Category: cars

Why Can’t My Car Do That?

Ashley Bischoff3 Comments

Autoblog reports on a nifty feature in the Bugatti Veyron (which just happens to have 1,001 horsepower). Upon inserting a special lightweight aluminum key, the car enters “Top Speed” mode (no joke, the words “Top Speed” then appear on the facia). I must concede that Autoblog beat me to the punch on this one, but it does rather resemble KITT’s Super Pursuit Mode:

“[The] car begins a series of safety checks on such things as tyre pressures. Once complete, the chassis squats to just 65mm above the road at the front and 70mm at the rear. From now on, the diffuser flaps remain closed and the angle of incidence of the rear aerofoil is minimised to reduce wind resistance. The final action of this high-speed mode is to disable all limiters (the car is otherwise limited to 375kph). Touch the brakes, however, and the car reverts to standard settings.”

For the metric-challenged, the equivalent measurements would be a height of 2.5" in front and 2.75" in back. In case you don't have a ruler handy, think of it as being lower to the ground than length of your pinkie finder (from knuckle to tip, assuming your pinkie finger is about the same size as mine). Naturally, some lucky bastard piloted one of these to a new world record — 400 kph/ 248.5 mph in a production car.

Traffic Alerts on Your Cell Phone

Ashley Bischoff3 Comments

After finding myself unexpectedly stuck in traffic on my way home from work one too many times, I thought to check whether I could get traffic alerts e-mailed to me (after all, there’re websites which track traffic, so I thought there was at least a chance someone might offer an e-mail option). I did some searching but I couldn’t find anyone that had traffic alerts over e-mail.

Then it occurred to me that traffic alerts sent to my cell phone would be even better — that way, I wouldn’t even have to be near my computer to keep up-to-date on any traffic anomalies. I wasn’t very optimistic about finding much, though; sending alerts via e-mail is one thing, but having a traffic-alert service with an integrated SMS gateway on the back-end seemed like a tall order. Nonetheless, I searched anyway — and, sure enough, there is such a thing. Apparently, MSN has a free MSN Alerts service which can send traffic alerts (or other updates) to one’s phone.

The process is fairly straightforward. First, you’ll need an MS Passport account. Then, just load up the MSN Alerts page and choose the “Add Alerts” link which is on the top of that page. The only tricky part, if you can even call it that, is that the traffic alerts are under the “MSN Autos” header (though, to be fair, the subheader does say “Receive real-time local traffic incidents from MSN Carpoint”).

From there, the options are up to you. After choosing your metro area (“Dallas-Ft Worth” in my case”) you can select from what looks to be several dozen metro regions (which, on my list, starts from “Abbott”, goes through ”Euless”, and continues right through to “Wylie”). In my case, I just chose “Dallas” ;). And, from there, you also have a choice of delivery times, delivery days and traffic incident severity; I set that last one just to “High” since it was mostly the accidents that I cared about and I didn’t want to rack up too many text messages needlessly.

I’ve been using MSN Alerts for a few days now and it’s working out well. Granted, it sometimes tells me about accidents on roads on which I don’t drive — c'est la vie — but the alerts on roads which I use have saved me a few times from driving into a block of traffic. And, other than traffic alerts, some of the other alerts offered have been handy as well; I’ve also signed up for breaking news alerts (under the “MSNBC News” header) and a Dow Jones stock alert (under the “MSN Money” header). There’re also alerts for sports and so on, but those didn’t interest me enough to use up my text messages for those.

Autoblog on Speed Channel’s WRC Coverage

Ashley Bischoff12 Comments

In a post last month about how Netflix tried to recommend a pregnancy workout disc to me after I had added an autocross driving disc to my queue, I made an attempt at describing WRC (World Rally Championship racing). However, I came across an entry at Autoblog (a car blog in the Weblogs Inc family) that painted a better picture:

I personally think that the WRC is the most exciting race to watch, and the more you guys care, the more chances they’ll show it live in the US. Here are the reasons to care: It has fast drifting turns, spectacular scenery, death-defying leaps over blind crests and some dude in the passenger seat reading out the turns to a guy driving at 100mph who hasn’t seen the road before. These guys have balls, real manly ones. Oh, did I mention awesome crashes into trees? Yeah, they got that too. For those of you who want to start watching, the WRC Magazine show airs on the Speed Channel.

After reading over that, I really began to ponder whether I should sign up for DirecTV sometime (or some other television service which includes Speed Channel). Really, I’m not even sure what my options are, Speed Channel-wise. I’m pretty sure that DirecTV carries it, but might Comcast Digital Cable or Echostar carry it as well? Oh, and just to clarify a minor thinko in Autoblog’s post — the drivers have seen the roads before, during the pre-race “recce” (however, in the midst of a race, the driver steers largely on the faith of the directions blurted to him by his navigator in the passenger seat).

So Much for Autocross

Ashley Bischoff2 Comments

I regularly go autocrossing with the Lone Star Chapter of the BMW Car Club of America. In case you haven’t heard of it, autocrossing is a timed driving event; the club sets up a course of orange cones early one Saturday each month at Mineral Wells airport and each participant drives around it as fast as he/she can. It’s a lot of fun and I look forward to it each season (they hold about 8-9 autocrosses a year during the warmer months).

