Thursday, March 29, 2012
Close call, these guys caught their pop up tent just before it crashed into their cars... and ruined the paint and bodywork on their show cars
Nice Olds F85 caught my eye in a parking lot... Cragar SS rims make about everything look better... but the overall design, though simple, is good looking
Take the lettering off the tail panel, and no one would know what this car is.
A train crash in the movie "Hugo" replicates the famous Oct 1895 Granville-Paris Express wreck photo... pretty cool to include that in a movie
Via: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/Train_wreck_at_Montparnasse_1895.jpg
I've posted that old photo before, because it's just amazing to me. Trains falling out of buildings... not very often that happens http://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2010/02/one-of-most-impressive-photos-ive-seen.html
Panic buying hits petrol stations across Sefton and West Lancashire
IT'S a curious contradiction. Petrol is, most motorists would argue, too expensive, and yet this week scores of them have been queuing up to buy as much of it as they can.
Over the past few days we've been keeping a close eye on threats of a strike by fuel tanker drivers - and the panic buying it's prompted right across our area and other parts of Britain. It's one of those stories that affects almost everyone - even if you don't run a car yourself - and unsurprisingly plenty of you have already got in touch to share your experiences.
The thing is, of course, that panic buying is a self-fulfilling prophecy, because it'll happen as soon as you - or rather, cabinet ministers - allude to it. At the time of writing no strike has actually been confirmed, but if you'd just emerged from a cave and taken a look at the number of "SORRY, NO FUEL" signs out at the moment you'd draw a very different conclusion.
It'll also be interested to see what effect the Twitter generation has on the course of events; the last time there were widespread fuel shortages, way back in 2000, it and Facebook hadn't even been invented. It, is, in many ways, a bit like last summer's riots. Social networking is simultaneously its best mate and its sworn enemy.
Without wanting to, er, fuel the panic, we'd be interested to know how you've been affected. Get in touch via all the usual Life On Cars channels...
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
most unusual utility spotlight I've come across, looks like vintage German VW bug equipment, my compliments to the owner for finding such a rare thing
unusual, and cool handmade car show plaque
87 year old Bentley driven over 1.5 million kilometers, and cross country for fun, still a pleasure to it's owner, 49 yr old, carpenter Robin Hine
here's a cool mod to a bug with no air conditioning.. front hinged windshield
one more reason I won't have a dog
Why using ANPR to catch out insurance cheats at petrol stations will never work
CONFESSION time, then, chaps and chapettes. Who out of this week's readers is driving around without their car insurance being up to scratch?
Apparently, just under 10% of the region's motorists are driving around without bothering with the pesky business of paying for cover, which means statistically at least one of you hasn't gone got any. After all, insurance is unbelievably expensive these days. It's also almost completely unfathomable and sold to you by an opera tenor who unites people from all walks of life because they all, without exception, would love nothing more than to have him removed from our TV screens for good.
Car insurance is confusing and expensive and as a result loads of you just can't be bothered with it. Even the Government, as I've mentioned previously, realise it.
Yet Whitehall's latest idea to crack down on the uninsured drivers - which I'm absolutely not one of, by the way - isn't going to work because while it's good in principle, it's got more holes than one of Jamie Oliver's colanders. As a bit of a self-confessed Dragons' Den addict, I just know that if it was some young business boffin's invention it'd be shot to pieces with just a handful of snide remarks from Duncan Bannatyne and a bad joke from Peter Jones. However, it's the Government who are suggesting it, so I will at least try to take it seriously.
In essence, they're on about fitting ANPR cameras, which can recognise car numberplates, to every petrol station in the country in a bid to spot uninsured cars as they pull in to fill up. The technology, which already works a treat on police cars, will then automatically tell the petrol pumps not to give the offending driver any fuel. And presumably give Plod a bell at the same time.
It's a great idea in principle but - Bannatyne mode activated - it will be horrendously expensive in practice, and it'd have to fitted to each and every one of Britain's 8,000 or so filling stations across the land. It'd also encourage even more crooks to clone car numberplates, siphoning would shoot up, and I can just see the court case where the one law-abiding driver, who the cameras clock by mistake, successfully sues for defamation after the system insinuates he's an insurance cheat.
It is, for all those reasons and a couple of others I can't squeeze into one Life On Cars column, a badly-thought out waste of what is basically YOUR money.
I'm out.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
More things that caught my eye at the Bugstock 2012
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