Read the full Hyundai ix35 Review.

©2010 Car Advice | News | Reviews - http://www.caradvice.com.au - All Rights Reserved.

Mazda faced the best kind of car company predicament when it came to re-jigging the Mazda6 for its MY10 mid-life makeover: How do you fix a car that’s not broken … without breaking it?

In fact, the Mazda6 is so ‘not broken’ that it’s one of the best practical, affordable cars you’re ever likely to drive. It’s not an M3 killer, clearly, but it’s a car that won’t cost you the farm, that will do all the conventional running around, and which is also damn satisfying to drive – much better than a family hack has any real right to be.

If you punt it hard on a twisty, demanding back road, you could easily find yourself rounding up a bloke whose just paid twice as much for his BMW or Audi. It’s that good.

Brilliant steering and chassis feedback, high grip levels and a predictable transition from grip to slip – even under extreme pressure – are the 6’s signature strengths. If you’re a real driver, that is. If not, the 6 is just an elegant car that’s extremely well put together, capable and with high levels of equipment.

Fact is, buyers are running away from large cars in droves. (Ford, for example, has seen Falcon sales cut in half in the past 10 years.) And while it seems logical to expect people in this transition to segue into medium-sized cars, they generally don’t. Many jump into SUVs instead, thereby bypassing two of the best cars in the country – the Mazda6 and the Honda Accord Euro.

This pair have been keeping each other honest since their first-generation versions kicked off in the early 21st Century, and of the two, the Mazda6 is available in a significantly wider range of configurations – sedan, hatch and wagon body styles whereas the Euro is sedan-only, and the 6 also offers a diesel engine option, something the folks at Honda have looked into in the past, but haven’t carried across the line yet … at least not Down Under.

Deciphering the Mazda6 model range is at first a little like cracking the code on the Rosetta Stone. The options are: sedan, hatch and wagon bodies in ‘Limited’, ‘Classic’, ‘Touring’, ‘Luxury’, ‘Luxury Sports’, ‘Diesel’ and ‘Diesel Sports’ specification levels. It’s enough to make your head hurt at first glance, but once you come to grips with the caveats on those combinations it’s really not too hard to grasp.

Here goes: Limited is the entry-level trim, available in sedan only. Classic is next, and you can have that in all three body styles, but the wagon is auto only. Touring is a wagon-only, auto-only deal. Luxury is a sedan-only, auto-only deal. Luxury Sports is a hatch-only affair, but you can have either the manual or auto transmissions. Diesel – it’s wagon-only and manual-only, while Diesel Sports is also manual-only, but available only in the hatch.

If you inferred from this complex lineup that there’s no auto option for the diesel, you’d be correct, and that’s a pity because a diesel auto would rock. But the diesel was mainly conceived for Europe, where diesel manual is the flavour du jour, and an auto’s not in the wings for this engine any time soon. Also, the diesel engine’s not available in the sedan – it’s a hatch- or wagon-only deal.

The powertrains are simpler: the mainstay of the range is a 2.5-litre DOHC four cylinder petrol engine that makes 125kW @ 6000rpm and 226Nm @ 4000rpm. In a body that weighs between 1400kg and 1600kg, depending on model, it’s not the speediest option in the market from a standing start, but the performance is far from inadequate. (One of the bugbears with a really well-sorted chassis like this one is that you want more power. If they gave you that, some other weak link would rear its head – torque steer perhaps. There’s always a weak link with every car, dynamically, and with this one it’s outright power delivery.)

You can have a five-speed auto or six-speed manual transmission with the petrol engine – subject to the model-range caveats above. And if you drive like a half-cut psycho on a twisty mountain road you’ll discover that there’s a bit of a gap between second and third in the auto, which a six-speed auto would also fix. It’s not on the shopping list either in the foreseeable future – probably because 99.9 per cent of owners don’t drive like that. It’s absolutely fine for normal driving.

One of the really cool things about using the auto in manual mode is that the downshifts are achieved by nudging the shifter forwards, with the upshifts accomplished by dragging it back (think: BMW). Although this is opposite to the convention used by some other Japanese and Korean entrants, it gives the car even more European flair, as well as making better ergonomic sense.

The diesel is a 2.2-litre four cylinder that makes 132kW @ 3500rpm and 400Nm from 1800-3000rpm, and it comes complete with a catalyzing exhaust filter to trap the undesirable particles. Obviously the diesel’s the pick from an output perspective, provided you’re happy to shift gears manually and search every unfamiliar servo for the lone diesel pump hidden somewhere counter-intuitive…

The best petrol combination for fuel consumption is the Limited manual, which pulls a respectable 8.3L/100km in the ADR combined-cycle test, while the worst is the Touring auto on 8.9. The diesel represents a significant improvement – 5.9L/100km – but you have to offset that against the often-higher up-front fuel cost.

Mazda has done what most car companies do as the referee blows the whistle at half time in the platform’s life. It’s tarted up the car externally with additional garnish, different (lighter) wheels, etc. And the net result in this case is a minor improvement on a car that already ticked all the style boxes. On the inside, the plastics and fabrics are better, and the fit and finish is typical of the best quality the Japanese can achieve. And since the Japanese achieve the best build quality in the world…

The equipment levels are up there, too. In the absence of curing your insomnia by detailing the matrix of which bells and whistles go with each of the seven specification levels, let’s just say the equipment levels are high, considering the price. And it’s a very comfortable car with excellent control and instrument achitecture.

The price? In as much as you can tell these days – seeing as it’s all negotiable at the dealership – the Limited notionally kicks off at $27,310 plus on-roads while the Diesel Sports hatch tops the range off at $42,815 plus on-roads. Which is pretty sharp.

There are a few quirks, however: On the plus side, metallic paint is a no-cost option. So, in terms of the auto industry’s average Dickensian mindset of slapping you with a fee – often a fee you can’t jump over – for the silver (or whatever) paint, Mazda gets a big tick there.

Then there’s the sat-nav, however, which is (Are you sitting down?) a staggering $2800 option. And okay, it includes a seven-inch touchscreen, voice activation, Bluetooth (and Bluetooth music streaming) and Whereis Sensis maps (but isn’t hooked up to a reversing camera, which isn’t available even though many other Japanese cars offer this). Mazda says the high-priced sat-nav is available because some buyers demand it. And I guess if I could sell GPS to the public at 10 times the price of a Tom Tom, I’d probably leave journalism and do that all day long. From a base in Monaco.

The bottom line: Mazda6 V Accord Euro – a pretty tough call if you’re in the market for a sedan, but a no-brainer if you want a hatch, a wagon or a diesel. Drive one, and go figure that anyone still buys a Camry.

2010 Mazda6 Pricing & Specifications

Mazda6 Limited (sedan from $27,310*)

• 2.5-litre in-line four cylinder 16 valve DOHC petrol engine with 125kW and 226Nm
• Six-speed manual or five-speed Activematic transmission
• Front-wheel drive
• Air-conditioning, cruise control, MP3-compatible CD-player with four speakers, aux-in jack for MP3 player, power windows and mirrors, remote central locking, tilt and telescopic adjustable steering wheel and variable intermittent wipers, 16-inch steel wheels with 205/60 tyres, chrome exhaust extensions, body kit with front and rear aero bumpers and side skirts
• Anti-lock Braking System (ABS), Dynamic Stability Control (DSC), Traction Control System (TCS), Emergency Brake Assist (EBA), Emergency Brake-force Distribution (EBD), Hill Launch Assist (HLA) (manual only), front, side and curtain SRS airbags, active front head restraints

Mazda6 Classic (sedan from $31,750*; hatch from $32,750*; wagon from $35,050*)

• 2.5-litre in-line four cylinder 16 valve DOHC petrol engine with 125kW and 226Nm
• Six-speed manual (sedan and hatch) or five-speed Activematic transmissionMazda6 Limited equipment plus auto headlamps on/off, Bluetooth® phone connectivity, dual-zone climate control air-conditioning, leather wrapped steering wheel, wipers with rain sensing function, MP3 compatible six-disc in-dash CD player with six speakers, steering wheel mounted audio controls, trip computer with current and average fuel consumption, fuel range, average speed and speed alert
• Newly designed 17-inch alloy wheels with 215/50 tyres and front fog lamps

Mazda6 Diesel (wagon from $36,250*)

• 2.2-litre in-line four-cylinder 16 valve DOHC intercooled turbodiesel engine with 132kW and 400Nm
• Six-speed manual transmission
• Equivalent equipment level to Mazda6 Classic

Mazda6 Touring (wagon from $38,120*)

• 2.5-litre in-line four cylinder 16 valve DOHC petrol engine with 125kW and 226Nm
• Five-speed Activematic transmission
• Mazda6 Classic equipment plus leather seat trim, seats (front) with three-position memory function and eight-way power adjustment (driver) and four-way power adjustment (passenger), parking sensors (front and rear)

Mazda6 Luxury (sedan from $40,905*)

• 2.5-litre in-line four cylinder 16 valve DOHC petrol engine with 125kW and 226Nm
• Five-speed Activematic transmission
• Mazda6 Touring equipment plus: sports grille, blackout instrument cluster, leather wrapped gearshift knob, paddle shift gear control, power sliding and tilt glass sun-roof, rear view mirror with auto dimming function, premium Bose® 240 watt amplifier with eight speakers, LED rear lamps, xenon headlamps

Mazda6 Luxury Sports (hatch from $41,415*)

• 2.5-litre in-line four cylinder 16 valve DOHC petrol engine with 125kW and 226Nm
• Six-speed manual or five-speed Activematic transmission
• Mazda6 Luxury equipment plus rear spoiler, aluminium pedals and footrest, bi-xenon headlamps with Adaptive Front-lighting System (AFS), updated 18-inch alloy wheels with 225/45 tyres

Mazda6 Diesel Sports (hatch from $42,815*)

• 2.2-litre in-line four-cylinder 16 valve DOHC intercooled turbodiesel engine with 132kW and 400Nm
• Six-speed manual transmission
• Equivalent equipment level to Mazda6 Luxury Sports without power sliding and tilt glass sun-roof

Satellite Navigation Option ($2800*)

• Available on Luxury, Luxury Sports and Diesel Sports models only
• Seven-inch touch-screen satellite navigation integrating Whereis® Sensis maps, Bluetooth (hands-free compatible), Bluetooth audio (MP3 player compatible)
• Controlled by either touch-screen or voice

*Pricing is a guide as recommended to us by the manufacturer and does not include dealer delivery, on-road or statutory charges.

