Tim Child

Have been borrowing a couple of cars quite recently and I have just noticed that its cheaper to take a car from inside the city and pay the congestion charge than to pay the average day car parking fee, now I am not sure how that helps matters. Surely it would be better to leave the car at home and just use public transport until I need the car. I haven’t looked at how much a monthly permit is but I wonder whether it is cheaper than the 25Kr a day it costs in congestion charge at the times that I use it…

And speaking of driving, Sweden is fairly safe particularly when compared to England perhaps due in some part to not having so many cars per square kilometre but I am fairly stunned that most of the roads that I have driven on at night do not have Cat’s eyes. Of course these would be completely useless in the winter due to snow, but they have additional road markings then anyway, but I really miss them in normal driving.

All over the world right now people are thinking about the price of Oil, mostly because it costs so much to run their big engined, wasteful cars and not because of any effect it will have on the environment. Most of the time these cars are accelerating quite fast, running not so frugally and generally polluting everything around them and adding to general problems of the earth.

Of course hurting people in their wallets or purses will perhaps make users change, but what about if they could actually see how much money they are wasting?

In cars we have meters to show how much petrol we have, and of course how many revolutions the engine is doing per minute, how fast we are going and of course how many miles/kilometers we have done. Some might be lucky to have a trip computer show how many miles to the gallon or kilometers to the liter we have done. If you have a Rolls Royce you even have a power in reserve meter based on a percentage scale.

But why not take it a stage further and show exactly how much money is being spent for every minute / kilometer / mile being done in real time. A simple meter will do, and it can get its information from current speed, the onboard computer which will know exactly how much fuel is being used in modern cars, or an approximation on older less sophisticated cars. You would probably have to enter in the cost of you fuel unless the pump could update the car using BlueTooth or what have you.

I am sure that people will start to aim to get it down, of course their is probably the odd idiot that will want to see how much he, and its bound to be a he, can spend in one minute by some mad use of driving but the majority I think would see how much it is hurting their wallet and change their ways if they are driving along watching their money being used.

I bet modern car manufacturers have thought about this, but want to keep us inside, using more fuel and making cars ever heavier but perhaps this is one trick that might, just might make us take more heed of what is being used by our cars.

These students rock.

C’etait un Rendezvous: “

(Via Gadgetopia.)

Haven’t posted for a while, which is becoming a bad habit, but one of the reasons being getting over this beauty:

As you can see it visually stunning, but the first thing that hits you is the smell of expensive Italian leather as you enter, then its how solid everything is as you pull off, the whole car feels like it is hewn out of lightweight metals, but really it is quite a heavy car, which is all the more amazing for the hit that the front engined V12 gives when it keeps accelerating, and accelerating, and accelerating. It just doesn’t stop..

Fantastic.