Category - General

The Guardian reports that the Nissan Leaf electric car has gone on sale in the UK.

Let’s just remind ourselves what the spec on the car is:

• 110 miles range per charge (claimed)
• more like 80 miles range on test drives
• 8 hours to charge from home mains
• ½ hour to charge to 80% capacity on a fast charger
• too many fast charges will damage the batteries
• try and find a fast charger anywhere at the moment
• batteries will deteriorate year on year anyway, so the range per charge will drop further
• Li-ion batteries in general have a habit of going kaput after 18 months – 6 months outside the warranty period
• a new set of batteries costs around £18,000 – the price of THREE Vauxhall Corsas

OK. So back to the gushing Guardian story, which glosses over these simple facts even though it actually points most of them out in its own blurb! Several people are mentioned by name as having bought a Leaf:

Mark Goodier, the Smooth Radio DJ, is one of the first. “The great thing about electric cars is that the fuel distribution is already in place,” he said. “We all have mains electricity at home. We have it at work and councils are already working on how to install thousands of charging points at the roadside. You can see why electric vehicles make such sense, particularly in towns and cities.”

Yes. As long as you don’t do more than 80 miles, or sit for too long in a traffic jam, can resist the temptation to turn on the aircon in the hot weather, don’t need to nip to Tescos when you get home or take the kids to football practice, and can then wait for 8 hours before using it again… electric cars are brilliant.

Richard Todd, a silicon chip designer from St Albans, used to drive a Toyota Prius, a hybrid half-electric and half-petrol car. “As an engineer I have always wanted an electric car – I’ve just had to wait for the battery technology to arrive,” he said. “Hybrids are good but the driving experience of an all-electric vehicle is way beyond this.”

Hellooooo! Mr Chip Designer… an 80 mile range is NOT a sign that “battery technology has arrived”. That will only be when the range is nearer 500 miles per charge.

Having said all that, the fact that it costs around £2 to fully charge the thing (equivalent to about £10 for the same mileage on a tank full of petrol) is attractive. Just a shame about all the other problems.

I can’t wait until someone’s battery goes flat while they’re stuck in traffic.

EDIT 31/3/2011: Autoblog’s gushing “first drive” totally fails to mention the restrictions set by the 80 mile usable range, or the effect “climate control” has on the range. Or, for that matter, the effect the reviewer’s heavy foot on said range.

Yes, of course you do! This article in getwokingham made me smile.

All it is is a story about two learners who have won 30 hours of driving lessons each. That’s ALL it is – unless you listen to the driving school who put up the prize, for whom it is a major advertising exercise.

At [big-headed school in question] we have a slightly different way of learning which aims to help people develop their driving skills rather than just pass the test.

If I had £1 for every driving school – single- or multi-car – which has claimed this, I’d be able to retire.

Let’s just set the record straight on a few points. Every ADI is self-employed, and the way they teach is purely down to them. So no school or franchise can claim that all of its instructors are identical, because they aren’t. Nor could they ever be.

An ADI might be taught to teach a certain way by his instructor, but once he is out teaching he will develop his own style. Simple fact.

In exactly the same way, learner drivers will do the same once they pass their tests.

Every driving school in existence is there to teach people to pass the test – that’s because there is a test that must be passed, and that creates a market for people who can teach you how to do it.

Like everything else in life, learning new things is merely a stepping stone to further development. When a child learns to write, they quickly learn to express themselves in ways that are specific to them. They don’t just learn to write the alphabet and nothing else – they apply their knowledge and develop new skills independently of anyone else. This is one of the miracles of the human brain.

Driving is the same. If people are taught appropriately – I’ll leave the word “correctly” to the idiot school in the article – then they are given all the necessary tools to carry on developing. They do not need showing how to use them in every conceivable situation. Anyone who thinks they do – like the school in the article is implying it does – is not as clever as they think they are.

A few ADIs out there take things to extremes, of course, and only drive test routes. Of course, I’m sure the school in question is going to drive miles and miles away from test routes during those 30 hours the two learners have won.

The bottom line back in the real world is that someone somewhere has donated around £1,500 worth of free lessons and got their company splashed all over a newspaper. It would cost a lot more than £1,500 to do that through normal advertising.

Oh, yes. And they are driving instructors like most others. They teach people to drive.

And one final thing. One of the prize winners said:

I was really surprised and shocked to find out I had won. It will save me a lot of money, well, it will save my dad a lot of money.

So like every other learner out there, her main priority is to spend as little as possible in order to get her licence.