©2010 Car Advice | News | Reviews - http://www.caradvice.com.au - All Rights Reserved.

The new rules are a step forward for child safety in Australia. Some lives will be saved. But how far forward have the new rules taken us? Experts overseas claim Aussie kids remain second-class citizens on road safety – despite the new laws.

Lotta Jakobsson Ph.D., M.Sc., is Volvo Car’s top biomechanist in charge of the company’s accident and injury prevention analysis. We meet in her laboratory in the company’s headquarters in Gothenburg, Sweden. Jakobsson is a world-renowned automotive child safety expert. She claims the new Australian regulations continue to place Aussie kids at unnecessary risk for three reasons: First, the laws mean we will turn our children around so that they’re facing forwards far too early in life. Second, the Australian legislation means children from the age of eight years will sit in adult seats when they should still ride in booster seats until at least age 10 or 11, and third, Australian regulators continue to refuse to allow parents access to the world’s best practise child seat fixation system, called Isofix.

“An adult’s neck is around five times stronger than a three-year-old’s,” says Jakobsson. “An even younger child’s neck is much weaker even than a three-year-old’s. The earlier you turn a young child around, the higher the risk that massive loads on the neck during a crash will cause unsurvivable injuries. I really don’t think it’s a good idea for children under three or four to face forwards in cars.”

Jakobsson says the deceleration during a serious frontal impact (”the most common kind of serious crash”) causes the child’s head to weigh many times its usual weight. “You simply get to a point where the structure of the neck can’t withstand the loads imposed,” she says. “The under-developed muscles, ligaments and bones get overloaded quite quickly. In many severe frontal crashes the adults might walk away relatively unhurt, but forward-facing children might not survive.”

To illustrate this point, she hands me a 12kg helmet designed to illustrate how unstable a child’s head is in relation to an adult’s. Wearing it you feel instantly as if your neck is no longer stable. The helmet has two large handles at the side. “You might want to hold onto those,” says Jakobsson. “For your own safety.”

In a forward-facing child seat, the child’s torso is held in place, but the head is free to move. The weakest link is the neck. When children face the rear, however, the imposed crash loads – the increased weight of the head – is supported by the structure of the seat, not the neck. “You know, there’s no secret why NASA places the astronauts rearward-facing in spacecraft,” says Jakobsson. “It’s better to support high loads on the head with the structure of the seat than through the neck.”

The proof of this pudding is in the numbers. In Sweden, with a population of nine million, just five children have died in frontal crashes in almost 50 years. In Australia, we lose 80 children annually – though not all of those die in frontal crashes. Clearly the numbers prove the Swedes are doing something right.

We move to a storage facility inside Volvo’s normally off-limits Safety Centre. It’s a repository for wrecked Volvos recovered from real-world crashes. Thomas Broberg, Volvo’s senior technical advisor on safety, takes me to a wrecked XC60, which he tells me was involved in a high-speed crash (with another, older Volvo … after all, this is Sweden). It’s a serious hit, in which the two cars met head-on, each at an estimated 65km/h. The bonnet is folded in half; concertina-ed up at more than head height. The front wheels have moved back into the guards. The headlights, bumper and grille are simply gone. The radiator and air-conditioning condenser are a press-fit into each other and also the engine and transmission, which have themselves slipped their moorings and moved back to accommodate and absorb the crash loads … a combination of very smart engineering and energy management that means the passenger compartment is remarkably intact.

“There were three people in this car,” says Broberg, “including a father driving and an 18-month-old child in a rear-facing child restraint. Everyone in the car escaped without injury, but I would not like to think about the likely outcome for the child if the seat had been the forward-facing kind.”

I ask Broberg if this child would have died in an Australian child seat. “Of course you cannot say for certain what would have happened, but I think the risk of serious neck injury, forward-facing in a crash like this would be quite high.” Unsurvivable injury? “Possibly. Yes.”

In Lotta Jakobsson’s laboratory she explains what happens when an average eight-year-old sits in an adult seat, in an adult seat belt – something permitted under the new Australian child restraint laws: “Well, their legs are quite short and the seat base is quite long in comparison so they slide forward in the seat to get their lower legs over the leading edge. That means the lap part of the seatbelt rides up over the abdomen, which is very dangerous.”

Okay, so what’s the problem exactly? “The seat belt is designed to ride over the bony part of your hips, supported on the pelvis. If it rides high and sits across your abdomen and you crash, you’re at risk of suffering severe soft-tissue injuries. You can bleed to death internally before you get to hospital. This is why children should sit in a booster seat until the age of 10 or 11 – a booster seat is designed to ensure the right geometry for the seatbelt.”

Jakobsson says children do not fit safely in adult seats until they are about 140cm tall – a height which eight-, nine- and even some 10-year-olds are yet to reach.

Then there’s the child seat itself. Australian Standards-approved child seats face forwards and use the ‘top-tether’ attachment method together with the adult seatbelt to secure the seat in the car. If it’s fitted correctly, an Australian ‘top-tether’ seat provides reasonable crash protection – albeit forward-facing.

Fitting a top-tether seat is often fairly complex, however. Unfortunately, many parents grapple with the process and get it at least partly wrong. Numerous surveys have shown as many as two-thirds of parents fit the seats incorrectly – predisposing their children to a bad outcome in a serious crash. In other words, two-thirds of Australian children are currently riding in cars with their safety seriously compromised – first by facing forwards, and second, by riding in a seat that’s improperly secured.

It doesn’t have to be this way. There’s a better child seat fixing system, called Isofix. It’s a system designed by the International Standards Organisation (hence the ‘Iso…’ name), of which Lotta Jakobsson is a member. “Isofix is an international standard child seat attachment system,” she explains. “It’s designed around two standardised seat mounting points built into every new car. It’s used in Europe, Asia, North America and Canada.” Lotta Jakobsson is surprised when I tell her using an Isofix child seat in Australia is illegal.

I’d never fitted an Isofix seat before visiting Sweden. But I’ve now tried it. The verdict? Dead simple – almost idiot-proof. A simple-to-fit base clicks into the Isofix mounting points – there is no possibility of getting it wrong. And the child capsule clicks into the base – also an idiot-proof connection, not to mention about three times quicker than Australia’s outdated top-tether system.

Isofix is a better system because it dramatically reduces the chance of fitting the seat badly. Most new cars in Australia are landed in the country with the Isofix mounting points already in place, yet parents are not even afforded the Isofix option, because using an Isofix child seat is illegal in Australia (because Isofix does not comply with the Australian Standard, which calls for the top-tether attachment system).

The regulators claim that putting Isofix on the shopping list for Australian parents would cause undue “confusion”. A case could be put, however, that two-thirds of Australian parents are already overly confused – or at least unwittingly ignorant – when it comes to fitting a child seat. The bottom line is that allowing Isofix would go a long way to protecting the two-thirds of children driving around right now with their safety compromised via poorly fitted child seats.

While the new child restraint rules will save some young lives, ongoing regulatory arrogance in Australia will continue to add unnecessarily to the death and injury toll among our most vulnerable passengers, at least until the legislation is further upgraded to meet world’s best practice standards.

©2010 Car Advice | News | Reviews - http://www.caradvice.com.au - All Rights Reserved.

The magnitude of stuff I just didn’t know gobsmacked me.

An example: How many people do you know who claim if they’re driving on private property – say, the local Woolies carpark – then the road rules don’t apply. If you know anyone like this, you can tell them from me that they’re full of it.

The Australian Road Rules apply to roads – and a road has a specific definition that has nothing whatsoever to do with whether the road is on privately-owned or public land.
Here’s the official definition: “A road is an area that is open to or used by the public, and is developed for, or has as one of its main uses, the driving or riding of motor vehicles.” Best read it a couple of times, because the implications are huge.

Here’s one: Let’s say you’ve had a few beers at the pub and, like a responsible driver you elect to cop a ride home from a (sober) mate or in a cab. But first, because you don’t like where your car is parked in the pub’s car park, you elect to drive it further down the back, where some drunk idiot is less likely to sideswipe it in the wee small hours. I mean, it’s not as if you’re rolling blotto here – there’s just a chance you might be over the limit.

So you move your car, the cops swing into the car park, they stop you and breath-test you. You fail the breath test, they arrest you, you get breathalysed and then charged with low-range PCA … and yet the offence occurred on private property. This is because the pub car park is a) open to the public and b) is developed for the riding or driving … blah, blah, blah. It’s a road.

That means all those other rules apply as well – seatbelts, giving way rules, having a registered car, mobile phones, indicators, having a driver’s license, etc. And guess what? It’s not just car parks – it’s beaches like Fraser Island or Sydney’s Stockton beach, bush tracks generally. Anywhere open to the public (or even closed to the public but used for driving anyway) is basically a road.

Now let’s take pedestrians. You have an obligation to avoid hitting one. Pedestrians have an obligation not to cause unnecessary obstructions. Pedestrians aren’t allowed to walk on the road if there’s a serviceable footpath or nature strip, and they’re not allowed to cross the road within 20 metres of a pedestrian crossing – but they are everywhere else. Drivers have to give way to pedestrians on crossings, obviously (give way means slow down, stop or remain stationary, if required, to avoid a collision). But if you are turning at an intersection and a pedestrian is crossing the road you’re turning into – you have to give way. Strangely this doesn’t apply at roundabouts.

And here’s some stuff most people don’t know about parking. Before you leave the vehicle – even if you’re just getting out briefly for whatever reason – it’s a legal requirement that you apply the parking brake. If you then move more than three metres away (the official distance to qualify as legally ‘leaving the vehicle’), you must also switch off the engine. If you leave the vehicle and there are no passengers (or only passengers under 16) you must remove the ignition key (the Road Rules haven’t adapted up to the existence of proximity keys yet).

If you leave the vehicle and there are no passengers, you must roll up the windows (at least within 2cm of shut) and also lock the doors.

If you knew all that stuff already, you’ve a better appreciation for the Road Rules than I had several months back. And if you didn’t, maybe it’s time you downloaded the PDF version of the Australian Road Rules and started curing your insomnia with it.

©2010 Car Advice | News | Reviews - http://www.caradvice.com.au - All Rights Reserved.

A year or so ago, it was all good – a predictably ‘Toyota’ outcome. GM fell flat on its face and became, essentially, a US Government department (okay, that’s taking it a bit far) and the Big T leapfrogged it to become the world’s number one car maker, with a production capacity of about 10 million vehicles.

