I grew up with motorsport, lived and breathed it all my life, a passion that culminated in working in the sport for two decades. I’ve been lucky enough to travel the world to watch motor racing, report on its heroes, covering everything from grassroots club racing to Formula 1...
There is a vast array of car manufacturers kicking around today, and due to the ever-broadening growth of electric cars, a number of prospective new entrants (vacuum maker Dyson, for instance) poised to enter the fray. And yet the car business is simultaneously homogenous...
Did one of your parents teach you how to drive? One of mine did. It was my father. As the head of the household and the avatar of all the family’s driving skills (Mum was several orders of magnitude crapper than he was), it fell to him to teach me how to drive the family car. Poor bastard was right up against it from the start...
'Value for money' or 'bang for your buck' are the sort of terms we all love to hear when it comes to buying anything, particularly cars. Australians love getting a good deal, and the thought of being ripped off tends to anger any of us, regardless of our socioeconomic background. But depending on how you look at it, we are paying a hell of a lot of money for some things in comparison to others...
Would you do 195km/h in a 110km/h zone? I know I wouldn't; so why are people happy to do 110km/h in a 25 or 40km/h zone? Poorly advertised new laws in Victoria, New South Wales, Western Australia and South Australia now put your life and mine at risk each time we approach an emergency vehicle pulled over on the side of the road...
Ford Ranger Raptor. Quite often, it feels underpowered. Yep, it’s true: sometimes it feels like you could really use a bit more motor. And yes, I know, it’s hard to get particularly excited about a 2.0-litre, four-cylinder diesel, regardless of how many turbos it has. Many have come out in their hordes to deride the Ranger Raptor, purely because of what lies under the bonnet...
The hunt for a new car was once a very different process. Go back 15 or 20 years, and you would have bought a magazine or a newspaper that would hopefully have a test on the vehicle you’re interested in, and you'd probably locate a dealer through the same medium. These days, it’s essentially all digital...
Trent, I won’t go all the way and call you an imbecile, which is probably a really bad idea seeing as you’re who I report to. I’m new, and that could end really badly for me. But, I have some points to make after reading your own opinion piece about low-range. Low-range is already dead, if you want it to be; it’s called the soft-roader...
They really must be taking the piss. There cannot be any other reason for it. It has to be a glorious in-joke, for sure. I refer to those stern ‘Roadworks Ahead’ signs whose Pavlovian demands silently relegate vast stretches of empty highway to 40km/h. Calm down. I am not advocating we barrel freely through clumps of hard-working road-crews at 200km/h...
Hardcore 4WDers are going to hate me for this, and I brace for the incoming tsunami of ‘you’re an imbecile’ comments, but this piece isn’t about what I want or don’t want. It’s about what the manufacturers are foisting upon us whether we might like it or not. Take gnarly rock-crawling and serious bush-bashing out of the equation...
One of the best things about today’s automotive industry is the improved vehicle safety. Cars aren’t just infinitely better in a crash, they’re also becoming increasingly proficient at helping you avoid them altogether. But unceasing advancement can come at the cost of clarity. In a market so congested, keeping pace with who offers what is difficult, to put it mildly...
I do not profess to be any kind of authority on China’s automotive industry. My recent trip to Beijing left my mouth agape at the sheer scale of… everything. But I am a follower of the car business in a more general sense, especially the pervasive trends of consolidation, influence peddling, and shared capital expenditure. Not to mention the current trade war...
Australia is often considered a natural test market when launching a new tech product or service for reasons such as geographical size, the open-mindedness of people, high-tech infrastructure and government incentives and support. It is then quite surprising to learn that, in a report released by Energeia, Australia is the slowest developed nation to adopt Electric Vehicles (EV)...
There is a constant argument that rages on in the CarAdvice office. It usually goes like this: “Why would anyone pay $70,000 for a small luxury SUV”, to which my usual reply is, "They don’t, these cars are generally well discounted". And so begins a debate about why luxury car companies price their cars so high to start with, then have them ripped apart by tens of thousands as customers start that slow dance of a walk out...
If nothing else, the car industry can sniff a solid commercial opportunity. So the sprint is on, to an allegedly clean, green, zero-emission EV future. Many people can’t wait. Electric vehicle news is everywhere. As I write this, Google tells me BMW is the latest premium German carmaker to jump on board the Mainstream EV Express, recently signing a billion-dollar battery supply deal with China’s biggest battery manufacturer...
I’m pretty sure many of you will seek to rend me like jackals pulling apart a tasty rabbit for what I’m going to say here, but I’m going to say it anyway. And yes, it can be viewed as environmental hate-speech in some quarters, but I don’t go to Newtown all that much these days, so I may survive. I very badly want to own and drive a gigantic American car from the Seventies...
I despise the phrase 'jumped the shark'. It comes from a late episode of Happy Days, where Fonzie literally jumps over a shark on water skis – at least, that's what Wikipedia told me. I wasn't born when the shark was first jumped, you see, but the expression still lingers like a bad smell over pop culture...
You know what they say about opinions... No, not that line, the other one – 'you’re entitled to an opinion, but you’re also entitled to be wrong'. I prefer the other one for pure entertainment value to be honest, but in the instance of the new Holden Commodore, the line I’ve just written above is much more appropriate – and accurate...
We just can’t do it. It’s beyond us. They can post all the signs they want, we just aren’t interested, or even emotionally capable of complying. We will happily and eagerly comply with all sorts of other road rules – like not going through red lights, not driving at 160 through a school zone at 8.30am, and not stopping where rocks are falling...
This opinion piece was originally going to be called 'turn on your lights, you absolute dimwit', but my editor deemed that too much of a rant. Go and think about it a bit more, nail down the idea behind it, and come back with something more rounded, he said. That was tough, because I was incandescent with rage. (I see what you did there - Ed...
