Icelert 1964

There’s still ice about. Quite a lot of it. Wrote this for Motor in January 1965. Right-click to enlarge
I wonder if the Icelert system still operates in Edinburgh. Quite a good idea on the face of it, a warning system that goes off in the office responsible for sending out the gritters. I suppose you would need an arrangement for shutting it off in winters like this one. The way snow has fallen deep and crisp and even and extremely fast, you scarcely need a warning siren; you just look out of the window and marvel at the incompetence of authorities who can’t keep airports open or trains running. Only goes to show that cars remain a great means for getting about when all else fails. Not good when jack-knifed lorries block snow-bound roads of course. Pity the poor individuals who had to sleep on the M8 and other roads. Pity too anybody who tried to use the M25 when a tanker fell off the edge. You get cross with fractious policemen who close down both carriageways whenever there’s a hint of an emergency. More than their jobs are worth if anything else goes wrong. Still, it’s the season of goodwill and here’s a scene worthy of a Christmas Card, taken by me, like the one above, at the end of our road last week. Happy Christmas

Camera hysteria

Russia is in the grip of its hottest summer for a thousand years, according to an over-hyped presenter on The World at One. Whatever happened to objectivity? The obsession the BBC has with global warming has led to near panic, and the same will follow the timely decline in speed cameras. Chief police officers, notably Lord Blair former head of the Metropolitan Police, are already predicting casualties. They will be followed by smug assertions that the gloomsters were right and we are all doomed.

The BBC, full of itself as ever, was quick to follow up the camera switch-off in Oxfordshire. “Figures seen by the BBC,” it trilled, “show that motorists are speeding,” the wicked things. The Association of British Drivers, a calm voice in the midst of the approaching frenzy, urges caution on Speed Camera ‘Switch-Off’ Hysteria: “Journalists and the public should be wary of being misled by claims of ‘success’ by the road safety industry.” Their figures routinely and deliberately ignore the huge strides made in vehicle safety design, better roads and improved emergency care, which could be responsible for the majority if not all casualty reductions. This is demonstrated by similar success in countries where the obsession with speed does not exist. They also ignore other factors such as ‘Regression to the Mean’ - a well established statistical trend that accounts for most of the ‘benefit illusion’ wrongly attributed to speed cameras. The ABD points out, “There is simply no hard evidence of any positive results from speed cameras.”

By way of support it quotes EuroNCAP, which shows that a car with 5 star safety is 60 per cent less likely to cause injury. The Department for Transport knows the facts of the matter perfectly well. In Appendix H of its Four-Year Speed Camera Evaluation Report is a calculation that attributes three-fifths of casualty reduction at camera sites to ‘Regression to the Mean’ and only one-fifth to cameras. The headline claim of a 42% casualty reduction at camera sites is therefore completely misleading and has been withdrawn but don’t imagine that some campaigner won’t repeat it.

Another DfT report showed that 384 of the 1793 camera sites studied showed an increase in casualties after cameras were set up and dozens more showed no decrease at all. The ABD carefully publishes its sources to back up its information. The witless World at One woman keeps asking interviewees “Aren’t you worried … “ about a) b) or c) to which the hapless people can’t reply no I am not worried about road casualties or whatever. But there you are, they’ll go on trying to push their anti-speed agenda because they belong to the dirigiste bullying Roundhead Left, the Guardianista that believes, like Nanny, that it knows what is good for us.

http://www.euroncap.com/home.aspx
http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/roadsafety/speedmanagement/nscp/nscp/
coll_thenationalsafetycameraprog/ationalsafetycameraprogr4598.pdf
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/29/dft_speed_cam_incorrectness/
http://eprints.ucl.ac.uk/1338/1/2004_31.pdf

The AA was set up a hundred years ago to counter anti-speeding hubris. It developed nicely with breakdown services and pillboxes but now plays little part in countering the persecution of drivers by out-of-control police.

Age Concern

VW puts an age limit of 80 on journalists. (Above) The delightful Scirocco
If Sir Jackie Stewart was a member of the Guild of Motoring Writers he would be ineligible to drive press cars. With the honourable exception of Jaguar, according to a list “kindly” supplied by the SMMT published in the current Guild Update he is too old, at 70, to be trusted with cars from a score of press fleets. The problem, apparently, is insurance.
18 January 2010
Drivers over 70 are no more likely to cause crashes than any other driver, and are considerably safer than younger drivers, according to a report published today by the IAM (Institute of Advanced Motorists).
Neil Greig, IAM Director of Policy and Research said: “The report contradicts the common assumption that older drivers are a danger on the roads. Just eight per cent of drivers are over 70 and they are involved in around four per cent of injury crashes; but of the 15 per cent of drivers who are in their teens and 20s, 34 per cent are involved in injury crashes.”
Older people rely heavily on their cars, and the ability to drive gives many older people better mobility and access to more activities. Men in their seventies make more trips as car drivers than men in their late teens and 20s.
Mr Greig added: “The IAM recommends that, rather than seeking to prevent older people from driving, we need to make them aware of the risks they face, and offer them driving assessments to help them cope with these risks.”
The RAC Foundation agrees. Its director Professor Sir Stephen Glaister said: Despite the myths, older drivers are no less safe.” Other motoring organisations reach similar conclusions. Andrew Howard, head of road safety at the AA: “The 70-year-old of the mid-1970s is very different to the 70-year-old today who is much fitter.” The AA published data showing a disproportionate number of young drivers have accidents.