Volkswagen, with its sights set on world domination, issued bold statements about overtaking Toyota to become the world number one by 2018 (VW was in a position to do that after it threw Porsche on the mat for a three-count after the bespoke sports car manufacturer’s failed attempt to do the David vs Goliath bid there).

About the same time, the new Prius, which is built in a factory with grass on the roof, in production lines capable of spitting out a Prius in under a minute, 24/7, nudged Honda’s Insight aside to become Japan’s top-selling car – a position it has enjoyed basically every month since. It even topped out 2009 with the Prius as Japan’s top seller.

And then the bad news kicked in. A former top in-house lawyer for Toyota named Dimitrios Biller alleged that the company covered up, or failed to produce, evidence in dozens of litigation claims. The lawsuit made quite a splash, but appears to have fizzled out.

A US family in a Lexus borrowed from a dealership found themselves on the freeway with the accelerator jammed to the floor at high speed. Despite having the presence of mind to dial 911, they lacked the smarts to simply nudge the transmission into neutral or just shut the engine down. They died in a harrowing high-speed crash, with the audio recorded like all 911 calls, and then released to the media.

Defective floor mats were allegedly to blame. At least at first, when similar reports of uncommanded acceleration started to filter through. An incredible two-point-something million cars were slated for recall. And then more and more. The problem metastasised around the world, and the total now stands at more than eight million cars.

You look up in the night sky, and some smart-ass says there’s 20 trillion stars up there. You go: “Yeah.” Someone says eight million cars, you go: “Yeah.” Like, it’s a lot, but how do you quantify eight million cars?

Like this. If you need a five-metre-long space to park a car, then eight million cars stretches 40 million metres, which is 40,000km – the approximate circumference of planet Earth. It’s also a traffic jam stretching from Sydney to Perth – 10 lanes wide.

It transpires that the problem’s no longer just floor mats, either. It’s accelerator pedals that are too long, and a lack of ‘deconfliction’ software in the ECU (lines of code that say if the brakes are on, best throttle off the engine). Both of those fixes are now under way as well.

So, happy days … except for the Tacoma, which has a recall about its driveshafts, which are potential failures looking for a place to happen.

And then there’s the Prius, which appears to have defective code in the braking software – at least on some models.

There’s also the allegations brought to bear that the company didn’t act quickly enough on the sticky accelerator front, and those matters are still in the pending tray.

It’d be fair to say that it is not a happy time to be in a board meeting at Toyota HQ. Reputation-rebuilding will be high on the agenda over coming months, and billions will be spent cleverly re-establishing the Big T’s position as the grand high poobah of quality and reliability.

The media has certainly smelled blood – I mean, we are talking about the biggest recall in automotive history. That’s newsworthy. But is it good policy to give a company a kick for doing the right thing? It’s easy to forget recalls are an ethical way for a car company to conduct business.

Much better on the moral front than, say, keeping quiet and settling liability claims out of court, with watertight confidentiality agreements ensuring the problem never gets the oxygen of publicity.

Toyota is spending millions on recalls – and not all of the vehicles fixed would ever have become defective. The company is overwhelmingly fixing potential problems only. And they’re doing it out in the open, in the public domain, with their reputation taking a beating.

I’m not an apologist for Toyota, but the company really seems to be pulling out all the stops to rectify the problems. I haven’t always agreed with the way the do business. For example, leaving ESP off the current Corolla for months after it was first introduced was, literally, a crime against humanity, in my view.

The big winners out of all of this have been companies like Ford, GM and Honda. In the US, GM and Ford sales surged in January by the same amount Toyota’s fell – a ballpark figure of about 20 per cent in each case. And Honda? Well, Honda’s had its own highly ethical recall underway – hundreds of thousands of vehicles with a potentially (note that word) defective airbag inflator module, a part Honda does not even manufacture itself. Luckily, the Honda recall is dwarfed by Toyota’s recall woes by more than an order of magnitude, and it has hardly blipped on the media radar.

Finally, recalls are a standard way of doing business in the car industry (and other industries). It’s understandable, perhaps, why customers expect perfection – just look at the way cars are marketed. But it’s also unreasonable, because cars are complex machines and problems are unavoidable.

The big question is: How much damage will the recall and the attendant media coverage do Toyota? Some commentators are smelling blood, but I reckon the damage is all short-term. It might come as something of a shock, but most of the world is not made up of car nuts like us. Most people don’t even bother to hear news about cars – until they’re in the market for their next car. That’s the only time their ears are to the ground, automotively. And that’s the majority of people Toyota sells cars to.

So, people in the market now might have some reservations. They might even buy a Honda or a Mazda, or even a Hyundai or a Kia instead of a Toyota – right now.

But in six months’ time, when Jethro and Cletus Kettle take the long drive down off Walton Mountain and trade in their seventh Camry at the local dealer, one guess what they’ll end up driving home? That’s the kind of brand and customer loyalty Toyota is banking on.

©2010 Car Advice | News | Reviews - http://www.caradvice.com.au - All Rights Reserved.

Every 25ml of petrol, which you could hold easily in cupped hands (although the World Health Organisation recommends abstaining from skin contact) contains about 800kJ of stored energy – about the same as a Holden Commodore or Ford Falcon traveling at 100km/h. And if you’ve ever searched YouTube for that famous Commodore-hits-wall-at-100km/h crash-test footage you’ll see just how much destructive potential there is when 800kJ goes horribly wrong.

(Incidentally, this is why it’s a major judgement error to try lighting the BBQ with a cupful of the stuff – that’s a ticket on the express to Molotov City. But it could improve the gene pool, overall.)

So even a small, 50-litre petrol tank contains the destructive potential of about 2000 large family cars all impacting the same point at 100km/h. Good safety tip: petrol deserves respect.

The energy stored in our common liquid fuels is gobsmackingly immense. The kerosene in just one torpedo (the fuel, not the explosive) was enough to destroy The Kursk, a Russian nuclear submarine bigger than a Boeing 747 and built to withstand extreme hydrostatic pressure. It’s a real miracle that the 20 billion-ish litres of petrol regularly de-canted by an untrained and unaware populace at servos across Australia hardly ever results in Hindenburg-esque drama.

The reason fuel handling is so apparently safe is simple. Two words: systematic protection. The refueling process involves interacting with a system carefully designed to prevent disaster. So long as you’re not holding the Olympic Torch with your other hand, it’s probably reasonably safe.

When you get out of the car at the servo, you touch both the car (undoing the filler cap) and the fuel nozzle handle (grabbing the pump). This equalizes the electrical potential of you, the car and the pump before there’s fuel vapour wafting around, preventing a static electricity spark. (Sparks can only jump between bodies with different potentials.) The nozzle itself is in contact with the filler neck during the refill, preventing a charge from building up as you fill, and the flow rates of the fuel are designed to prevent a charge building up in the liquid itself as it flows. (Perverse fact: liquid petrol can carry a static charge.) There are even emergency shut-off valves that stop a fire at a bowser or elsewhere on the forecourt from spreading to the large storage tanks underground.

So, filling up comprises a multi-layered safe system. Even so, however, static electricity is the commonest cause of service station fires. These are low-probability events with high consequences. And they usually occur because human dumb-ness knows no bounds. From time to time (rarely), some dumb-ass manages to overwhelm the protections built into the system and send himself on a little holiday to the burns unit of the nearest big hospital.

It usually happens when filling a portable fuel container. And the newsflash there is always to put the container on the ground near the pump before refueling it. This earths the container to the same potential as the pump, preventing a spark jumping between the two at an inopportune moment – such as when highly explosive fuel-vapour/air mixture is spewing out. If you refuel a jerry can or the mower container while it’s sitting in the back of your ute, in the boot, or in a box trailer, caravan, etc., you risk blowing yourself up – it’s that simple. People do it on a semi-regular basis, even though the servo console operator isn’t supposed to activate the pump if they see you putting yourself in this dangerous situation – yet another inbuilt protection in the system.

For a system to be really safe, however, there must be human safeguards overlaid on top of all the inbuilt systematic stuff. And I’m not just talking about refueling; I’m on about driving as well.

Although the regulators claim speed is the commonest factor in road trauma, the reality is that intersections are really the biggest contributor. (This is why freeways are so safe – despite the relatively high speeds, grade-separated interchanges replace ordinary flat intersections. And that prevents vehicles traveling in different directions from crossing paths.)

An incredible 50 per cent of road trauma happens at intersections. And it doesn’t occur because of a defect in the rules. The rules governing traffic flow at intersections are completely robust. There’s no flaw permitting vehicles traveling in different directions to occupy the same space at the same time.

Yet crashes at intersections happen all the time – to the tune of about $10 billion annually, comprising about 800 deaths and 10,000 serious injuries.

It happens because human protections fail. People drive through stop signs/red lights, etc., when they should give way. They make mistakes. Maybe they’re angry, distracted, fleeing the cops, picking up a dropped baby’s bottle, rolling a joint or re-loading their Beretta. Who knows? And – here’s the main point – the other driver in the crash doesn’t a) acknowledging the risk in the first place and b) taking preventative action to mitigate it.

See, it’s pretty common to drive through a green light safely. Of all the millions of movements through intersections daily, only a tiny fraction go wrong – low-probability, high-consequence events. Most of the time drivers in the opposing traffic flows stop and give way as they should. Occasionally someone doesn’t, and if you steam on through on the green at exactly the wrong moment, without checking, you’re suddenly a statistic. Experience told you to expect the best (compliance/safety) and what you got was in fact the worst (non-compliance/crash). And it’s not much fun being notionally in the right if you’re also in hospital, for example, and unable to feel your toes.

What drivers must do is acknowledge that, from time to time, rules get broken. That’s part of the system, too. We have to act to protect ourselves from situations where the rules don’t get complied with.

As a journo I once spoke to a chap on the brink of death in a trauma centre, fully conscious but slightly disoriented and lying in a resuscitation bay, a hole ripped inconveniently in his heart from being T-boned in exactly this situation. The rip in one of his heart’s chambers meant blood was leaking into the pericardium (the sac that encases the heart) slowly squashing the heart with the very fluid it’s meant to pump.

This problem is called, in the vernacular, a cardiac tampenade, and it’s not a nice way to spend your Saturday afternoon. We chatted briefly (I tried to be optimism personified; we both knew it was a sham) while the trauma director told a nurse to “get the tray”, which I later learned was trauma centre shorthand for the ‘thorachotomy tray’, a macabre assortment of the tools required to crack a human ribcage open in the event he crashed and they had to fix him then and there, before an operating theatre became available.