So it matters little that the driving school claims that it “does things differently”. The only “different” thing any school can do to get people to become safer drivers than they would otherwise be is to get them to take more and more lessons. Because experience only comes with driving time.

Making them take more lessons is a certain way of making them go to a different school – it happens all the time when people know they aren’t being taught quickly, and end up spending too much time parked up and yapping away.

Still, it was a nice advert for them.

I saw this story about a new traffic calming measure in the Watford Observer.

This Google Maps image shows the feature (BEFORE it was modified, judging from the descriptions in the article):

The restriction in question used to be 236cm wide, and it had a single post either side. After being modified, it is now 213cm wide, and it has three posts on each side.

The question you have to ask is why was it made  narrower?

Apparently, numerous cars have been damaged – some can’t even get through it – and at least two are in the process of suing the council.

It is also on a driving test route.

The article points out:

On the day it was re-opened, police were forced to close the road while engineers came back to shorten the steel posts, which had knocked the wing mirrors off dozens of cars.

So it was poorly installed even in the first place. This should automatically lead you to at least consider that it might have been poorly installed in other ways, or that it was perhaps poorly conceived at some point. The fact that it is causing so many problems surely points to something being wrong somewhere.

…several drivers have continued to hit the shortened posts, with one engineer admitting one in ten vehicles are being damaged by the obstacle.

There comes a point when you can’t keep blaming the motorist. When 10% of them are experiencing the same problem, maybe you have found that point?

Unless you are a council held by this Mickey Mouse coalition we have at the moment.

The problem seems to be that the restriction is now not so much a bottleneck as a channel – the three posts either side mean you have to drive in a precise line over a finite distance instead of just at a single point, so you have to be absolutely parallel with the kerb as well as more equally spaced either side to negotiate the 23cm narrower gap – and you have to maintain it over several metres.

But here’s where it gets really funny. It’s the part where the Mickey Mouse councillors try to justify it:

Council bosses claim the work, costing £18,000, was carried out to save them money repairing the previous posts.

A resident points out that all six of the new posts are already damaged.

The police say they have had reports of drivers hitting the posts as well as of them using the bus lane in the middle. Ah yes, the bus lane – I wonder if that is any wider than it was before?

Hertfordshire County Councillor Stephen Giles-Medhurst, who sits on the authority’s highways and transport panel, said it was a possibility a camera could be introduced to prevent this.

The Liberal Democrat representative for Central Watford and Oxhey said: “If it continues it is something we could consider.

Wow. What a way for the Mickey Mouse government to save money – spend cash needlessly altering a chicane, end up spending more to maintain it than you did before to contradict your alleged reason for changing it at all, then put a camera in to make sure it isn’t used incorrectly as a result of its rubbish design and build quality!

Giles-Medhurst then reveals his true feelings about those he is supposed to represent:

“I drove my car, a Toyota Prius, through the posts and had no problem. It shouldn’t be an issue unless you misjudge it. I would ask, if you lose you wing mirror, are you driving at the right speed?

“There have been a lot of complaints, particularly from people with cars wider than 7ft, but there are signs up and if you ignore them, you do so at your own risk.”

What a prize moron he is.

In any case, all this is about the bus lane and nothing else. The modification was done for the buses, not motorists or anyone else.

I’m getting a lot of hits at the moment on things like “dangerous adi” and “overtaking adi”.

I’m not sure precisely what the searcher is searching for, but maybe they’re looking for evidence of the silver Renault Scenic (reg no. R511 NRR ) that overtook me at traffic lights last night along Wilford Lane.

The pea-brained driver had decided he or she was going to overtake before a lane merge at Compton Acres, and overtake they were going to – even though there was no room. It’s also worth pointing out that the 30mph speed limit both before and after their idiotic manoeuvre obviously meant nothing to them.

The scary part was the “baby on board” sticker in the back window, and the L plates on the back. There’s every chance it DID have children inside, seeing as it headed off towards Clifton (big surprise). God help whoever it is they’re teaching to drive.

I saw this in yesterday’s press, but the BBC website also covers it.

A pick-up truck went through a puddle of water – and the “puddle” turned out to be a 10 foot-deep hole created by a burst water main washing soil out from under the tarmac.

On first hearing, it sounds amusing – but one of the occupants was taken to hospital with back and leg injuries.

Police said only the size of the vehicle prevented it from being submerged completely (more of the road gave way once they’d entered the hole, so it sounds like it might not even have been there until they drove on to the tarmac which was suspended over nothing). If it had been a smaller car the whole incident could have been tragic.