What's made you not grumpy but not smile either today?

[StevenRB45]

generally if you know some geography ie what towns and cities you want to drive in the direction of, you can then usually find what you want following the road signs to smaller places when you get there.

I drove all over the UK, going up to Scotland and over to Europe relying on nothing but a quick look at a map before setting off.

How to read a clock? I was taught how to find north with naught but a wrist watch . Also they do teach reading clocks as guess what my lad did this year.

No idea if they teach map reading though..yet. No Satnav when I did my test in 2002 although we got the joy of the theory test...before the hazard perception test though.

I did similar direction finding...until all my mates went to uni. Finding a student house in Liverpool or York, Leeds, Sheffield or Edinburgh was always an adventure.

It's fine for going between two big population centres...but the last 5 miles can become the last 20 miles very easily.

Daft really most the time I'll set it away from home and know that largely I have no interest in it until maybe last 10 mins of the trip, at which point I might go as far as unmuting it. Mainly it's there to answer the question "are we nearly there yet?"

 

[PuntoHowTo]

How to read a clock? I was taught how to find north with naught but a wrist watch . Also they do teach reading clocks as guess what my lad did this year.

No idea if they teach map reading though..yet. No Satnav when I did my test in 2002 although we got the joy of the theory test...before the hazard perception test though.

I did similar direction finding...until all my mates went to uni. Finding a student house in Liverpool or York, Leeds, Sheffield or Edinburgh was always an adventure.

It's fine for going between two big population centres...but the last 5 miles can become the last 20 miles very easily.

Daft really most the time I'll set it away from home and know that largely I have no interest in it until maybe last 10 mins of the trip, at which point I might go as far as unmuting it. Mainly it's there to answer the question "are we nearly there yet?"

So I think I was one of the first to do the theory test in 1998/99 because when I did it is was done on a marking card that was read by a machine, you had one sheet with the questions and one that you had to make your answer on with a line in a box (a lot like the lottery ticks) then when you’d finish the card was fed into a machine to mark it automatically.

Never had the hazard perception when I did my driving test though I did do it later on when I thought it might be a good idea to train to become a driving instructor.
I found it pretty easy but then I’d been driving a good few years by that point.

The theory test then for an instructor was 100 questions which I passed easily, by that time it was actually done on the computer, things had moved on

 

[StevenRB45]

Walked past a certain farmhouse...the one that usually has a bright Yellow electric Lotus monstrosity on the drive.

Today it's oddly missing, replaced by a Toyota Aygo X...from a body shop specialising in electric car repair.

Oh dear, points to 2 things, 1 they crashed it, 2 it was their fault as otherwise they wouldn't have literally the worst car possible as the other side would be paying.

What a shame, nevermind.

 

[portland_bill]

Walked past a certain farmhouse...the one that usually has a bright Yellow electric Lotus monstrosity on the drive.

Today it's oddly missing, replaced by a Toyota Aygo X...from a body shop specialising in electric car repair.

Oh dear, points to 2 things, 1 they crashed it, 2 it was their fault as otherwise they wouldn't have literally the worst car possible as the other side would be paying.

What a shame, nevermind.

Bodyshop courtesy cars present one of the biggest risks on the road.
Here is someone, driving a car unfamiliar to them, and showing evidence of having already crashed the one they are familiar with. Keep plenty of space.

 

[PuntoHowTo]

Walked past a certain farmhouse...the one that usually has a bright Yellow electric Lotus monstrosity on the drive.

Today it's oddly missing, replaced by a Toyota Aygo X...from a body shop specialising in electric car repair.

Oh dear, points to 2 things, 1 they crashed it, 2 it was their fault as otherwise they wouldn't have literally the worst car possible as the other side would be paying.

What a shame, nevermind.

On the plus side unlike most lotus cars this one is made from actual metal so won’t spontaneously explode into a million tiny pieces as soon as it touches anything, and need specialist repair by the lotus factory as only lotus have the relevant skills and facilities to fix their proprietary special fibre glass blend.

While being metal has some advantages, the down side is that the actual car is nothing more than a cheap Chinese electric car pretending to be a reputable brand so unlike all previous Lotus cars, It will probably be a rot box by 5 years old and need replacement anyway

 

[StevenRB45]

Bodyshop courtesy cars present one of the biggest risks on the road.
Here is someone, driving a car unfamiliar to them, and showing evidence of having already crashed the one they are familiar with. Keep plenty of space.

To be a fly on the wall (possibly wearing a crash helmet) on the drive home would have been interesting.

Logic dictates it's probably a CVT i.e. electric car body shop hopefully wouldn't bang clients who haven't driven a manual in an indeterminate amount of time into a 5 speed..unless they want to change the clutch twice as often as the oil.

While if it's manual that would certainly have been an adventure, otherwise..going from somewhere between 600-900 horsepower and 2.7 tonnes or so of lemon yellow wedge to less than 1 tonne of 70bhp Toyota would have turned the air blue in that car a few times even if it's CVT.

 

[StevenRB45]

Interesting times at NCAP...

Citroën C5 Aircross

Euro NCAP 2025 safety rating of the Citroën C5 Aircross: detailed results, crash test pictures, videos and comments from experts.

www.euroncap.com

Note the pictures show a Peugeot 3008, as does Peugeot 5008 and Vauxhall Grandland.

As it appears new procedure is to copy paste results across all platform shares.

Think of all the crash tests they've done unnecessarily up until now!

Even better copy paste across power trains so apparently the rating applies for piston engined variants as well. Some issues with that technically...one of which is they are getting on for half a tonne lighter and another...it doesn't actually test what happens in a petrol version with the engine at the front.

Oh well nice to see them phoning it in. Christ if they'd applied the same rationale to VW group for the last 20 years they'd only have needed to test 3 cars...