Flying Car for UK?

Pigs Might FlyThe Green Car Website reckons that a flying car approved for use in the USA could soon be approved for use in Europe.

It’s called the Terrafugia, and can do 35mpg on the road at up to 65mph. It’s a two-seater and can fly at 115mph, whereupon it uses 5 gallons of fuel per hour!

In the UK, it would cost £150,000 – and already you can pre-order by paying a $10,000 deposit.

The article explains that Terrafugia is Latin for “escape from land” – reflecting a desire for cars which could escape from the congested roads and soar above the traffic.

What it doesn’t say is that it is also a reflection on how out of touch with reality some people really are!

Apparently (well, obviously), you will need a drivers license AND a pilot’s licence. But anyone who is stupid enough to think it will solve any problems in the UK, with overhead cables and trees, and other air traffic, shouldn’t be let outside alone – nevermind about have driver’s and pilot’s licences!

Precisely how (and where) you would attain take-off velocity anywhere other than at an airport is currently not being considered.

Its wingspan of just under 30 feet also raises questions. You’d need one of the wider stretches of the M25 to even think about launching it – and we all know what the M25 is like in terms of getting up to 3rd gear, let alone take-off velocity.

One of my pupils raised a valid point. He said it’s bad enough with crashes in two dimensions, without adding a third. Of course, that would also raise issues for innocent road users already adversely affected by lunatics on the road coming at them from the left and the right. You wouldn’t want to add above to all that, would you?

Canada’s Bad… and Racist Drivers

The Toronto Sun makes a comment about the standard of driving in Canada. The article is about 120 words long, and doesn’t actually say much other than a national poll saying 75% of Canadians think driving standards are worse than 50 years ago. And this needed a poll?

I think the Canadians have been taking lessons from the UK on how to state the obvious.

Far more interesting is Canada’s massive problems with racism and prejudice. Take a look at some of the comments that people have left at the foot of that story. If you said any of that stuff in the UK you’d be arrested.

Mind you, a couple of comments did ring a bell with what happens over here:

Bad driving habits? Talk to the stupid people who brake driving uphill, the idiots who do 20 under the speed limit, causing a huge line up of cars behind them, the jerks who do not turn off their high beams when coming at you at nightime. Or how about the tools that dont know how to park, people who rip up ahead on a bottleneck road and force their way in, when people have been waiting for minutes already. [edited by DOAADI for racist rant]

Another favourite of mine are the people who brake because someone in another lane puts on their brakes. Most people are sheep and do not focus on driving. I drove professionally for years. It is near impossible to make a decent living driving in the Toronto area.

A lot of that could almost be taken from here, couldn’t it?

Blind Drivers?!

It’s quite frightening, but they are being serious.

This article reports that blind people were put behind the wheel of manual cars on a test track in Cologne. For some inexplicable reason, it is deemed boastworthy that the fastest one of these blind drivers got the car “up to 74mph”.

The article suggests:

Teaching the blind to drive is an increasingly realistic goal as cameras and sensors become sophisticated and cheap enough that they might one day substitute for sight.

The rough translation of this is as follows: having cameras and computers reliable enough to be a substitute for sight is many, many years off – even if it happens at all.

Ford apparently saw the event as “empowering blind and visually impaired drivers”.

I remember once someone reported that blind people were being taught to drive with the aid of a guide dog in the passenger seat, which was trained to bark once for “turn left” and twice for “turn right”.

The number of people who believed it was amazing. It was published on April 1st.

Quality Driving Lessons Count

An American article, but very relevant to the UK – and anywhere else where driving lessons are conducted.

The article says that better drivers are frequently the product of better-quality driving schools. It doesn’t really expand upon this, being mainly an advisory in the popular mode (the UK media is no better), but the tag line is definitely valid.

VillainI guess the instructor involved in what I saw this afternoon should take note. I’d picked up a pupil for a lesson, and as we were waiting at the end of his street to emerge I saw another learner car go by – and I recognised the driver. A few weeks ago he’d put his lessons on hold to concentrate on his studies (this sometimes happens a lot at this time of year). I’d obviously been at pains to find out if it was anything I’d done at that time, and he assured me it wasn’t.