During our brief and faux upbeat discussion it became pretty clear that this certainly wasn’t how he planned his day. Big consequences often flow from small mistakes. A few minutes later I rode up in the elevator and watched two highly skilled and in my view utterly heroic surgeons get the plumbing under control – successfully as it happens. A humbling, uplifting experience. Unfortunately, many stories like this don’t always end as happily.

After a couple of glasses of red, a paramedic I know tells a gripping, if black, story about a motorcyclist who T-boned a car at an intersection (sorry mate; didn’t see that red light). He turns up on the scene and the rider’s suffered a ‘bilateral tension pneumothorax’ – two collapsed lungs – and ‘bilateral traumatic amputations at the femur’ – both legs cut off in the crash, at the thigh. That’s bad. Amazingly, he kept the unfortunate victim going until the hospital, but the injuries were too great and the motorcyclist succumbed to them.

The bottom line is that prevention beats cure, or attempts at same, hands down.

What’s got me stumped, basically is why the licencing process teaches only the rules (red light means stop, T-intersection ‘give way’ protocols are…, etc.). You can get your licence in this country without ever being told a simple safety check before proceeding into an intersection can halve – yep, halve – the risk of getting hit by road trauma.

It’s fine to build better roads and safer cars, but until the authorities come to grips with drivers – equipping them with strategies and safeguards for really boosting safety, such as the ‘look both ways’ widget for intersections, above, more preventable trauma will keep happening. It’s hardly advanced driving, is it?

©2010 Car Advice | News | Reviews - http://www.caradvice.com.au - All Rights Reserved.

Reporting on servicing is a great idea in principle, because the cost of servicing is very important to car buyers. In practice, however, it’s very hard – almost impossible in fact, and often irrelevant – to report car servicing costs in our reviews. At least it’s impossible to do it in a meaningful way.

Here’s why:

For starters, the distance interval is irrelevant to most Australian car owners. Believe it or not, the average kilometres driven annually by car in Australia, according to Ausstats, is less than 15,000km. The general servicing intervals specified by car companies is based on both distance and time – for example 12,500km or six months; whichever comes first. And while the distances recommended often vary – they could be 15,000 or even 20,000km – by far the most common time interval is six months.

And that means the difference between a car with a 15,000km service interval and a car with 20,000km is likely to be irrelevant even to drivers who cover twice the average annual kilometres – they’ll still be in the dealership every six months dropping the oil.

And, sure, for high-mileage drivers, the distance interval is important. However, for the vast majority of private car owners, even reporting the longer-distance servicing intervals (at least doing so without the context above) would be tantamount to painting a false picture on which cars offer tangible advantages over which for the average driver.

The next point is about servicing cost. And here I’m on about the cost of the standard ‘log book’ service – dropping the oil, changing the filters, etc., as specified in the owner’s manual.

Unfortunately, prices cannot be fixed under Australian law. This means car companies are generally unable to tell their dealerships, which are mostly separate companies that own a franchise to sell the brand to the public, how much to charge for servicing. The rules also mean car companies are unable to set the retail price of cars, happily enough, allowing informed car buyers to trade one dealer off against the other.

This means that for every particular car there is simply no set price for either the parts required in a standard service – the oil, the filters, the timing belt, etc. – and no set price across any of the brands for the cost of the technician’s labour.

The best piece of servicing advice I can give any car owner is always – and I mean always – call the three closest dealers and get a quote for the next standard service.

A mate of mine, who used to be the motoring editor of a major newspaper, used to run a column in the paper in which they ‘mystery-shopped’ the cost of a standard service across several dealerships. The variations were simply humongous across nearly every brand.

Once, he said, they got dealerships to quote on a service that didn’t even exist on the log book – it might’ve been a 15,000km service on a car with specified 10,000 and 20,000km services – and all but one dealer gave them a price. Only one informed the journo who called anonymously that the service wasn’t due for another 5000km. It makes you think.

Of greater interest, perhaps, is the cost of spare parts – is a front headlamp assembly for a Commodore the same price as that of a Camry or Aurion? How about the engine management computer? The windscreen?

This stuff is especially relevant for people buying a used prestige car. See, many prestige cars bleed like stuck pigs, financially, for their first three years of life. They seem like a real bargain – check out a 2006 model BMW 7 Series on redbook.com.au, for example, compared with its ‘new’ price – but the warranty’s expired. If the i-Drive control computer spits the proverbial six weeks after you buy it, well, you should brace for impact. There’s no reason to expect the price of the parts has moved in line with the depreciation on the car itself. The term ‘second mortgage’ comes to mind.

The only problem now is for us to report accurately the cost of spares. See, there are 250-something cars on the market now, plus all the permutations of spares on older models stretching back, say, maybe 10 years, times six or seven key parts for an indicative spare-parts snapshot.

That’s … ummm … about a thousand e-mails and one helluva database, which would require constant updating. Anyway, gotta go – the nurse is fixing me a Valium sandwich.

©2010 Car Advice | News | Reviews - http://www.caradvice.com.au - All Rights Reserved.

It’s an election year in Victoria, and public policy is being crafted around conservative sentiment. At these times, in politics, ‘Are there any votes in it?’ is a far more important question than ‘How many lives will it save?’. Law and order agendas – press releases that kick off with the words ‘get tough on…’ – are vote-winners with middle Australia. They’re easy to distill to a sound bite, and made for prime-time news. Which is why the Victorian opposition fell all over itself to echo the Government’s anti-hoon sentiment. It’s a potential vote-winner for both sides, because nobody likes ‘hoons’ (not even me).

The Victorian Government’s proposed three-step anti-hoon agenda is this: For a first offence, the so-called hoon’s car is impounded for 30 days. A second bout of ‘hoonerism’ sees the vehicle sent up the river for three months. And a third offence will see the recidivist hoon’s car sold at auction, with the proceeds purportedly used in some governmentally administered but as yet nonspecific way to benefit the victims of crime or road trauma. Occasionally, a hoon’s car would be crushed, with press conference invitations to all the major news networks – and, presumably a front-row seat reserved for the soon-to-be-carless hoon himself.

The official line is that crushing cars would be done sparingly, in cases “where we see a demonstrable opportunity to send a powerful message to the community and to set a powerful example for a young person who has repeatedly breached our road laws in Victoria,” Mr Holding said.

Crushing cars across the board would be impractical, according to Mr Holding, since many cars driven by those of a ‘hoonish’ persuasion are in fact owned by innocent parties (a fact admirably demonstrated in WA last month when a Lamborghini Gallardo, driven at an alleged 160km/h by a mechanic commissioned to service it, was impounded even though it was owned by an innocent doctor, whose pleas for its early release fell on the Police Minister’s deaf ears until the doc threatened a compensation claim, after which the minister’s hard line promptly turned to water). Many more hoons’ cars would presumably be subject to finance agreements – and there’s no way the banks would cop a public policy that legalised the large-scale destruction of loan security assets.

So, in a nutshell, car crushing would be reserved for an occasional law and order PR stunt; the 21st Century equivalent of public flogging.

Due process – having the matter adjudicated by a court, basically – wasn’t discussed by the minister. Nor was the exact definition of ‘hoon’ – because keeping this term loose makes selective interpretation by the regulators very convenient. What constitutes a hoon, precisely which driving behaviours are hoonish (the five-year-old Victorian girl whose parentally supervised mini-bike was confiscated in Victoria last year under anti-hoon laws springs to mind), and the legal process surrounding the whole issue – not discussed, which is typical of public policy on the fly. The sound bite is always more important than the substance there.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not an apologist for hoons. (Even if there’s no exact legal definition of the word.) And I’m not a hoon myself. Even if I knew what one was – precisely – I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t qualify. Nor is this a case of sour grapes. I’ve got a clean driving record; all my points are intact.

If a hoon is a person who, for example, drives a car at 160km/h in a 60 zone, then I reckon that person should go to jail. Same as if you were to crank up a chainsaw in a crowded shopping mall and start waving it about. If said hoon kills or maims someone in the process, well, they should probably remain there for a rather long time. In fact, I don’t even think we need the term ‘hoon’ in the legal lexicon. There are more than enough offences – starting with dangerous driving – available to the regulators, should they wish to start belting anti-social fools over the head. I also think that the sum total of a dangerous or culpable driver’s assets should be up for grabs to compensate the victims of their actions – in cases where the victims are, for example, unable to work ever again, or are substantially disabled, and they or their families are placed well behind the financial eight-ball as a result of some idiot’s decision to drive irresponsibly.

However no amount of anti-hoon rhetoric uttered by useless politicians will be capable of kicking a big goal for road safety – or any other type of goal except maybe the ‘own’ kind. And we do need rather a large goal to be kicked here, because road trauma is personally horrific and, collectively, prohibitively expensive. It’s a major health problem and a significant financial impost on the community.

To put this last point in perspective, the Australian Crime Commission recently pegged the cost to the community of organized crime in Australia at $10 billion. The official estimate for road trauma is closer to $20 billion. It makes you think – about regulatory policies and the allocation of resources.

The reason why anti-hoon rhetoric is easy to utter is because real solutions are hard. They would require regulatory resolve – and the admission that there are some glaring problems with the way offenders are dealt with under the current legal system. And the best way to describe that process is ‘broken’.

How about you take your best guess at the number of unlicensed drivers around you in the traffic, on an average day in Australia, on an average Aussie road. It’s a staggering 10 per cent. The number of unregistered vehicles is about the same. It’s mind-bending. And these are the official estimates, usually buried in some obscure link, on some obscure page of an obscure government website. Politicians don’t want to ‘get tough’ on unlicensed drivers or unregistered vehicles because that announcement would be a de facto admission of the size of the problem – and a potential goal-kicking opportunity for their respective political oppositions. And that’s the last thing you’d want in an election year – handing the opposition a gilt-edged opportunity to take a swipe at the way you’ve run the ship.

However, that’s exactly what we need – fessing up about entrenched problems, and the steely resolve to cop the flack and get on with the job of fixing them. Have a listen to a few radio news broadcasts – all too often there’s the traffic story highlighting the textbook moron we desperately need off our roads. You know the bloke I’m talking about – he’s speeding, unlicensed, drunk and driving an unregistered car. He’s ticked all the boxes marked ‘scumbag’. And often he kills an innocent party (or parties) and walks away unscathed. What we need is a real, serious, ‘get tough on scumbags’ policy – not just the soundbite that sexes it up. We don’t need a new label for these people, because we already have one: they’re called dangerous drivers.

