No, but seriously

The CEOs of the big three car makers all turned up in Washington this week to plea poverty and beg for billions of dollars in taxpayer bailout money. All three of them turned up in corporate jets - at about $20,000 round-trip cost. And all three of them refused to take a cut from their $28M salary to $1 and just receive the benefits and stock options.
Then they said they were running out of money.
Maintaining seven private jets each (plus a fleet of King Airs and other light aircraft) will do that to your cash flow. It would of course be cheaper to fly commercially in first class, or heaven forbid, coach. Or even chartering someone else's private jet - these are all cheaper options that would save money.
They've laid off 51,000 employees between them. If all three CEOs took a $1 salary then that would have saved 16,800 of those jobs. Getting rid of 21 corporate jets with their associated maintenance and operating costs would have saved the other 34,200 jobs easily.
I have the same opinion on this as I did on the $700bn bailout package - vote it down. As a taxpayer it's not my responsibility that the car makers have squandered their cash and can't make a car that does more than 25mpg. Screw them. Let them fail. I don't see Honda, or Toyota, or Daewoo, or Hyundai begging for cash. Why reward Ford, Chrysler and GM's poor business ethic with taxpayers money when they clearly couldn't care about actually saving money?

I'm a great fan of public transport when it's done right. Case in point, Portland's MAX light rail system (read: tram). We decided on a short weekend away and rather than renting a car, we decided to rely on public transport instead. There's a MAX station right at Portland airport, and the red line goes into downtown Portland, within a block of most of the hotels. We hopped on, paid $4.60, and hopped off 40 minutes later within two minutes walk of the hotel. On the way, we watched gridlocked rush hour traffic, nose-to-tail on I84 and when we got to the hotel, we discovered overnight parking was $29. In this case, it's a total no-brainer. Sit in traffic, pay three day's car rental ($150), two nights valet ($58) and half a tank of petrol ($15), or spend a grand total of $9.20 on public transport to do the exact same thing.

Think about it next time you go away somewhere - do you really need that rental car?

Having left the UK 8 years ago, it never ceases to amaze me how much is broken about England when I return for visits. This time around it occurred to me how ridiculously small the parking spaces are. They're not quite big enough to get a car into. Well - they are, but only if you don't want to open the doors and get out.
Then there's the new mayor of London - Boris Johnson. Now he wants to tax motorcycles for parking in the city centre. Typical. They introduce the "congestion charge" to try to encourage people to use bikes, motorbikes and public transport instead of cars, and it works to some extent. Now so many people have swapped to motorbikes, BoJo has decided it's time to tax those too.
Then there's the traffic police - or lack of them. So many speed cameras have been installed since I left that by the police force's own admission, they've slashed the number of actual traffic police. In some cases by as much as 90%. So whereas an physical policeman pulling you over could assess the road and traffic conditions, as well as your driving, and thus make a subjective assessment of whether or not you truly deserve a ticket, now the country is presided over by automated cameras that fine you two weeks after the offence. Which is of course totally ridiculous. Take me for example - if I get a speeding fine in a rental car, two weeks after I've left the country, then it tells me two things.
1. I don't need to pay it because they can't prosecute me outside of England
2. It didn't make the road I allegedly committed the offence on any safer because I wasn't stopped at the point of my alleged offence. In fact after two weeks, I'd be lucky to even remember where the hell I was with the amount of travelling I do.

Yes. England is well and truly broken. But if you still live there, you already know that.

And don't get me started on the price of petrol.....

I've got a Ford Galaxy MPV on rental at the moment (apparently Hertz think that's in the same class as a "compact 4 door saloon"). It drives OK but it's laced with awful design problems. The three that stand out immediately are the handbrake, the interior lights and the heating and ventilation system.
The handbrake is this interesting double-pronged affair that looks like the throttle control from a fighter jet. It's cleverly designed so that when you release it, it traps your thumb between the release button and the centre console.
The interior lighting is very art nouveau - soft dimming, soft illuminating, accent lighting in the footwells etc. It's all very clever but totally useless because there's no light at the ignition switch. So when you get in in the dark, you end up scratching up all the plastic on the steering column trying to find the ignition key slot.
And finally, the heating and a/c system. In manual mode it's fine. In Auto mode it's totally useless. For some reason, when you use Auto mode, Ford seemed to think that what you want is a right foot that is either baked or frozen. In Auto mode it only uses the footwell ventilation outlets, and on the driver's side, it's pointed straight at the accelerator pedal. So if you want to heat the air up inside, you end up with a burned foot long before the air actually begins to circulate out of the footwells.

This is the 21st century isn't it? Because those sorts of design decisions are reminiscent of the horse-drawn carriage.

Started the long-term test of Pulstar Pulse spark plugs : Pulstar plugs.

Richard Noble and Andy Green are back to their old tricks with the proposed Bloodhound project - a "car" designed to break the 1000mph barrier on land.

Supersonic car targets 1,000mph.

Frankly I hope they manage it, because it would be as big a spectacle as it is an achievement.

The tax and licensing renewal for my wife's Yaris came up this week. The car is 11 months and a week old, and the Utah State Tax Commission tell me that it needs an inspection and emissions test this year. That's the US version of the MOT back in England, only a lot less rigorous.
What a racket. Inspection and emissions on a year-1 vehicle? That's just an excuse to print money. I called the state tax offices on this. It used to be that they required an inspection and emissions check every year from the third year on. Now it's been changed to every other year from new.
I know why.
In America, it's the norm for people to sell their cars and buy new ones every three years. If this happened at a dealer, a loophole in the law meant the vehicle was excused the tests that year, presuming the dealer would do them in order to verify the vehicle was fit for re-sale. Meaning the tax commission didn't see a penny in testing revenue until the fourth year of a car's life.
With the change, even if people sell their car after three years, the tax commission get one lot of testing revenue out of them at the beginning of the second year.
That's a good moneyspinner.