kottke.org posts about cars
Many early 20th century hackers found the Ford Model T a perfect platform on which to build all manner of different mobile machines.
Among the 800 vintage automobiles brought by collectors were ones that had been converted to snowmobiles, racing coups and tow trucks. That was only a glimmer of the many innovative changes made by Model T owners, for uses Henry Ford never had in mind. They transformed the cars into tractors, pickup trucks, paddy wagons, mobile lumber mills and power plants for milling grain. An itinerant preacher converted his into a four-wheeled chapel.
Check out the slideshow for several examples, including the goat sidecar.
Replacing a car that gets horrible gas mileage with one that gets good gas mileage is preferable to replacing a car that gets good gas mileage with one that gets excellent gas mileage. To that end, kottke.org contributor Cliff Kuang says to the car companies: forget about 100-mpg cars and focus on small, achievable increases in MPG ratings.
My concern is a rhetorical one: What happens when advancements in cars are eternally linked — through marketing and special prizes — with big innovations, rather than tangible results right now? Fuel efficiency gets its urgency sapped: Someone’s working on it, with results TBD. Wait and see.
The average U.S. citizen completely ignores the regularity with which the automobile kills him, maims him, embroils him with the law and provides mobile shelter for rakes intent on seducing his daughters. He takes it into his garage as fondly as an Arab leading a prize mare into his tent. He woos it with Simoniz, Prestone, Ethyl and rich lubricants — and goes broke trading it in on something flashier an hour after he has made the last payment on the old one.
By last week, this peculiar state of mind had not only sucked thousands of American oil wells dry, stripped the rubber groves of Malaya, produced the world’s most inhuman industry and its most recalcitrant labor union, but had filled U.S. streets with so many automobiles that it was almost impossible to drive one. In some big cities, vast traffic jams never really got untangled from dawn to midnight; the bray of horns, the stink of exhaust fumes, and the crunch of crumpling metal eddied up from them as insistently as the vaporous roar of Niagara.
That’s from Time magazine in 1947. (thx, david)
A short appreciation of the iconic Citroen Deux Chevaux on the occasion of its 60th anniversary.
As a student and trainee journalist, I managed to drive my bright red one thousands of miles around the continent and once even to Morocco without a breakdown. The main drawback was sunburn from motoring with the cloth roof rolled back. There was so much wind you didn’t feel the rays.
Truckliness is next to Godliness.
Sen. Jim King, R-Jacksonville, said he had a set [of Truck Nutz] on one of his vehicles, which he described as “all pimped out.” They are no more than “an expression of truckliness,” he said, although he’d acceded to his wife’s request to take them off.
“I find it shocking we’d tell people with metallic testicles on their bumpers that this is a violation,” said Sen. Steve Geller, D-Hallandale. “There’s got to be better things for us to spend time debating.”
(via clusterflock)
Erik Spiekermann on FE-Mittelschrift, the typeface used for German license plates.
The official typeface for our license plates is now called FE-Mittelschrift, with FE meaning it is Fälschungs-Erschwert, i.e. difficult to forge. Apparently car thieves, terrorists and notorious law-breakers had been exploiting DIN’s geometric construction principle and turning E into F or 3 into 8 etc by simply using a bit of black tape or white paint.
Here are all the alphanumeric characters:
Note the tamper-resistant differences between the 6 (no notch) and 9 (notched), the E & F, the I & 1, the O & zero, the P & R, and so on.
A pair of well-to-do auto enthusiasts named Alex Roy and Dave Maher set the unofficial record for crossing the US by car: 31 hours, 4 minutes, faster than the old record of 32 hours, 7 minutes.
According to Yates and his fellow Cannonballers, trying to beat that record today is pointless. Their argument goes something like this: Cannonball records were set back when the free-wheelin’ ’70s hooked up with the greed-is-good ’80s for fat lines of cocaine and unprotected sex. But these, brother, are Patriot Act days - executive-privilege end times in which no rogue deed goes untracked, no E-ZPass unlogged, no roaming cell phone unmonitored by perihelion satellite. Big Brother is definitely watching. Big Speed, the old Cannonballers say, is a quaint, 20th-century idea, like pay phones or print magazines.
