Quiet News Day?

Most of the car sites today, like Autocar for example, are going with the announcement of the Vauxhall Insignia Country Tourer - a four-wheel-drive family estate car.

Not particularly interesting, even for someone like me who drives a four-wheel-drive family estate car.

It's brown:

 The Telegraph have been running two non-stories since the weekend.

A pointless review of the first episode of series 20 of Top Gear.  Pointless because it is written by someone more interested in repeating the fact that he is "not the target audience" for the show and then telling us that he didn't enjoy it.  Well, what a surprise!!!  Prat.  Some of the reader comments are suitably scathing though.

Their second non-story promises us the Top 10 Long-lived cars still on sale.

Only it doesn't.

I was expecting a list of cars that haven't really changed much in many years like the Land-Rover Defender or Porsche 911 (OK the 911 has changed a lot, but it still looks the same).

But no.  What we were given were a bunch of car names that have lived on - like the Ford Fiesta.  The early Fiestas bore no relation whatsoever to the new ones.  Pointless journalism.


Meanwhile, Autoguide have got hold of the story that "Ferrari is limiting its employees to only three in-house recipients per email."

This will cause problems if Fernando Alonso wants to send an amusing jpeg of a cat to Felipe Massa and all of their mechanics.

He will probably have to send the email several times to groups of three each time.

I'm not convinced that Ferrari have really thought this through.

What's in a Name?

A story this week from Car Magazine about how Mercedes are "simplifying" their car naming structure. You have to read it to believe it - it makes no sense whatsoever. They are trying to make their naming system which uses letters to identify the postion the model has in the range more logical.

They are failing spectacularly.

Maybe they should rethink the whole letters and numbers thing and just use names instead. They will need to be careful though - GM's Nova for instance didn't do too well in Spanish-speaking countries where "No va" means "doesn't go".

Ford's Pinto had similar problems as this is allegedly slang for "small penis" in South America.

Ford had better luck in Britain naming their cars after "gentlemen's magazines" like Escort and Fiesta.

All of the names in my little picture above are real car names - except one!

There's a prize of much kudos for anyone who spots my fake one.

Some names are so good that several car companies choose them independently of each other. For example, my profile picture is of an Austin Metro but anyone sitting at a computer on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean will expect a Metro to be a Geo Metro - so for those people - here's a nice picture of one of them...

Inflatable Girlfriends

A 51-year-old Canadian man has been fined for driving in a high-occupancy vehicle lane with a blow-up doll in the passenger seat of his car.

That's the opening line and picture from a story in my new Car News source, www.caradvice.com.au

It is about a man who was fined for using a Car-Pool lane while travelling alone with a blow-up doll wearing a jacket and baseball cap in his passenger seat. I'm not sure about Canadian seatbelt laws but this doll was safely strapped in.

The picture is not of the offending vehicle, but looks like an advert for Reeses. I don't know if it was mocked up in Australia or not - do they have Reeses confectionary Down Under? - they generally don't in the UK.

The article concludes with the nugget of information, "For the record, police confiscated the doll as evidence, although the cap and jacket were left with the driver" - which conjures up the image of a patrol car driving through Ontario with a naked sex doll on board.

The story prompted me to recall the classic Only Fools and Horses episode with the exploding dolls and to find this picture:









And that, in turn, led me to this story from 2008 in The Mirror with this picture...Look closely at the rear window of the Fiesta - she was definitely not strapped in.