When I saw this today, I texted him a little later and asked if it was him I’d seen. He said it was, and that this instructor was giving him a few lessons over the summer holidays. I again asked if it was anything I’d done (good instructors are paranoid about things like this), and he telephoned me to assure me it was absolutely nothing to do with me, but his mum was paying and this instructor had told her that her son shouldn’t stop driving otherwise he’d forget everything and never get started again.

That is an absolute load of crap.

The instructor in question must be really desperate for work to have to resort to this type of unprofessional behaviour (Heaven knows what other things were said). It’s a shame such antics don’t get you kicked off the register, because they should.

One thing is certain: you get what you pay for, and someone so desperate for work that they drop prices and provide inaccurate information in order to steal it from other people really are worth even less than that!

The funny part is, though, that my diary is full up. So I guess the last laugh is mine. Of course, my ex-pupil will suffer because he wasn’t far away from test standard, and this cowboy is going to milk him for the summer.

DSA Alert: Find Your Nearest Instructor

An email alert from the DSA:

Online directory of driving instructors launched

  • Only official online directory of qualified, approved driving instructors
  • Over 30,000 qualified instructors signed up to the service
  • Search for qualified, approved instructors in your area

A free online service making it easy for learner drivers to find qualified instructors in their area has been launched today by the Driving Standards Agency (DSA).

Find your nearest driving instructors’ is available on Directgov. It lists fully qualified driving instructors who have signed up to be listed, and allows users to search for instructors closest to them by typing in their postcode.

Learners will also be able to see if an instructor has signed up to the voluntary code of practice and if they are committed to continuing their professional development. The voluntary code of practice sets out the professional standards and business ethics expected of those working in the industry.

Road Safety Minister Mike Penning said:

“This new service will make life easier for learner drivers and parents looking for qualified instructors in their area. I hope that this will allow people to make more informed choices about who they want to teach them to drive.”

Once qualified, approved instructors are tested regularly by DSA to ensure they are delivering the required standard of instruction, and are subject to ongoing enhanced criminal record checks. They display a green badge in their windscreen during lessons.

Trainee driving instructors will not be listed in the directory. However, trainee driving instructors can do a limited amount of teaching to gain experience and must display a pink badge in their windscreen to indicate that they are not yet fully qualified.

Find your nearest driving instructors is at direct.gov.uk/finddrivinginstructor.

Useful links

I’m not quite sure what Penning’s involvement in this is, as the service has been avaialable for some time, dating from before his mob scraped into power.

When Advertising Goes Wrong

Blackcurrant Lucozade PosterLook at the picture on the left. It’s the poster being used to advertise Blackcurrant Lucozade at the moment.

Does it – in any way at all – make you consider rushing out to buy a bottle of the stuff?

I’m sure the girl is attractive, but you certainly can’t tell from this picture, because in it she looks quite horrendous. The purple tongue is disgusting, and an indirect, yet obvious pointer to anyone with a brain that this stuff needs to be kept away from anyone under the age of 25 who goes anywhere near light coloured material. And her expression screams “this stuff tastes bad“.

There are a number of similarities with a certain famous painting by Edvard Munch.

It’s one of those occasional ads that really irritates me for some unaccountable reason each time I see it. It’s even uglier full size.

I wonder exactly what the executives of the company which makes Lucozade were thinking when they approved this? It just doesn’t work.

Afterthought: I have just got to post more articles. This is making me mad keep seeing it at the top of the page. Damn, it is ugly. Ugh!

Footnote: This is quite a popular post judging from the hits – and they can’t all be from weirdoes only interested in the girl!

Since originally posting it, it became clear that Lucozade was gearing up for the annual music festivals. Although this particular ad has thankfully hit the trash cans (at least around here), there are several others that glamourize music festivals – silhouetted sunset shots of kids doing dangerous stunts that the stewards would eject them for, or screaming pointlessly at something, waving their fingers in the air.

Just think: when you go to a music festival, and especially if you’re there for the week, where do you go to the toilet? How do you clean yourself afterwards? How do you clean yourself at all? What do you think is in those bottles that are inevitably thrown around by retards in the crowd? And as much as Lucozade would have you think otherwise, the number of times the weather has been anything like it is in those ads – particularly at festivals during the last decade – could be counted on the fingers of one hand.

A pupil told me that he saw someone knocked out by a 2L bottle of “something” that hit them on the back of the head. Let’s face facts here, people aren’t going to be slinging unopened bottles of Volvic around anymore than they’re going to be able to stand in the sun all day drinking Carling and screaming without having to urinate. And he confirmed that when his dad turned up to drive him home (Leeds to Nottingham), they had to drive back with the window open.