Roy was inspired to take up fast driving by the short film C’était un Rendez-vous, where Claude Lelouch races through Paris at breakneck speeds to meet his sweetheart in Montmartre. Here’s the route they took, another piece on the record in the NY Times, and a book by Roy on his exploits. This is the sort of thing that is really, really cool up until the moment Roy’s tricked out BMW makes contact with a family minivan at 120mph…and then, not so much.
Update: Here’s a video of the pair zooming along on the freeway. Comment on YouTube:
Those guys look like they’re doing about 90-95… BFD. You see that all the time going up and down I-5 and I-95.. I once was doing about 90 down I-95 and got passed by a HOUSE on a flatbed truck. (yawn)
A 13-step guide for buying a car while controlling the sale and the price.
It works only if you truly are willing to walk away…and then refuse to bend when they try to put you off or change the terms. Stay civil, do not let any emotion in. You are on a mission, Marine!
Fantastic advice. My dad is a skilled car buyer and on one particular occasion, spend two grueling hours dinkering with a used car saleman over a junky but good-running truck. He walked out at least twice and kept escalating up to the manager before getting the price down from $2300 to around $400.
A really small car from 1924. “The license plate is almost as large as her automobile, but Miss Mary Bay likes her car because it is easy to park.”
A 1993 New Yorker story by John Seabook called The Flash of Genius is being made into a movie starring Greg Kinnear. The story revolves around Bob Kearns, the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper and his struggle to get the US auto industry to pay him for infringing on his patent. “There’s no question that Dr. Kearns’ wiper circuit was interesting. He had a three-brush motor, with dynamic brake and intermittent on one speed only — his system was a concatenation of a lot of different ideas. But we figured there was just no way in the world it was patentable. An electronic timing device was an obvious thing to try next. How can you patent something that is in the natural evolution of technology?”
BTW, the phrase “flash of genius” refers to a test of patentability enacted in 1941 saying that the act of invention had to be a “flash of creative genius” on the part of the inventor and not the result of tinkering. That standard was replaced in 1952 by the non-obviousness test.
Cartype: “A comprehensive collection of reviews and study of typographical applications of emblems, car company logos and car logos with images, comments, links, car company information and general interest.”
The Senate voted to increase fuel mileage requirements on cars sold in the US. “If the Senate bill becomes law, car manufacturers would have to increase the average mileage of new cars and light trucks to 35 miles per gallon by 2020, compared with roughly 25 miles per gallon today.” According to CNN, SUVs are included under the requirement…it’s about fricking time that loophole was closed.
Ferrari gives out a limited number of passports to VIPs, which “gives its bearer entrance to the factory, unrestricted access to all the restricted areas, and no-questions-asked carte blanche to borrow any of the cars in the factory’s fleet”. (via clusterflock)
Predictions for the year 2000 made in The Ladies Home Journal in 1900. Two of the really interesting predicitons: “Cities, therefore, will be free from all noises.” and “Automobiles will be cheaper than horses are today. Farmers will own automobile hay-wagons, automobile truck-wagons, plows, harrows and hay-rakes. A one-pound motor in one of these vehicles will do the work of a pair of horses or more. Children will ride in automobile sleighs in winter. Automobiles will have been substituted for every horse vehicle now known. There will be, as already exist today, automobile hearses, automobile police patrols, automobile ambulances, automobile street sweepers. The horse in harness will be as scarce, if, indeed, not even scarcer, then as the yoked ox is today.” (via long now blog)
People cruising the streets for parking meters do so because meter pricing is too low. “Underpriced curb spaces are like rent-controlled apartments: hard to find and, once you do, crazy to give up. This increases the time costs (and therefore the congestion and pollution costs) of cruising.”
Video of the Bugatti Veyron reaching its top speed of 253 mph. The Veyron is the world’s fastest production car and is even faster than F1 and Indy cars. Looks like the driver had some sort of religious experience. (via clusterflock)
Regarding the hypermiling business from last week, a question on Ask MetaFilter: Does a truck work extra to pull a drafting car?