So why do the motor industry insurers take the opposite view? Is the list a smokescreen enabling press offices to refuse cars to old, perhaps retired Guild members, to whom they don’t want to lend cars? Or do insurance company records for Guild members show they are more dangerous than other drivers?

Age Concern

I could drive one of these at the SMMT Test Day.
One manufacturer in three must stop selling cars to drivers over 70. If industry publicists are agreed that three score years and ten is the upper age limit for drivers, it follows that it will become a cut-off point for salesmen.

Of 33 makes taking part in next week’s SMMT test day, 22 apply an upper limit of 70 or 75 for journalists. Alfa Romeo, Chevrolet, Honda, Infiniti, Jaguar, Land Rover, Lexus, Proton, Subaru, Toyota and Volvo will welcome older drivers who are, according to the RAC Foundation, amongst the safest on the road. Search Blogspot for Still Safe at 70.

Ford and Renault will allow older drivers into their slower cars. Audi and SEAT raise their disqualifying age to 80.

Of some 300 cars I have tested since I passed 70, all but one have been returned without so much as a scratch. The exception I am sorry to say was an Audi, on which I buckled a door sill on a low car park wall. I have driven Aston Martins, Bentleys, Audi R8s, Porsches, Jaguars and more but now, it seems, the PRs are imposing some kind of ageist apartheid. It can only be inferred that they will stop selling cars to anybody over 70.

I could, of course, easily fall off the edge of the Millbrook test track next week, if I go. Nobody’s perfect. But after something like two million accident-free miles (save for a couple of minor blemishes mentioned in the Blog) I hope to get away with it for a bit longer. The SMMT says the age limit is imposed by car companies’ insurers. My insurers find me safe enough, my licence is clean; I had some speeding misdemeanours when I was younger but I try and remain within the law nowadays.
Or I could drive one of these: splendid Jaguar engine at Geneva last year

Highway Code

You don't expect The Highway Code to carry political messages although, of course, it does. Herbert Morrison, Minister of Transport in 1931 and Lord Peter Mandelson’s grandfather, described the first in 1931 as: “A code of good manners to be observed by all courteous and considerate persons.” Leslie Hore-Belisha (he of the beacons) wrote in the foreword to the 1935 edition: “In every human activity there is a standard of conduct to which, in the common interest, we are expected to conform.” Yet the compilers could not avoid reflecting social distinctions. Not only is the 1935 driver obviously a professional gentleman, a banker or a doctor perhaps, but the coachman solemnly rotating his whip is conducting a carriage for nobility or gentry.

By the 1946 edition the socialists were in power, so perhaps in view of the shorter tenure expected of Ministers of Transport, no name is attached to the Foreword. The signalling driver is now obviously middle class. No more a racy 2-seater, his car is an upright saloon alongside a cloth-capped cyclist. The coach has been replaced by something working-class, looking suspiciously like a brewer’s dray.

The pictures come from Highway Code (Michael O’Mara Books, 2008), which very sensibly comments that stopping distances in the 2007 Highway Code were the same as those in the 1946 edition. Officialdom never really understood stopping distances. The late Jeff Daniels and I once did a feature in Autocar debunking police theories on estimating cars’ speeds from skid marks. Disc brakes, grippy tyres, decent servos and anti-lock mechanisms, not to mention other improvements in car behaviour have always been well beyond the reach of a bureaucratic mind.

Volvo crash test

Crash tests are spectacular affairs. Volvo has just marked the tenth anniversary of its crash-test laboratory by performing three sorts of impact tests before a hundred journalists. All the computer simulations in the world can’t prove what happens in real life crashes but it is just as well that the science of testing has improved. Mercedes-Benz has been doing them since the 1930s. I went to one, it must have been about 1970 because it was a Chrysler 180, a slightly lugubrious car designed in Coventry as a big Humber but made in France. They had a crash test facility, on a sort of coal tip near Paris, in which they sped a car on a kind of chain drive affair, into a concrete block. It all went wrong. The roof crumpled, the doors flew open, the windscreen fell out and the passenger compartment was crushed; it was just as well nobody was inside because they’d have been killed. The press officer who’d invited us was aghast, tried to explain that there had been a miscalculation over the impact speed.
No chance of that with Volvo. They have done 3000 crash tests and say: “The degree of precision in a test in which two moving cars collide at 31 mph is 2.5 centimetres. This corresponds to two thousandths of a second. By way of comparison, a blink of the human eye takes about 60 thousandths of a second.” A concrete slab is used for tests including rollovers and avoidance or mitigation of a crash. The crash block weighs 850 tonnes and is moved around on air cushions. Volvo has a team of 100 crash-test dummies: men, women and children-shaped, of different sizes and ages with advanced measuring instruments configured for different crashes. In 2001 Volvo was made a centre of excellence by proprietors Ford, crash-testing Aston Martins, Jaguars, Land Rovers and Ford as well as Volvo cars and trucks.