But, hey! That’s the Lucozade image.

Autoglass Redundancies (Update)

This is an OLD story.


I mentioned recently that Autoglass was getting rid of 400 jobs.

As a follow-up, a reader has provided the following information (copied exactly as submitted):

The 300 permanent staff that Autoglass are making redundant are having their contracts breached. Autoglass are paying in lieu of notice which by law as to be in your contract, there is nothing in our contracts outlining redundancy. So they have to serve our notice which makes us entitled to benefits and so on, but we aren’t getting them. Pay in lieu of notice terminates our employment today the 15th July 2011. All 300 staff are entitled to take Autoglass to an employment tribunal or even to a civil court for breach of contract.

I stress that this is a comment submitted by a reader.

Workington Theory Tests

I’ve mentioned several times the furore over the DSA’s plans to close the Workington Theory Test Centre, and how the government was sticking its nose in.

Well, at the end of the day sensible logic lost, and the junior transport minister, Mike Penning, has forced the game result. Although the test centre only does about 3,000 tests a year – it’s capacity is 15,000 tests (so it’s running at only 20% capacity) - this idiotic coalition we are suffering has decided that in spite of all the cuts being made, this is one that shouldn’t be!

Penning has said:

I am clear there should not be a gap in theory test provision in Workington.

If a suitable alternative facility is not in place by September 1, I have arranged for a mobile test centre (bus) to be temporarily placed in the area to ensure continuity.

Can you believe this idiot? The DSA was closing it because it wasn’t cost effective.

And Tony Cunningham, the Workington MP who chose this as his cause célèbre, has wasted no time adding a few noughts to his previous tag line about people having to travel miles to Carlisle (the proposed alternative). It’s now “hundreds of miles” they would have had to travel – if this had dragged on any longer, no doubt it would have risen to “thousands”.

Just to remind Mr Cunningham that Carlisle is 32 miles from Workington.  So the worst that could have happened is that people would have had to travel an extra 32 miles. I don’t think that classifies as “hundreds” – except in Mr Cunningham’s strange world.

Meanwhile, the rest of us – even those who DO live “hundreds of miles” away – are going to have to pay for the three staff who are only 20% occupied.

Driving Test Pass Rates (by Test Centre)

Pass Rate DialI’ve been getting a lot of hits from people looking for driving test centre pass rates.

The DSA used to publish them alongside the details for each test centre, but you could never be sure how reliable they were or even if they even were being kept up to date. I suspect keeping them updated was the reason they stopped doing it – it must be very labour intensive to do.

However, DSA does log the data, so they are available. They recently made the data for the period April 2010 to February 2011 available – split between gender.

As I say on that page, pass rates are not a probability of passing your test. How good a driver you are controls that.

If a Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing…

…then no knowledge whatsoever must be lethal!

This is Plymouth (link long since dead) reports on a press release concerning test centre pass rates. Basically, 152 out of 340 test centres have pass rates of 50% or more. No one seems to have bothered to calculate that this is 45% of test centres – so you could say that about half of all test centres have pass rates of 50% or more, and half have pass rate of less.

It’s a bit like saying that when you toss a coin there is a 50% chance of getting heads, and then getting all upset by it as if it’s a problem or something!

This is Plymouth is worried that the Plymouth test centre has a failure rate of 60%, whereas other Devon centres have failure rates of 49%, 45%, and 42%. Why assume that the 60% one is wrong? What about the one at 42%?

The highest failure rate was as Hermon Hill, Wanstead – 72% out of 4,826 first time tests.

The lowest failure rates are in remote Scottish communities – with tiny populations:

Examiners in places such as Mallaig, Inveraray, Islay and the Isle of Skye test barely 200 candidates between them a year.

Mallaig saw 14 first-time candidates last year and failed only 21% – or three – of them. Again, no one seems to have bothered to calculate that if they’d have failed a fourth then the failure rate would have leapt up to 29%. Fail a fifth and it’s a humongous 36%.

In Wanstead, you’d have to fail another 50 to increase the failure rate by just 1%!

It’s pretty obvious that driving around Mallaig is not the same as driving around Wanstead – except to the media. And Wanstead hardly has the same sort of clientele as Mallaig. So why the big deal?