The Ultimate Summer Supercar

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Yeah, all right, it's a bit late. I know summer's finished and the autumn equinox has just passed. But I've just rediscovered the results of Top Gear's ultimate summer supercar poll stashed on my computer, so I thought I'd share them. What did I vote for? The Gallardo, obviously. Look at it! It's beautiful!

What would your ultimate summer supercar be?

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3D Children: Speed Bumps of the Future?

In a slightly bizarre new initiative, a traffic safety foundation in Vancouver is using 3D art to make drivers aware of the hazards of children running onto the road. The girl chasing a ball appears to rise out of the road as the car approaches:



Now, in principle, this would make you slow down. In practice, it might well just give you a mild heart attack and make you slam on the brakes, causing a huge pile-up over a piece of artwork. I like the idea in theory, I just don't think it works so well in practice... also, as many other people have pointed out, if drivers get used to seeing these 3D children they can drive over, what's to stop them mistaking a real one for a 3D one in a moment of stress?

What do you think? Good plan? Bad plan?

Juggling the costs of car ownership

You’ve shopped around. You’ve wandered past showrooms of beautiful supercars, gazed through the windows and stared with puppy-dog eyes at the salespeople, having no effect whatsoever; because let’s face it, big sad eyes don’t equate to big wads of cash. You’ve compared car insurance quotes, you’ve worked out how much space you need, maybe you’ve even worked out your average yearly mileage and come up with a clever money-saving formula.

Now all you have to do is buy the car and keep it running. You might think the decision of what to buy is the difficult bit. Oh no. Ohhhh no. The difficult bit, like anything, is keeping it going. Sometimes I get a sudden, desperate urge to clean my house (admittedly not very often). I scrub and wrestle with furniture and move things and drop things on my toes and rearrange and tidy until it sparkles. Two days later, I realise I haven’t done the washing up and everything is in a heap in the middle of the bedroom floor. For me at least, the starting isn’t the hard part. It’s the carrying on.

So what can you do to make sure you’re being economically sensible about car ownership? There are some very simple steps you can take to make sure your car isn’t costing you a small fortune every time you fire up the engine and trundle off to see grandma. Here are my top 3:

Remember to check things
If you stop at a petrol station, try to work out when you last looked at your oil and water levels. You’ll probably have a constant eye on the petrol gauge, but lots of people forget about the oil until the light comes on, costing themselves extra money. Check it every so often and keep it topped up.

Replace things yourself
It might sound obvious, but the number of people who take the car into the garage to have someone else change the oil, windscreen wipers or water is pretty astonishing. It really isn’t that hard to do, and if you’re really terrified of anything mechanical, you’ll probably have a friend who’ll do it for the price of a beer.

Don’t use premium petrol
Seriously, what’s the point? I’ve never really understood it. Perhaps there is some sort of secret magical formula, but in my experience premium petrol is a higher price for no extra benefit.

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New Mazda Shinari Concept

This is the new Shinari concept from Mazda. It's very, very pretty. It looks like a car that will growl at you when you start it up, then purr as you drive along the road. But, as they say, looks aren't everything. And this car does seem to have the classic Mazda problem: no visibility out of the rear window. The only Mazda we've ever had, a hideous turquoise sporty thing, made reversing feel like impending death on wheels. Totally blind. Other people have told me similar stories of their Mazdas; and while this one is pretty, I'd rather be able to see when I reverse. Still, at the moment it's just a concept. Maybe they'll introduce something magical to make it easy to reverse, if and when they release the real thing.

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