The reason the roads have degenerated to the extent that one in 10 drivers qualifies as a potential scumbag is because the courts in every state have the limp-est of limp-wristed attitude to unlicensed driving. It’s pathetic.

Let’s say thousands of people lose their licenses every year, which they do. Most of those people respect the law. They refrain from driving, go through the process, do their time (maybe even drop a few kilos seeing as they walk a fair bit more than before), get their licenses back and start driving again. But a proportion – a significant proportion – are scumbags. They lose their licenses and drive anyway.

If they get pinged by the cops, you know what happens? They go before the court. The magistrate tells them they’ve been very, very naughty. He disqualifies them for a longer period. Often, in this situation, they drive home from court. (A reporter I know on A Current Affair, Ben Fordham, once famously citizen’s-arrested one such scumbag for national TV – a great story. Pity it didn’t catalyze a wave of regulatory reform.)

This process often repeats itself. Again and again. And let’s face it – if you’ve been disqualified from driving for 10 years because you’ve driven, and been caught, again and again, how much of an impact on you will it really make on your driving if a magistrate ups the ante to 15 years next time? Or 20? Another contact of mine, a traffic specialist solicitor, claims there is a growing number of drivers he refers to as the “long-term unlicensed”. It’s a significant social problem.

We don’t need to start confiscating cars and, occasionally, crushing them because it’s the court system that’s broken. The cops catch plenty of dangerous drivers, who go before magistrates and are disqualified from driving. The system is broken because many of these people simply ignore their disqualification and keep driving. It’s not until they kill or maim somebody that they’re likely to see the inside of a jail cell – and that’s a bit late to start fixing the problem in my view. The damage has already been done.

Driving unlicensed is the kind of thing the regulators would focus on if they weren’t blindsided by what the former deputy Prime Minister and devout car enthusiast, John Anderson, once told me was a “singular obsession with speed”. In my view, Mr Anderson was – and is – one of the very few good ones. Maybe that’s why he got out of it.

As I understand it, you might be committing an act of hoon driving if you simply accelerate a little harder than you intended when the traffic lights go green. A small degree of wheelspin – and I’m not talking a burnout or a donut here – and you might be up for having your car confiscated. There’s no due process. I mean, you’re presumed innocent of murder right up to the point where the court convicts you, but as a practical matter you’re charged, convicted and penalised as a hoon right at the roadside. And, while you’re being booked a couple of dozen unlicensed drivers will probably drive right past you. So, while they’re stomping on you for a minor offence, the long-term unlicensed get a virtual free kick. It’s unconscionable.

Society would benefit more if the cops carried out large-scale random license checking, and if the people convicted of dangerous driving went inside for contempt of court if they ignored the court’s orders to refrain from driving for whatever period.

If any government minister thinks targeting hoons – whatever they really are, officially – and holding the odd press conference in front of the compactor at the nearby scrap-metal yard has any chance of lowering the road toll, then I have some swamp land in Florida he can buy, dirt cheap. Developers are snapping at my heels, but he can have it for just $10,000 an acre – that’s less than half of what they’re offering. It’s the bargain of the decade – guaranteed.

©2010 Car Advice | News | Reviews - http://www.caradvice.com.au - All Rights Reserved.

Written Review: Audi TT Review.

©2010 Car Advice | News | Reviews - http://www.caradvice.com.au - All Rights Reserved.

In the same timeframe, the number of passenger vehicles in Australia has grown only 13 per cent, from 10.6 million to 12.0 million.

Diesel cars themselves still represent only a small proportion of cars on the road. Only 579,688 of Australia’s 12 million passenger vehicles were diesels in 2009 – about one car/4WD in every 21 on the road. Yet back in 2004 it was a smidge of just over 322,000 diesels floating in a sea of 10.6 million (one in every 33 cars/4WDs). There have never been more diesel cars on Australian roads.

The bottom line with diesels is that you get more torque and less power, which leads to some interesting driving effects. Say you’re in a petrol car at 2500rpm on the highway. You get to a steep hill. You don’t want to lose any speed. You push the accelerator. The engine-management computer interprets that (correctly) as a demand for more torque. It says, “but I need to rev higher for more torque,” since 3500-odd rpm is where peak torque hangs out (at wide-open throttle) in a petrol engine.

So the transmission shunts back one (or sometimes two) gears, which can be hateful – especially in heavy cars that are low on torque.

In a diesel, however, in the same situation peak torque is often at about 1800-2000rpm. As the revs come back the engine makes more torque and the car seems to lope over the hill without so much fuss, seeming quite effortless.

The down-side is power. Diesels don’t make so much power (because they can’t rev as high, and power is torque divided by revs, basically). That means a diesel will never out-accelerate a petrol in an apples-for-apples shootout – even though it might make for a more effortless cruiser.

On the environment front, diesels are about 30 per cent more thermodynamically efficient than petrols. This means lower fuel consumption and less CO2 emissions to the tune of about 30 per cent. Unfortunately, some very nasty microscopic particles are emitted from diesel exhausts. In cars with catalytic exhaust filters, they are trapped and periodically burnt away without driver intervention (and the filters never need to be replaced). Unfortunately, there’s no requirement for manufacturers to fit them.

The last two essential bits of ‘diesel’ info concerns the economics of the stuff. There are about 20 billion litres of petrol sold in Australia every year, but only about two billion litres of diesel sold through service stations (another eight billion litres or so is sold in bulk). So that means petrol bowsers out-number diesel bowsers about 10 to one. You’ll have to search an unfamiliar servo to find the (usually) lone diesel bowser – and although we can put a man on the moon 40 years ago, science still hasn’t invented a diesel filler nozzle that doesn’t leak. You’ll continuously get the stuff all over your hands – and it stinks, which is a major disincentive for, in particular, women (and metrosexuals).

This 10-for-one outnumbering scenario means fuel retailers (servo operators) are disinclined to discount diesel to drive up their store sales in the way they get people into the shop by dropping the retail margin on petrol to get people into the shop so they can buy ridiculously inflated bottled water, thereby keeping the servo profitable.

Finally, there’s economics – a diesel engine is more complex than a petrol engine, so they charge a premium for them. Usually that’s about $2500, and it erodes most of the economic benefit of buying the diesel. (In fact last time I calculated this all out, the costs of operating petrol and diesel cars for the terms of the tease were approximately line-ball.) And there’s no guarantee the price of diesel will remain low. World economies, and in particular industries, run on diesel. And in fact, jet fuel and diesel are distilled from the same fraction of crude oil. What this means is that as world economies recover, demand for diesel (effectively a fixed-supply resource) will increase. Therefore, the price will rise. As world economies recover and more air travel is required, the supply of diesel might actually drop. Result? More upward pressure on price. (Not that petrol will be immune from upward price pressure either in the medium term.)

If you haven’t watched the Audi TT 2.0 TDI video review, please do so, and leave your comments on that as well. We’re currently working on a functional specification for video car reviews on CarAdvice, and your thoughts would be appreciated. The TT 2.0 TDI web review is here.

©2010 Car Advice | News | Reviews - http://www.caradvice.com.au - All Rights Reserved.

Perhaps we should back up a sec. Modern cars are jam-packed with safety kit, which is split into two fundamental camps – ‘active’ safety systems, like brakes, which are designed to help you avoid crashing in the first place, and ‘passive’ safety systems, like airbags, designed to lessen the impact on you when you are actually crashing. Passive systems are invoked automatically by the car.

Australia has the dubious distinction of being a developed country with one of the world’s oldest fleet of cars actually ‘out there’ on the road. Average age: about 10 years. In terms of technology this is a bad thing – it means the average Aussie driving around today is 10 years behind the eight-ball on safety technology (and emissions technology, and…) It’s easy to forget that if you’re a motoring journo, swanning around in new cars all the time.

So, although many high-end Euro luxury/performance cars will offer the lucky few who buy them something like nine airbags, the average Australian in a car today is lucky to be protected by just two – at the front.

It’s interesting to note that while airbags are passive devices, seatbelts are active – because the driver must elect to use them. Thankfully we’ve been pretty good at that in Australia since the 1970s, and it remains the main reason why our road toll, per capita, is much better than that of the USA.

Airbags are just part of a crash safety system that is fundamentally integrated into the car’s structure – which is why you can’t add them to a car in an aftermarket sense. This is because although the hardware itself (crash sensor; steering wheel with inbuilt airbag module, seatbelt pre-tensioner) could be easily boxed up and sold over the counter at Super Cheap or Repco, you could never tune it so it would work effectively.

Airbags must deploy at the ‘Goldilocks moment’ – not too early, and not too late. And here, a few milliseconds either way makes the difference between life or death. That’s why car companies do all that expensive crash testing. It’s the precise choreography of all that in-car explosive stuff – down to one-thousandth of a second accuracy – that really does the job of saving lives.

The blink of an eye takes about a fifth of a second (200 milliseconds). The bit of a car crash that can kill you is all over in about 40-80 milliseconds – two-and-a-half to five times faster than the blink of an eye. That’s from the moment the car first contacts the thing it hits, to the point the impact danger is effectively past. In that impossibly small window of opportunity the crash sensor must determine that a crash is taking place, decide if it is serious enough to deploy the airbag, send a pulse to the airbag’s detonator if it is (and a separate pulse at a separate time to the detonator in the seatbelt pre-tensioner). Then both charges in the pre-tensioner have to explode and, in the case of the airbag, generate enough nitrogen gas to deploy the bag, get it out there, ready, fractions of a second before your head hits it. Once the crash sensor says the binary equivalent of ‘go for it’, it’s all over in under 40 milliseconds.

There are variations, but most airbags use a detonator and solid propellant. The detonator fires into the solid propellant, which causes a rapid chemical reaction. An inert gas, usually nitrogen, is created at high pressure. It’s this that inflates the bag. Nitrogen is comparatively harmless, which is a good thing … since ordinary air is about 78 per cent nitrogen. (You can actually suffocate in a 100 per cent nitrogen environment, since there’s no oxygen, but that’s not much of a risk in a car crash.)

Sodium-azide was a popular propellant in older airbags. Unfortunately, it was highly toxic (sodium-azide itself, that is – not the post-deployment byproducts, which were carbon-monoxide and nitrogen oxide). It was mostly phased out in the 1990s. Nitrocellulose (think: gunpowder) has largely also been phased out because it’s not as stable as newer propellants.