The first one this year was in March which I ended up missing since I was in Austin that weekend for SXSW. And, I couldn’t make the April one either for some reason. So, today — May 7th — was supposed to me my first autocross of 2005. I had everything lined up and I was ready to go. Sunscreen? Check. Bugspray? Check. Protein bars? Check. Cooler with Fruit2-0? Check.

The usual sequence is that I’d meet up with some other drivers at the McDonald’s at MacArthur & 635 at 6:30am on the morning of the autocross. And, from there, we caravan to the event. It’s not always the same bunch of guys that meets there but there has always been at least a few people that would drive down together. So, this morning, I had my alarm clock set for 5am and I was out the door by 6am. I drove to the meeting place and waited a few minutes, and then a few minutes more. No one showed up — I guess everyone decided to eschew the caravan this time.

Since I had always driven with the caravan, I never learned how to get there. And, while the group would normally head off around 7am, I waited until 7:15 in case anyone showed up. At this point, I was kinda stuck — there was no one else to follow and I didn’t know how to get there on my own. Figuring that I might be able to drive home, print directions, and still make it in time, I headed back to my apartment. I got there by around 7:45 and checked MapQuest which gave me directions but confirmed that it was about a 1 hr 40 minute drive to get there. Considering that Mineral Wells is roughly 100 miles west of Dallas, I wasn't terribly surprised. But, as the registration cut-off time was 9am, I soon realized that I couldn’t make it :(.

That really bummed me out since I was thinking about this first autocross since the beginning of the year and I was looking forward to it all week. My coworkers were even joking with me about it as I left the office yesterday — “Drive carefully!”, Leia said with a smile as I walked out, to which I cheerfully replied “I’ll be sure not to!”. Well, so much for that idea. It’s about 9am now so I guess I’ll go back to bed for a few more hours sleep and figure out the rest of my day after that. Blargh.

Netflix’ Recommendations Don’t Always Work

Ashley Bischoff2 Comments

I signed up for Netflix earlier in the week and my first set of movies — Hero, Anchorman and Napoleon Dynamite — arrived on Friday. And, I watched them this weekend:

  • Napoleon Dynamite — I hadn’t seen this one yet and felt that I couldn’t hold out for much longer as there were too many pop culture references to it among my friends that were whizzing right by me (not that I was really avoiding it in the first place). And I now know the response in case someone asks “So, you got my back and everything, right?” ;).

  • Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy — This is a spoof of 70s newscasts which stars Will Ferrell and Christina Applegate. Well, that’s how the studio would bill it — to me, Fred Willard is more of a draw than Applegate these days (and I mean that as a complement to Willard). Oh, if only Willard could have had the starring role — while I think Ferrell can hilarious, he amplified the role from mere parody into caricature. I really wanted to like this one, but I didn’t really.

  • Hero — This is an epic martial arts flick set in pre-unified China. As IMDB puts it, “A series of Rashomon-like flashback accounts shape the story of how one man defeated three assassins who sought to murder the most powerful warlord in pre-unified China.” Now, don’t get me wrong — the movie was beautifully shot and the martial arts were exceptional. And, the sword fight within the falling autumn leaves was stunning and has some fabulous use of color between the adversaries’ red cloaks and the falling yellow leaves. However, I ended up bored by this one; there’s a good dose of martial arts but the non-martial-arts segments just plodded along for me.

I went to the gym this afternoon and, while I was pedaling along on the elliptical machine, it occurred to me that I should check for World Rally documentaries on Netflix.com later this evening. For those who aren’t aware of it, World Rally is a driving sport where drivers don’t race on a track:

Rallying is a form of motorsports that is run over ordinary roads rather than in specialized circuits used in Formula One or off-road environment used in endurance events like Paris-Dakar. In distinction to rallycross in rallying drivers compete against the clock, not directly against the other drivers. And in distinction to rally-sprints, stages used in rallying are much longer (up to 40 to 50 km, average being 10 to 30 km) and special co-drivers are used to call pace notes. […]

Or, put another way, have you ever flipped through the channels and come across a race featuring cars which resemble the Subaru WRX and Mitsubishi Lancer Evo flying along dirt roads? That would be World Rally. In any case, I searched Netflix for “rally” and came across “World’s Greatest Rally Cars”. Well, I was pleased to find that; granted, it was from 2001, but I don’t get Speed Channel on my cable system (the only network which carries World Rally) and I was eager to find anything.

I then clicked through to the category for that disc’s genre (“Motor Sports & Biking”) to see what else I could find. There, I also found Skip Barber’s film “Going Faster”, a film about (you guessed it) how to drive faster. I already have the book by the same name and I found it very useful for improving my times in autocross. I added that to my queue — so far, so good — and Netflix presented me with a list of “Other Movies You Might Enjoy”… one of which was “Kathy Smith’s Pregnancy Workout”. Bwhah?

I suppose that Netflix’ recommendation system tries awfully hard but I guess it has an off-day every now and then ;). I’m not even really sure how it would think those two films are related. I mean, it's not that pregnant women would be autocrossing (as I would imagine that the G-forces could be disruptive to the baby). All I can figure is that a lot of guys that go autocrossing also have pregnant wives… or something?