts something fierce.
Anyway, amongst the highly predictable, Sunoco, Marathon and Getty get the nod.

Courtesy of GM, a new term for mass firings is “Rightsizing”. No longer are we downsizing, issuing redundancies or rationalizing, we’re rightsizing. I wonder, is the opposite of rightsizing “Capsizing”? That’s what it is in maritime language - as any good yachtie would know.

So, GM’s engineering branch in Detroit is expecting to be capsized on Tuesday. GM seems to be denying it. Let’s just see shall we.

Ok, can’t ignore it because it’s all over the blatts like bees on honey… Ford is re-releasing the rent-a-racer.
It’ll be on show at the New York International Motor Show, April 12-13 click here for details

Lastly, because it’s getting on for 3 in the morning and it’s highly likely I’ll start swearing if I get any more bluff and bluster from the internet based automotive interest websites, the absolute latest news from autospies.com is, at the time of my writing this, already a day old.

For example, they haven’t caught up yet with Mazda’s release of “the first street legal gasoline-hydrogen hybrid vehicle, the new RX-8″. Should I tell them or just leave that as an example of Auto Boston one-upmanship? Here’s your linkage.

Heh.. you sleep, I’ll find stuff out so it’s ready for you when you wake up.