Called to the bar

Practically every car I've owned since the late '80s has had its tyre pressure - both in the handbook and on the sticker on the door pillar/fuel flap - quoted in the metric 'bar' measurement.

So it puzzles me that every time I use the air line at my local filling station the readout has always been switched to the PSI scale. Why? Are people so wedded to the imperial measurement that they painstakingly convert the metric measure? Or do they just stick 30PSI in because that's what their dad used to do?

I switch it to bar each time and leave it that way, but I've never yet found it on metric. It's only a matter of pressing a button so it's no big deal, but I really would like to know why people do it.

GOM

They've got your number

Has anyone else noticed the number of organisations that seem to have access to your car's registration details nowadays? Obviously the DVLA has always had it, as have the insurance companies to be able to give you online quotes.

But now it's all over the place. Sell a car on eBay and you can enter the registration to bring in the vehicle details. There's even a Castrol site where you can enter your number to find out what kind of oil to buy.

Now, I'm guessing these companies pay for access to the data, so it's making the government money. But isn't it a bit sinister? After all your registration is the only means used to identify your vehicle for enforcement purposes, fines, etc. Shouldn't the details of what type of car belongs to which plate be rather more closely guarded? Doesn't this help the people who clone registrations to avoid congestion charges and the like? Am I being paranoid? You bet!

GOM

Tyred and emotional

Two new tyres needed to get the highly-trained Korean hatchback through its first MOT today. Have got Nexen - not a brand I've ever heard of - but they seem quieter than the OEM Bridgestones on the motorway. Plus at £51 a tyre pretty good value.

A bit of Googling (other search engines are available) reveals that Nexen is South Korea's oldest tyre company and has a joint venture with Michelin. Isn't the Internet wonderful?

If there's anything more to report I'll keep you posted.

Classic diversion

By way of a little light relief here's a photo from the Grumpy Old Motorist's trip to the Silverstone Classic at the end of July.

 

It is, of course a Morris J-van dating from the late 1950s. I used to have a Dinky Toy version as a kid, in Capstan cigarettes livery as I recall -- you'd have social services round for giving kids tobacco branded toys today, how times change!

Click the photo for a higher res version and some other snaps from the event on Flickr.

GOM

Driver aids

Reading a recent issue of Octane magazine (when you get to my age the classic mags always hold more appeal) I was struck by Rowan Atkinson's column in which he said that he never allows friends under the age of 35 to drive his older cars any more.

He argues that modern cars with their plethora of driver aids have meant we now have a generation of drivers who don't know what a car actually feels like. It's an interesting thought. If like the Grumpy Old Motorist you passed your test in the mid 1970s your first car was likely to be something basic and rear-wheel drive, like a Ford Escort -- or in my case a Vauxhall Viva. No power steering, no ABS, no traction control, not even all-round disc brakes.

Crude you might think, but you got to know the feel of the car. You knew that lightening of the steering on a slippery surface or that slither when you braked too hard and locked the wheels. Then when you graduated to your first front-drive hot hatchback in the 1980s you found out about torque steer.

Now it seems our legislators don't trust us to know how to drive so they insist on more and more nannying gizmos to make our cars "safer". The problem is that it can have the opposite effect, if you don't know what the car feels like when it's about to let go you're going to end up having a much bigger accident.

What's the solution? A couple of weeks in a Caterham for every new driver, perhaps?

More seriously we should be worried about where this is taking us in the future. The technology already exists to remotely control a car's speed based on satellite information. That's a horrifying thought. Controlling speed is a key part of the driving task, take that away and people are more likely to lose the full concentration that safe driving demands. Scarier still, knowing that they can't speed drivers are likely to keep their foot to the boards at all times, regardless of weather and traffic conditions. And let's not even think about the circumstances where a burst of extra speed might just save your life. As an interesting aside here, the government's own figures show that since mandatory speed limiters were introduced on lorries deaths of HGV drivers in accidents have increased -- go figure.

Currently our political masters don't have the will to implement this degree of control -- and would lose too much revenue in speeding fines if they did. Let's hope the day never comes when they're persuaded otherwise.

GOM

School's out

With the school holidays coming to an end it seems appropriate to talk about the effect they have on traffic.

Anyone who commutes by road will know that you can knock at least 10% off the journey when the schools are off. I'm not quite sure why this should be - presumably because parents are on the road at different times when they don't have to ferry kids around.

So what's the answer? Compulsory US-style school buses perhaps? Or maybe just change the timings so that schools start earlier or later. I don't know the answer, but given the effect the holidays always have you'd have thought someone would have addressed the issue by now.

GOM