If someone you know drives too fast, please don’t be afraid to tell them. No one else is going to until they’ve broken something, or someone.

If your concentrating on driving, driving within the means of yourself and your car, you can still enjoy the performance of your car while considerably reducing the risks of something going wrong. It is impossible however to completely remove all risk, hence why judgement is so important. That’s what I think is missing today.

Ironically it’s most likely because cars are too safe these days.

Peltzman Effect
From my favourite podcast Skeptoid Episode #118;

“The Peltzman Effect was nicely summed up in an episode of the TV show CSI: “The safer they make the cars, the more risks the driver is willing to take.” It’s named after the regulatory economist San Peltzman who first described the effect.”

“…When you make it safer to take risks, more people will take them;”

I have to admit though, I have learnt a lot about setting up a car with iRacing and this sort of stuff makes it easier, and more interesting.

How to;

While in iRacing you turn on telemetry (Alt-L),  the exporter gets the data out of iRacing (download here) and converts it into MoTec format. Download the MoTec i2 Pro and create a new project, open the log files and away you go.

A project already setup by Remy Lozza is available here and read more on the iRacing forum thread.

Ken Block once again shows how to produce a viral video. Awesome.

So only a few weeks after it had joined it’s new owners, we took it camping in the Barrington Top in NSW, where there just happened to be a mountain to climb.

I got this shot from the top, where funnily enough there is an old caravan that someone dragged up there.

I made sure I got the light levels right for the sky so that I could get in the sky and clouds and then after a bit of low level light adjustments and a bit of vignetting this is what we came out with.

Reminds me of that typical Top Gear style shot.

I would really love this to have worked but unfortunately it just isn’t quite there. There is actually nothing wrong with the hardware, well mostly anyway. OK, so there is a major issue with the hardware.

First issue is it uses an FM signal to pick up the traffic information which of course is digital and when digital reception is bad, it’s useless. So the problem I have living 38.9kms from the CBD is it won’t pickup any traffic until I’m almost 1/3 of the way in, by then I’m already stuck in traffic.

According to Suna who provide the traffic signal to the Navman and the RTA, who in NSW provide the traffic information data to Suna, there is never ever any traffic on the M2. Which of course the M2 is always a $5 carpark.

Problem is if you follow it around it’s suggested new route, you never going to know if there was any traffic there any way. Therein lies the second issue, the data it self is where it all falls over. Because it never picks up traffic on the M2 you then start to doubt the system and start ignoring it because you can never gauge it’s success, you can only gauge it’s failures.

So basically I still use it all the time as a gauge, but you just can’t rely on it. Having said that, a better FM signal and more accurate traffic data and it would be defiantly worth it.

Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution – Defy Physics from Resin on Vimeo.

You think about what it was like 20, maybe 30 years ago and the cars were harder to drive, you didn’t have all these helping hands that took the responsibility away from the driver.

Take traction control for example, in a car without traction control you quickly realise if you push your throttle to the floor, you loose traction. So how do you react? You use less throttle and you learnt a little physics along the way, too much power means less control. Take a car from today, it has twice the power but a little button that controls the throttle for you. So how do you react instead, full throttle and the computer will handle the rest. We’ve learnt nothing

about how a car really reacts and nothing about the physics involved in making a tonne and half of metal move.

So all those 18 year old, mummy and daddy bought me a new car types couldn’t give a stuff of course, but these are the ones that I’m scared of! You apply the same lesson of physics to braking and handle, hence ABS and ESC and what do you have? People who have never driven a car without these helping hands, pretend driving technical advancements and they then have no understanding in what it really takes to handle a car correctly.

And what’s the result of that? Tailgating, wreak less driving and not learning the lesson until they really get into trouble when they realise just how hard it is to stop over a tonne of metal.

How do you fix it? Every new licence holder must pass a advanced driving course, teach actual driver control before they are allowed on the roads. And no, tax payers shouldn’t have to pay for it. You don’t want to invest a couple of hundred bucks into learning to drive properly, then get off the road. Catch a bus.