If you’ve ever been in a crash in which the airbags deploy, you’ll probably notice the cabin is liberally dusted with white powder. You will be, too. Some people are moved to ponder what it is, and the health implications of breathing this stuff. Don’t worry – it’s not a combustion product. It’s just talcum powder or commercial chalk, which is used to lubricate the bag.

For every car crash, there are actually three big hits – and it’s the third one that kills you. Hit one is between the car and whatever it hits (think: 100-year-old gum tree). In slo-mo, the metal starts to deform. The tree pushes back on the car, which accelerates backwards (decelerates, if you like). You get thrust forward, relative to the car, which leads to…

Hit two, which is between you and the car. If you’re dumb and not wearing a seatbelt, much of that impact will take place between your head and the windscreen; fade to black. If you’re one of the 99-point-something percent of Australians who does wear a seatbelt, the impact will mainly occur between your hips and thorax, and the belt itself (your head and legs might still hit the dash, however, causing life-threatening injuries). If there’s a lot of slack between you and the belt, hit two will be bigger than if the belt is snug – because if it is loose, your body will be travelling at a high speed relative to the decelerating car when you slam into the belt. But relax; you’re not dead yet.

Hit three is the one that really counts. It’s the arbiter of life and death. After your body hits the seatbelt, your internal organs slosh forward, and hit the front of your rib cage (on the inside). If that hit is big enough, it can sever your aorta, the major blood vessel in your chest, or rip a hole in your heart. That’s bad. If your head hits the dash (or the windscreen) your brain will hit the inside of your skull. Blood vessels will tear, and blood will leak into your skull cavity, which is, essentially a rigid box. The pressure of the blood inside your head – there’s nowhere for it to go – can kill you. (Also bad…)

This is what all that crash-mitigation technology seeks to avert – in simplistic terms the airbag springs into action between collisions one and two, which has a flow-on benefit to collision three.

Look at it like this: A crash sensor, which is just a box with an accelerometer in it (or accelerometers, if the car has side airbags), and a chip inside which says ‘go bang if the crash gets worse than this XXX’. If the crash severity exceeds this predetermined line in the sand, the seatbelt pre-tensioner fires off, sucking in all the slack in the belt (reducing collision two). It also sucks you square-on into the seat so you present a better target to the airbag. Within instants the airbag is full. It actually starts deflating before your heads hits it – when that happens, it’s the automotive equivalent of jumping off a four-storey building onto a stack of Sealy Posturepedic mattresses, as opposed to, say, the bare concrete footpath.

There’s one more thing happening: the car’s structure itself is protecting you. All that controlled deformation in engineered ‘crumple zones’ up the pointy end of the crash is absorbing energy – before it gets to you. This is why old crashed cars never looked that damaged, and yet the people inside died. These days, the cars often appear royally screwed over by similar collisions, and yet the people walk away.

So, if you’re in a car with airbags, there are a few things you need to do: You need to realize they’re there, all the time. An airbag is the kind of thing that will wait patiently for 20 years or more for it’s big moment, then deploy in under a heartbeat. It’s easy to forget the damn things are there. But you really need to remember – because getting in its way at exactly the wrong time is bad.

The driver’s front airbag is packed into the hub of the steering wheel. So, if you drive one-handed, with your arm across the steering wheel (say, with your right arm at the 10 o’clock position or your left at 2 o’clock) and have a crash while you’re driving that way, your arm will be between the airbag and your head. And while it’s easy to joke about having ‘Seiko’ embossed permanently into your forehead afterwards, if there is an afterwards, the real problem is that your arm will spoil the deployment, and the airbag won’t be able to protect your head. This is just another reason why driving two-handed with hands at 9 and 3 o’clock isn’t optional.

Passengers have responsibilities, too. The passenger’s front airbag (which is bigger than the driver’s because it has to fill a bigger space, and must therefore deploy even faster) comes out of the dashboard. How often have you seen a front-seat passenger driving with a leg crossed over the knee or, worse, a foot (or feet) on the dash? Imagine what happens there – knees blown back into chests at 300km/h (the approximate airbag deployment speed), and no subsequent head protection…

©2010 Car Advice | News | Reviews - http://www.caradvice.com.au - All Rights Reserved.

Model Tested:

• 2010 Audi TT Mk2 2.0 TDI Quattro; 2.0-litre, four-cylinder, turbocharged diesel; six-speed manual; two-door coupe – $70,900*

Drop-dead gorgeous styling, unbeatable economy, torque-monster engine, razor-sharp steering
No automatic transmission, less than ideal compressor/sealant spare-tyre system

CarAdvice Rating:

Not too long ago, the term ‘diesel sports car’ would have been dismissed as a bad joke, and any company that proposed such a concept would have been labeled a pariah. Not any more – Audi wins Le Mans monotonously with diesels these days. Turbocharged Direct Injection (TDI) has made all the difference.

Driving a diesel performance car isn’t the same as driving a petrol one. It’s not better, nor worse. Just different.

Exhibit A: The Audi TT 2.0 TDI quattro – released in the second half of 2009 as part of the German brand’s ongoing efficiency offensive, which saw a mass of new slow-sipping variants plugged into the company’s already swollen model lineup.

On fundamentals, TT 2.0 (not to be confused with iSnack 2.0…) stacks up this way: 350Nm of peak torque from 1750-2500rpm. Thinking laterally, that’s line-ball with a direct-injection Commodore V6 … only much lower in the rev range, and from two fewer cylinders. The TT also weighs about 400kg less. Despite this, it offers roughly the same tyre contact patch as an SS Commodore. So you could correctly infer that when you drive one, the ‘grip’ and ‘go’ departments are pretty well covered.

So is fuel economy. The ADR-certified combined-cycle test puts the TDI TT at just 5.3 litres/100km – that’s a staggering 54mpg in the old money. It’s also roughly half that of Australia’s most popular car, the ubiquitous V6 Commodore.

Peak power from the diesel is just 125kW – so it’s not especially setting the world on fire there. And that’s the main reason 0-100 takes 7.5 seconds, despite the fact that the car seems so impressively purposeful in the twisty stuff. It storms along like its unstoppable through bends and up hills, but loses a bit to low power when tasked with straight-line acceleration.

You’ll pay about $71,000 for the pleasure of TDI TT ownership, plus on-roads and minus any discount you might negotiate from a motivated dealer (but, since Audi’s sales amount to a virtually unstoppable juggernaut, expect more ‘take’ than ‘give’ on the negotiation front). For that sort of money you could be in a 135i Sport BMW, a V6 Alfa Romeo GT or a Nissan 370Z. Among the all-paw competition department, you could pick up a Lancer Evolution X MR TC-SST … or a Subaru WRX STi, with enough change left over on the Rex for a tidy overseas jaunt (in Asia, though, not Europe or the USA).

So there’s no shortage of alternatives in this crowded, fashion-conscious segment of the market. That means one of the main reasons why people buy TTs is because they fall head over heels for the styling. And that’s pretty easy to understand – when it comes to drop-dead gorgeous curves, you have to spend a lot more to get the same, or even similar, visual impact. That combination of muscularity and sleekness is almost there in the Boxster S (you’ll pay half as much again for that) but probably doesn’t really happen again in the market (strictly in terms of styling here) until you look at a Benz SL or Porsche 911, both of which are stratospherically more expensive propositions.

The beauty continues into the cabin. Unlike many a Japanese sports car, which offers more buttons than the flight deck on an Airbus A380, or so it would seem, the TT’s interior is minimalistic, elegant and understated. It’s easy to make everything work, because all the controls are well thought out and instinctive, but you don’t feel as if you need a 15-year-old texting genius in the passenger’s seat to find, say, the AM band on the radio.

The speedo is especially nice. Zero to 260km/h, but with a really smart, non-linear calibration. The legal limit – 100km/h is straight up, so it’s dead easy to keep track of as you cruise. That means 0-100km/h takes half the sweep of the needle, while 100-260 takes up the other half. Really intelligent design for speed-obsessed regimes like Australia’s , with 0-90 presented in 5km/h increments, and 90-260 presented in 10km/h steps.

While other manufactures are falling over themselves incorporating ‘proximity key’ technology allowing both keyless entry and keyless start via a start/stop button, the TT is offered with a standard ignition key on a flick-out fob. There’s manual seat adjustment, too, even though Japanese cars from about the $40k mark are these days doing it by pushbutton. Still, it’s not that hard to get the seat right the ‘old fashioned’ way, and the seats themselves are ‘Goldilocks’-spec supportive – not too squishy, not too loose … just right for cruising with the odd spirited fang thrown in.

So, basically, the exterior’s a joy – a step up in every respect from the first TT, which caused something of a stylistic stir when it first lobbed on the world stage in the late 1990s. And the interior, ditto … at least if you sit in the front.

The rear seats exist in name only. Short, above-the-knee amputees will be happy in them, but since legroom is nonexistent and headroom (if that’s the right word) is compromised to the extent that the rear hatch incorporates a graphic warning to the effect that shutting the lid on a tall person could injure their heads, it probably makes more practical sense to fold the rear seats down and utilize the significantly increased rear luggage compartment space that results.

Another impractical feature – for Australia at least – is the flat-tyre provision, which amounts to an onboard 12-volt compressor and a tin of sealant. These work fine for simple punctures, and they certainly save weight. But if you suffer significant tyre damage, you’re basically stranded. With a space-saver, at least you’d be mobile, albeit limited to 80km/h.

Dynamically, this TT (version 2.0, if you like) is light-years better than its predecessor. This car is everything the first one should have been, dynamically, but in some cases, wasn’t. It’s razor sharp, with great poise and balance, abetted my significant mid-corner grip and really progressive, positive transition from grip to slip and back. The steering is a particular delight, which tells you e-x-a-c-t-l-y where the front wheels are pointing, and what they think about you pointing them there. If you can’t hear what they’re saying, maybe you need to get your fingers checked.

The biggest problem when you’re going for it is changing gears – and you will be changing gears, since there’s no auto option hooked up to the TDI. It’s not that the slick-shifting six-speed isn’t a delight. It is – the short throws are great, and so is the clutch and the solid-bordering-on-chunky gear knob. The problem is, initially, re-calibrating your brain to forget everything it’s learned about revving the guts out of a petrol engine to make it perform.