The most enjoyable and interesting thing I’ve read in a week has to be this article about Wayne Gerdes (via bb). Gerdes is a hypermiler — a person who drives in an obsessive fashion in order to increase his vehicle’s fuel efficiency — and strikes me as someone that Errol Morris would be quite interested in doing a short documentary about. He’s refined his driving technique over the years to wring 59 MPG out of a plain Honda Accord and clocked over 180 MPG with a hybrid Honda Insight. Here’s a taste of how he drives:
“Buckle up tight, because this is the death turn,” says Wayne. Death turn? We’re moving at 50 mph. Wayne turns off the engine. He’s bearing down on the exit, and as he turns the wheel sharply to the right, the tires squeal-which is what happens when you take a 25 mph turn going 50. Cathy, Terry’s wife, who is sitting next to me in the backseat, grabs my leg. I grab the door handle. As we come out of the 270-degree turn, Cathy says, “I hope you have upholstery cleaner.”
We glide for over a mile with the engine off, past a gas station, right at a green light, through another green light — Wayne is always timing his speed to land green lights — and around a mall, using momentum in a way that would have made Isaac Newton proud. “Are we going to attempt that at home?” Cathy asks Terry, a talkative man who has been stone silent since Wayne executed the death turn in his car. “Not in this lifetime,” he shoots back.
At PopTech last year, Alex Steffen of WorldChanging told the crowd that cars with realtime mileage displays get better gas mileage. Turns out that’s how Gerdes got really interested in hypermiling:
But it was driving his wife’s Acura MDX that moved Wayne up to the next rung of hypermiler driving. That’s because the SUV came with a fuel consumption display (FCD), which shows mpg in real time. As he drove, he began to see how little things — slight movements of his foot, accelerations up hills, even a cold day — influenced his fuel efficiency. He learned to wring as many as 638 miles from a single 19-gallon tank in the MDX; he rarely gets less than 30 mpg when he drives it. “Most people get 18 in them,” he says. The FCD changed the driving game for Wayne. “It’s a running joke,” he says, “but instead of a fuel consumption display, a lot of us call them ‘game gauges’” — a reference to the running score posted on video games — “because we’re trying to beat our last score — our miles per gallon.”
If people could see how much fuel they guzzled while driving, Wayne believes they’d quickly learn to drive more efficiently. “If the EPA would mandate FCDs in every car, this country would save 20 percent on fuel overnight,” he says. “They’re not expensive for the manufacturers to put in — 10 to 20 bucks — and it would save more fuel than all the laws passed in the last 25 years. All from a simple display.”
Competition, even with yourself, can be a powerful motivator. I’m not convinced, however, that FCDs would improve gas mileage across the board. There are other games you can play with the display — the how-much-gas-can-I-waste game or the how-close-can-I-get-to-18-MPG game — that don’t have much to do with conserving fuel consumption. Still, next time I’m in a car with a mileage display, I’ll be trying out some of Gerdes less intensive driving techniques, including the ones he shares on this Sierra Club podcast (Gerdes’ interview is about 2/3 of the way through).
Calvin Trillin, parallel parking expert, parks a self-parking car. “As you ease up gradually on the brake, the wheel turns on its own to make one reverse swoop into the spot. Watching the wheel turn by itself is a bit like watching a player piano, except in traffic.”
Totally crazy video of cars sliding around on an icy Portland Street. The soundtrack in my head is playing The Blue Danube when I watch this. (via bb)
Diagram that shows what it takes to move 15,000 people/hour using different modes of transportation (car, bus, light rail, etc.). A fast train with one track going each way (using a space 8 meters wide) moves as many people as a freeway with 7 lanes in each direction (51 meters wide).
Physiologically, humans aren’t meant to drive fast in cars because our flicker fusion frequency isn’t high enough. Compared to birds (> 100 Hz versus 60 Hz for humans), at high speeds, everything kinda blurs together for us, leaving us ill-equipped to react quickly.
Screw Chevy: “It’s not OK to use images of Rosa Parks, MLK, the Vietnam War, the Katrina disaster, and 9/11 to sell pickup trucks.”
Update: In a hamfisted tribute on the occasion of her death, Apple posted a Rosa Parks “Think Different” ad on their home page. (thx, mark)
Thanks to the glories of YouTube, you can now watch Kaj Pindal’s Oscar-nominated short film, What On Earth!:
Made in 1966 under the auspices of the National Film Board of Canada, the animated film records a visit by Martians to Earth and their observations about the planet’s dominant life form, the automobile.
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