The Tesla-driving, gourmet pizza-eating, Tasmanian Pinot-drinking South Yarra socialists are after us again. If they’re not trying to make electric cars compulsory then they’re promoting driverless cars as the answer to the road toll or, even worse electric, driverless cars as the answer to global warming, child poverty, racism, eczema and the domination of Hawthorn Football Club.
Look, I’m open-minded. I have diesel and petrol cars. Driverless cars will change the lives of many people with disabilities, particularly the blind. But if we want to do something about the road toll we should do more about distractions.
A study by Jake Pelini in this month’s Atlantic magazine (which also contains a deeply disturbing piece on what sex was really like in the Victorian era) shows that in the US, “94 per cent of crashes involve some form of driver error or impairment before impact” and that “4 million of the nearly 11 million crashes that occur annually could be potentially avoided if distractions were eliminated”.
Another issue for driverless car makers is raised by lawyers Don Slavik and Adam Levitt, who say “automakers will have to accept responsibility and liability for crashes — an obligation currently borne by drivers”. How good will that be. No insurance premiums.
Talking of distractions, German police raided Audi on Wednesday just as VW’s luxury division chief executive, Rupert Stadler, was presenting at the group’s annual results presentation. The German media has long said that “the indications are growing that the VW subsidiary has played an important role in the development of the dieselgate fraud software, calling Audi the ‘mutter des betrugs’ (mother of the fraud). Reuters reported that: “Munich prosecutors said their investigation was in connection with the sale of around 80,000 Audi diesel vehicles in the US between 2009 and 2015 on suspicion that they were fitted with devices to cheat on emissions tests.”
Given the issues Audi owners have been having in Australia, it mightn’t be long before our very own consumer storm trooper, ACCC boss Rocket Rod Sims, starts raiding the company’s local offices.
A reader says Audi has up to a dozen SQ5s (including his) that have a strange hesitant running problem that’s almost like fuel starvation. “They have flown techs out from Ingoldstadt (Audi global HQ) to my car for three days and apparently two techs to Western Australia where they have one that is worse. The problem seems to be in the ECU algorithms and they appear not to have a clue. If this is true every car has this fault … but not all owners have noticed? They plan to fix every delivered car when they get a patch or whatever. Being treated like a mushroom made me eventually ring Germany,” he says. Audi says the $130,000 SQ5 engine has “a full 230 kW that accelerates from 0 to 100km/h in only 5.1 seconds. And since it’s a TDI engine we’re talking about, it is also extremely efficient.” Hmmm. Fuel efficient.
Of course, readers still have problems with the rear main seals leaking on the Audi Q7.
Talking of problems in Germany, only about 50 readers emailed me about my claim that Woolf Barnato was Australian.
Look, if you were my age and had moved from the espresso martinis to the chocolate ones at Amelia Island, you’d be trying to claim the three-time Le Mans winner as one of ours, too. Woolf was, of course, English. He had a bit of money made in the rich father business when his father died during a boat trip from Cape Town to London. The coroner found his dad Barney, who was in the diamond and gold caper, died by drowning while temporarily insane. However, his co-driver was Carlton boy and son of a pearl salesman Bernie Rubin. No health problems at The Blues. Motto: A sound mind in a healthy body. Not many wins lately, though.
Talking of Italian carmakers, Ferrari must be hanging out for sales. American Express has a golf day (only slightly more boring than driving a Tesla) in Sydney where you and a few mates can win a GTC4Lusso 12-cylinder four-seater Ferrari for sinking a hole in one.
Talking of Australia, I forgot to mention that Wheels magazine named the Mazda CX-9 its car of the year. Mazda do make seriously good cars (I own a BT-50 and track an MX-5) but more interesting were the cars that didn’t make the cut.
This is a shortened version of the original article – read the rest at The Australian.