Diesels don’t reward when you do that. Peak power’s not their forte; low-down torque is. So what you need to do is short-shift. If you see 4000rpm on the dial, you’re changing gears too late, son. The car will fall into less of an accelerative abyss if you shift up at 3500rpm. It even sounds good – though not excellent in the manner of 7500rpm full-throttle petrol upshifts – when you do that. And you’d best remember not to change back until just below 2000rpm, too – you’ve got peak torque going for you all the way down to 1750rpm. If you want to milk the diesel for all it’s worth, changing your driving style (at least a little) will be essential.

Video Review:

Ratings:

CarAdvice Overall Rating:
How does it Drive:
How does it Look:
How does it Go:

Specifications:

• Engine: 1,968cc DOHC four-cylinder (16 valve)
• Power: 125kW @ 4,200rpm
• Torque: 350Nm @ 1,750rpm
• Induction: Common Rail & Turbocharged
• Transmission: Six-Speed Manual
• Driven Wheels: All
• Brakes: Discs with ABS, EBA & EBD
• Top Speed: 226km/h (Claimed)
• 0-100km/h: 7.5 seconds
• CO2 Emissions: 139g/km
• Fuel Consumption: 5.3L/100km (ADR)
• Fuel Tank Capacity: 60L
• Fuel Type: Diesel
• ANCAP Rating: TBC
• Airbags: Front, Side & Curtain
• Safety: ESC with Traction Control
• Spare Wheel: Sealant Type
• Suspension: Strut (F) / Multi-link (R)
• Cargo Capacity: 290L
• Tow Capacity: N/A
• Turning Circle: 10.9m
• Warranty: Three-Year / Unlimited kilometre
• Weight: 1,413kg (Tare)
• Wheels: Alloy 17 x 8.5-inch

©2010 Car Advice | News | Reviews - http://www.caradvice.com.au - All Rights Reserved.

Elsewhere in the corporate structure, car companies are trying to make their cars more similar – not less so. There’s an ongoing marketing challenge. Obvious reason, economics: one of the niftiest ways of improving the bottom line is to use parts from another, existing, car (or cars) in the next one (or ones). It saves them having to design, prototype, test, certify and produce new parts, obviously.

Take this one step further: why not produce the one engine designed to do the job (even with a few minor tweaks) across a range of cars? Makes sense. You can do it with technology, too. Everything you’ve already learned about crash safety or direct injection, or hi-tech manufacturing processes can be incorporated more easily in your next design than if you had to develop it all from scratch.

Then there are economies of scale – the more you produce, the cheaper each individual unit gets. Simple.

Final step: buy another car company and use, say, the engines from one across both, the crash technology from the other, run just one proving ground…

This is fundamentally why car companies own other car companies. Take Ford’s ownership of Volvo, which kicked off back in 1999. Did you ever wonder how it suddenly (this is a relative term) became a walk in the park for the Falcon to achieve a five-star safety rating?

It’s incest, automotive-style. And everyone’s doing it.

Until recently, Ford also owned 33.4 per cent of Mazda. (Today it owns only 13 per cent, thanks very much to the GFC.) The companies co-developed technology and then shared it. Park a Mazda3 next to a Volvo C30 and check them out closely. The reason they’re so similar isn’t a coincidence – they’re built on similar underpinnings and they share some fundamental engineering. This co-development arrangement appears to be on the rocks, however, in the aftermath of Ford’s lesser ownership position.

Volkswagen: The conglomerate has stated it will be the world’s largest automaker by 2018. (You have to admire that German confidence.) The company owns the following brands: Volkswagen (obviously) plus Audi, Skoda, Bentley, Lamborghini and … soon … Porsche. (The latter after an epic David V Goliath battle that would have gone the other way had Porsche been able to stump up the cash to exercise the options that would have given it control over Volkswagen.)

There’s a reason the Audi R8 has a 5.2-litre V10 with 386kW and 530Nm. It’s called the Lamborghini Gallardo… And behind the scenes, you’ve got Skoda manufacturing transmissions for Volkswagen, etc.

Volkswagen also just bought a 20 per cent stake in Suzuki for $US2.5 billion … as you do..

Mention ‘Fiat’ to your average punter in the street, and they think of the 500 – often the old one. The reality is quite different – Fiat is a massive, sprawling entity with an enviable garage and a history of dicing with bankruptcy. It owns Ferrari, Maserati, Alfa Romeo and truck manufacturer Iveco. Thanks to the recent bail out of Chryser, Fiat also owns Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep and Ram – and the cross-pollination there is only just about to kick off (though rumours of the next-gen Viper sporting a Ferrari V12 in the manner of R8/Gallardo have been quashed).

General Motors, the world’s former number one vehicle manufacturer, amassed a stable of brands so heavy and ultimately unstable that they literally drowned the company, which declared itself bankrupt in 2009. Holden, obviously, is a GM brand. It’s joined by Cadillac, Chevrolet, Buick and GMC. Saab is still hanging around GM’s post-bankruptcy neck like that pesky albatross (Spyker might buy it; bad luck for the Dutch if that sale goes ahead). But retired, RIP, are Saturn and Pontiac – the latter very bad news for Holden, which did a tidy export line in left-hand-drive Commodores dressed up as Pontiac G8s. And Hummer? It’s Chinese now – owned by a four-year-old manufacturer of cement mixer trucks and tow trucks with just 4300 employees, called the Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Co. Hummer should fit into the company’s product range nicely.

Daimler owns Mercedes-Benz, Maybach, smart, and the Freightliner and Sterling truck businesses. Renault and Nissan are joined at the hip.

Indian industro-conglomerate, Tata, progenitor of the world’s cheapest car, the two-cylinder Nano, also owns Land Rover and Jaguar – a fact often overlooked in Jaguar’s and Land Rover’s marketing communications. Fact is, Tata picked Jag and Land Rover up for a song ($1.7 billion Aussie dollars) when it bought both brands from Ford in 2008. Ford paid $US2.5 billion for Jaguar in 1989 and $US2.75 billion for Land Rover  (which it bought from BMW) in 2000. Despite the apparent discount, ongoing Brit-brand operational issues have placed Tata under immense financial pressure.

Hyundai owns Kia, which explains, for example, why the powertrains of the Santa Fe R 2.2 and the Sorento are so apparently … identical.

Toyota owns Lexus (which explains why the Camry is so quiet and refined – couldn’t have a rough-around-edges platform under the Lexus GS). It also owns Daihatsu and truck maker Hino … as well as a 16.5 per cent stake in a company called Fuji Heavy Industries, which owns another brand you may have heard of – Subaru.

China, is just coming to the auto-incest party. In addition to the Hummer scenario above, Geely Automotive acquired Albury-based DSI (Drivetrain Systems International) when Aussie company, which is one of the world’s few remaining bespoke and independent auto trans manufacturers, foundered financially earlier this year. Geely also looks like being the frontrunner to purchase Volvo from Ford.

Volvo is the last remaining brand in Ford’s Premier Automotive Group quartet. (Jag and Land Rover went to Tata as noted, and Aston Martin went to  a consortium of two major investment houses based in Kuwait. The consortiums are led by David Richards of Prodrive fame and Dr Bez is the CEO of the company.)

The reason Geely wants Volvo? Simple – Geely has six factories in China with a combined production capacity of about 300,000 units annually. What it really needs is the technology to underpin a rapid improvement in its product. It’s a lot cheaper – not to mention faster – to buy a company with all that technology in-house than it is to develop it in some new laboratory just outside Shanghai.

Volvo is both knee-deep in revolutionary technology, and an absolute bargain right now. In fact, Ford paid $US6.5 billion for Volvo back in 1999 (when the Premier Automotive Group still seemed like a good idea). Geely looks like buying it for ‘just’ a smidge over $US2 billion.

Incestuous global business, isn’t it?

©2010 Car Advice | News | Reviews - http://www.caradvice.com.au - All Rights Reserved.

But the local slug just doesn’t compare to the one that’s taking place overseas. The market in the United States fell from 16-point-something million to about 10 million. The ‘missing’ 6.5 million cars, if you could find them and line them up, would be a traffic jam stretching from Sydney to Perth – seven lanes wide. So that’s a massive slug for the car industry.

This hit, together with government incentives, meant China overtook the US to become the world’s biggest car market in 2009.

The recession is the canvas upon which all the other top automotive news stories is written. Yet it’s not all doom and gloom.

Ford makes a profit

Shock! Ford surprised the market by posting a $1.1 billion net profit in the third quarter of 2009.

In the US the company managed this by getting its product range right – consumer reports say the company’s quality is up there with Euro and Japanese cars, and the company also enjoys more IIHS ‘Top Safety Pick’ awards than Honda or Toyota.

Volkswagen overtakes Porsche

After an epic stoush, which at times saw Porsche’s David about to get the upper hand on Volkswagen’s Goliath, Volkswagen will subsume Porsche. Ousted Porsche CEO Wendelin Wiedeking, almost pulled off the coup of the decade, borrowing $17-billion to finance the purchase of options equivalent to a 51 per cent stake in VW, but couldn’t stump up the cash to exercise the options, and the house of cards collapsed. Goliath won.

This is all part of Volkswagen’s grand plan for world domination that sees the company on pole position by 2018, overtaking Toyota to become the largest car company on earth.

China becomes the new automotive superpower

The numbers – at least in forecast – are in: The Chinese will buy almost 13 million cars in 2009 while the USA will manage to purchase ‘only’ 10 million. It’s a done deal. Just two years ago, before the recession, forecaster JD Power predicted it would take until 2025 for China to overtake the USA. What a difference a global financial crisis makes.

In the spirit of ‘show me the money’, US billionaire investment guru Warren Buffett used 2009 to take a massive shareholding in Chinese electric car maker BYD, which expects to sell electric cars with a 400km cruising range in the US in 2010.

Hyundai shifts into top gear

Swimming against a massive downward trend globally, Hyundai managed to post double-digit growth in many markets. Amid the doom and gloom of the US, Hyundai grew its market share from 3.1 per cent to 4.3 per cent in 2009 – and an extra 1.3 per cent of a 10-million-unit market is a tidy acquisition, thanks very much. US sales grew by more than 20 per cent, so did sales in Canada, which topped 100,000 units for the first time.

In Australia we keep getting press releases like these: “Hyundai Drives Past 60,000 Units” (Dec.), “Hyundai Sales Up +106 per cent for Highest Ever October Sales Result” (Nov.),  “Hyundai Achieves Highest Ever September Sales Result (Oct.), (Ditto August), and “Hyundai Moves to No. 4” (August), etc.

