If this clip doesn’t make the hairs on the back of your next stand up nothing will. The only downside is the usual visual effect of television cameras flattening out terrain. I’ve been to Spa and I can tell you the climb into Eau Rouge is much steeper than this clip shows. Either way, the driving from Alonso and Hamilton in last year’s opening lap is as close to carnage as you can get without there actually being a shower of carbon fibre. Forget the merits of who had right of way and just enjoy this amazing footage while you can!
Month: September 2008
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Fifth Gear – Series 14, Episode 4
Apologies for the late update to this week’s show. Jason Plato—AUSmotive’s preferred Fifth Gear presenter—started the show comparing the JDM Honda Civic Mugen RR v the UK spec 2000 GT. The Japanese Civic was the quickest around their test track, and by some margin, plus it sounds bloody good, too.
I didn’t want to mention Tim Shaw this week, but given he covered the revised CO2 taxes UK residents will be paying shortly, I thought it would be worth raising, given our federal government’s recent issues with its proposed Luxury Car Tax increases. I’m guessing it won’t be long until we’re paying taxes based on emissions here in Australia too. They highlighted a Volkswagen Golf 1.6 and a Citroen C4 XS, the French car expels 13 grams less in CO2 emissions, but when the new tax laws are introduced, the Citroen will cost almost AU$200 less to register. I daren’t mention the funky and frugal MINI John Cooper Works again (6.9l/100km, 165 g/km), but, well I just did.
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Holden fuels economy
On a day where official interest rates dropped for the first time in seven years Holden is chasing more family friendly headlines. For all private buyers until 31 October Holden will cap fuel at 99¢ a litre for two years or 20,000 kilometres, whichever comes first.
Alan Batey, Executive Director of Sales, Marketing and Aftersales said “We will provide this cap across all segments to ensure the benefits are as widely available as possible, given that fuel prices impact all drivers regardless of the size of their car. Whether you’re buying a Commodore for the family, a Barina as your first car, or a Colorado as tool of trade, we know everyone will appreciate our helping hand.
“GM Holden is committed to providing affordable and economical cars to our customers, and this campaign is another way that can be achieved.”
Maybe I’m missing something here, but surely this offer would actually encourage people to buy less fuel efficient cars. One thing is certain this offer has nothing to do with providing more fuel efficient cars. There’s more to this offer, but I can’t tell you right now, I’m off to get me six-litres of loud and proud Aussie V8 Sportwagon! (A shame that the 270kW V8s are recommended to run on 98RON and this offer only applies to 91RON fuel or diesel. Gee, who saw that coming!)
Source: Holden
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Fancy a landspeed record?
So, I lined up against Luke Skywalker at the lights the other day. He started lookin’ at me, I started lookin’ at him and I knew we were going to be on. Okay, I know the force is strong in him, but come on, look at that riced up go kart he’s in. My car may not be capable of intergalactic transport, but as I always say, she may not look like much but she’s got it where it counts. Skywalker starts trash talking saying he’ll blast me off. I asked if he cared to make in interesting. He agreed and a deal was struck. Winner takes all.
The lights are about to go green, I look at him with a glint in my eye and say “jumping through hyperspace ain’t like dustin crops boy!” That was just to psyche hom out though, through the force of tha interwebz I knew Skywalker’s “rocket” only had a 40km/h top speed. He believed his own hype and I blew him away.
I am now the proud owner of a rare X-34 Landspeeder! Or at least I could be if I wanted to.
Source: Daniel Deutsch via Top Gear
On my drive home from work the other day I caught the start of Paul Barclay’s Australia Talks program on Radio National. The focus of discussion was on Australia’s car industry, with topics canvassed including:
- Ford’s decision to cut 350 jobs and the broader impact that will have on local employment
- The planned cut in tariffs from 10% down to 5%
- How effective are the Holden and Toyota export programs?
- Should the Australian car manufacturing industry be protected, and why has it been protected in the past?
While trawling the press archives at AUSmotive I often stumble across some pretty cool images. Rather than keep them all to myself, I figured it would be nice to share a few from time to time. In the first of what will become a randomly updated series, I trust you enjoy this image taken from the 2006 Targa Tasmania. Click on the image above for a 2000x1320px version. Should you choose to use this as a wallpaper/desktop image that size should cover most monitor resolutions. If not let me know what size you need and I’ll see what I can do.
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Honda trumpets Jazzy fuel economy
With the recent release of the MY09 Honda Jazz the Honda PR department conjured up the Urban Fuel Economy Challenge at national media launch last week. The results are now in! During the challenge, both 1.3-litre and 1.5-litre versions of the all-new Jazz returned pretty damn impressive consumption figures of just 5.1 litres/100km across a 60km drive through suburban Melbourne.
That’s better than Honda’s published ADR81/01 figures of 5.8l/100km and 6.4l/100km for the 1.3-litre manual and 1.5-litre manual respectively. Apparently the national average consumption figure for Australia’s vehicle fleet is 11.4l/100km, so naturally Honda is pretty pleased with itself, coming in under half that national figure. The 1.3-litre i-VTEC engine produces just 138gCO2/km when fitted with the manual transmission. However, you may be surprised at how those numbers stack up against another small hatch. Read on…
Adrian Van Hooydonk, BMW’s Head of Design, talks us through the design of the 1 Series Coupé. The clip runs for 3 minutes, 44 seconds.
Source: bmw-web.tv