Currently Hyundai’s Australian sales are a shade over 59,000 vehicles for the year to November 2009. That’s a surge of 41.6 per cent. In a down market.

The government incentives to ABN holders here run out on December 31, 2009, and the economy emerges from recession, and neither of these is especially good news for Hyundai, when Toyota looks in its rear-view mirror, the company it’s most concerned about seeing right up against its rear bumper is Hyundai. (This won’t happen for some time, however – Toyota currently sells three times as many vehicles as Hyundai.)

The Internet becomes unstoppable in automotive communications

Forget radio and TV – and especially print. The web is where people go when they want to be informed about cars, now. The Chevy Volt’s chief engineer Andrew Farah found himself tweeting 140-character answers to anyone who posed them at the vehicle’s unveiling.

One of the first things GM did, post bankruptcy, was launch a new ‘ask Fritz’ website which invited the public to pose questions and comments direct to CEO Fritz Henderson.

When GM chairman Ed Whitacre ousted CEO Fritz Henderson and took the top job for himself, it was Facebook that offered alternative comment in the face (literally) of the traditional bland PR department commentary and stony silence. (A person purporting to be Fritz’s daughter Sarah let rip in an expletive-heavy rant on the GM Facebook page. It was pulled down after 15 minutes, but not before the news had proliferated throughout the web. It’s still online today.)

One no longer has to wait until the Friday motoring supplement in the newspaper for informed automotive commentary (or the monthly on-sale date of a specialist magazine). With the internet, automotive news is now.

The internet has changed the way information about cars is presented, it’s changed who can comment (and how effectively they can be heard), and the traditional mediums are worried.

A death in the family makes Toyota the world’s new number one … then the big T hits a wall

When the old GM declared bankruptcy, Toyota moved by default into the number-one global spot. And then the GFC really hit. After decades of steady growth and profitability, the development of a devoted customer base, strong resale values and unquestioned quality, sales plummeted. Massive losses – billions of dollars, the first losses in decades – and production cuts were the order of the day.

Participation in Formula One was unceremoniously dumped. Then a former top in-house lawyer alleges the company is engaged in compensation claim cover-ups. Massive safety recalls didn’t help the ‘unquestioned quality’ reputation built up over decades of smart marketing. A family dies at high speed when an accelerator jams, the emergency services conversation is recorded … and 3.8 million vehicles are recalled.

Adding insult to injury, Volkswagen is now nipping at Toyota’s heels for the number one spot, about eight years ahead of schedule.

General Motors and Chrysler emerge from bankruptcy

Billions of US taxpayer dollars are devoted to the rescue packages for GM and Chrysler. The bail-out took place mid-year, and the bankruptcies were among the shortest ‘Chapter 11’ proceedings in US history.

Fiat and Chrysler are now joined at the hip, and technology will soon flow between them – hopefully to the betterment of both brands. Fiat itself is no stranger to tiptoeing around bankruptcy, managing narrowly to avoid it earlier this century. But it’s Fiat that owns Chrysler, not the other way around. Italy will call (and is calling) the shots. This could be interesting for Australia, where Chrysler products (the Chrysler, Dodge and Jeep brands) are imported by a factory owned company (Chrysler Australia) while Fiat’s products (Fiat, Alfa Romeo and Ferrari) are imported by a third party (Ateco Automotive).

GM has a board full of federal government control and chaired by former AT&T (telecommunications) boss Ed Whitacre. At the time of writing, Ed W is busily rearranging the deckchairs – ousting CEO Fritz Henderson after hiring a new chief financial officer. Saab is already Chinese, and brands like Pontiac and Saturn have simply disappeared. Against this backdrop, it still looks as if nobody at GM really has his eyes on the ball labelled ‘sell Saab’. Every time a suitor presents for the troubled GM-owned Swedish car brand, the deal falls over. One can only wonder how bad the buyer’s terms and conditions can be, when the company’s preferred option appears to be winding the brand up. (GM is the biggest foreseeable reason to stay tuned to automotive news reports for 2010, by the way. This story’s not over, by a long shot.)

©2010 Car Advice | News | Reviews - http://www.caradvice.com.au - All Rights Reserved.

Will driving at 90 kays an hour make your trip safer? Probably not, but let’s just say the jury’s out on that. Crashes that start at 90km/h generally end better than those that kick off at 100 (or 110), but adding 10 per cent to your driving time opens the door even further to the other big long-distance killer – fatigue. Will driving at a reduced speed make the trip longer? Certainly – in time, if not in distance.

The reduction in the Newell’s limit wasn’t exactly smooth sailing. There was the RTA on one side and a vocal community, NRMA, business and even police opposition to the then proposal – which the NSW RTA simply turned a deaf ear to, and ultimately steamrollered over. The NSW Police’s western region commander Steve Bradshaw told the ABC: “Reducing speed [on the Newell Highway] won’t make much of a difference. Other things need to be targeted, like fatigue.”

The new speed limit adds one hour onto the 1060-kilometre trip from Victoria to Queensland along the Newell. It also means trucks and passenger vehicles are all limited to the same 100km/h speed – making overtaking a heavy vehicle in front all the more difficult.

In one of its more Orwellian statements, the RTA said the lower limit was a benefit to all road users. Here’s what an RTA spokesperson said about that recently: “It is expected that the reduction in the speed limit will also reduce the difference in travel speeds between the various road users on the open road and reduce the need for overtaking.”

Huh? Frankly, fewer things seem are less appealing than the prospect of driving behind a B-double for several hours along the Newell Highway for want of an extra 10km/h of overtaking ability. That extra 10km/h was an asset, not a liability, as every experienced long-distance driver knows.

Politically it’s easier to drop the speed limit than it is to spend money on engineering upgrades (and maintenance) on our roads – engineering deficiencies being another major killer that the NSW RTA fails to acknowledge, possibly because it is also the agency tasked with upgrading the roads.

Mr Blight says reducing the Newell’s speed limit to 100 is the first step in a campaign to reduce state-wide speed limits on all undivided highways to 100km/h and then to 90 kays. This allegation is based on comments Mr Blight says RTA members have made at NRMA meetings.

“There are a few fanatical guys within the RTA who are totally anti-speed and they have a campaign to get every speed limit in NSW down to 100. We had a guy from the RTA at our policy committee the other day who actually under a fair bit of pressure let it slip that now they might be thinking about 90,” he said recently.

There is certainly a number of so-called ‘experts’ within the RTA and in the other state regulatory agencies whose view is that road safety is something so complex that non-academics – ordinary people like us, if you like – simply are not cut out to understand it, nor is an average person’s view on road safety policy of any value.

In the RTA, the poster boy for this group of experts is Dr Soames Job, director of the RTA’s Centre for Road Safety. According to the Centre’s website, the agency exists to develop “new solutions to the biggest killer on our roads – speeding”. Dr Job says that there is no evidence adding one hour to the trip along the Newell will increase fatigue. Let’s hope he’s right, because even the RTA acknowledges that fatigue (not speed) is the number-one cause of serious crashes on the Newell.

Adding an hour to a remote trip will surely increase the potential for fatigue, not reduce it. If fatigue is the biggest contributor to crashing on that road (and the NRMA, the cops and the RTA agree that it is) then the RTA is playing a dangerous game. Dr Job doesn’t agree.

“There is no evidence that this is the case. Naive assertions such as this have the potential to cost lives in western NSW,” he said.

The NSW RTA is so impossibly arrogant that it is no longer even accountable to its own regulations and policies when it comes to reviewing speed limits. Its own Speed Zoning Guidelines (pp 16-17) state that stakeholder consultation is an essential part of the speed limit review process. You’d think that if senior police, who are at the coal face when things go wrong on the Newell, and the NRMA, which represents the Newell’s road users, and the local communities disagree strongly with the proposal, then maybe the RTA would re-think its position. And pigs might fly…

The first of those 90km/h signs will go up in NSW before you know it.

©2010 Car Advice | News | Reviews - http://www.caradvice.com.au - All Rights Reserved.

By John Cadogan

The announcement by Australasian New Car Assessment Program boss Lauchlan McIntosh took place at the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne yesterday, two weeks after the final crash test that elevated the Benz vans from four stars to five.

According to ANCAP, compared with people in a five-star vehicle, those in a three-star car are 1.6 times more likely to suffer serious injury in a crash, while those in a one-star car face 2.4 times greater risk.

Mr McIntosh told CarAdvice, “One in every two fatalities in a poorly performing van could be prevented if the occupant had been in a four- or five-star vehicle”.

ANCAP test program manager Michael Paine put it more bluntly, categorising the star ratings as “five star”, “four star” and “unacceptable” in the pre-test briefing a fortnight ago.

When questioned, he said there is so much choice among highly rated entrants to make the purchase of a vehicle with three stars or less unjustifiable on safety grounds.

To earn five stars, vehicles must pass three crash tests – an offset front crash simulating a head-on collision at 64km/h, a side impact with a 500kg sled at 50km/h, and a pole impact with a 250mm diameter steel pole supported by an immovable concrete block. It must also come equipped with ESC.

This third (pole impact) test is applicable only to potential five-star candidates. The side-on impact takes place level with the driver’s head, and at 29km/h experts like Michael Paine say such a crash in the real world – into a tree or pole, sideways, at the same speed – would almost certainly be fatal in vehicles without curtain airbags or head-protecting side airbags.

Although the Viano is equipped as standard with curtain airbags, the Vito is not.

Ken Matthews, managing director of Mercedes-Benz’s Commercial Vehicles, says the company will consider fitting them as standard from January but says the van market is extremely price-sensitive.

At present a Vito with head-protecting curtain airbags is an $800 option on top of the vehicle’s $39,490 list price. The top-selling Toyota HiAce, which rates three stars, sells from $34,540, and the Mitsubishi Express, at a lowly one star, is priced from just $24,590.

Mr McIntosh says commercial vehicle safety ratings are an OH&S issue.

“There is a legal obligation on companies and fleet managers to ensure a safe workplace. We urge fleet purchasers to factor vehicle safety ratings into their purchasing policies,” he said.

The five-star Mercedes-Benz Vito and Viano sit above the Hyundai iLoad van and iMax people mover, and the Volkswagen Caddy and Transporter, all on four stars.

ANCAP has tested a total of nine vans, with the remaining five rating below four stars.

©2010 Car Advice | News | Reviews - http://www.caradvice.com.au - All Rights Reserved.