Be Excellent To Each Other

Modern cars are such arseholes.

Was driving in over the mountain this morning and it was foggy, so I put my rear foglight on.

A few seconds later the car starts bonging at me and at first I didn't connect the two events and started wondering what was on fire, but as I looked at the display in the instrument cluster it was displaying 'TURN OFF REAR FOG LIGHT!'

So I'm like, who the fuck made you boss? Dickface.

Turns out the car didn't think it was foggy enough to have the rear fog light on, there must be some kind of sensor for it, as when the fog got denser it stopped nagging me, and then when it got a bit thinner, it started nagging me again.

The thing is, the mountain road isn't a normal road, people drive on that road at crazy speeds in the fog because it's (a) Derestricted and (b) Many people absolutely know it like the back of their hand.

As such, they can be travelling at speeds that aren't really a good match for the conditions and visibility, hence I'll turn my rear fog light on in moderate fog, just so there's more visibility of my arse on the road in case someone's tanking up behind me at 80mph and I'm stuck behind someone doing 28mph, (which has happened).

And yes, as soon as I see a car in my rear view mirror, I turn the rear fog light off.

Fucking car telling me when I should and shouldn't turn my own fucking fog light on. Twat.

Just give us driverless cars and be done with it. Wankers.

Your rear fog light can dazzle other road users if it's not sufficiently foggy though, I've seen it way too often. For 99% of use cases that alert is probably a good thing.

Yesterday was a right pea souper around me though. Too many people in silver cars driving around with no lights on at all. It was pretty scary.

I'd get rid of that car if I were you Hearthly. It's been nothing but trouble.

I bet Mali doesn't have problems like that in the Exciting Rover

I feel bad for him, son, Rover got 99 problems but a fog switch ain't one.

Have you google searched for temperamental fog bongers?

I think that a lot of people don’t know how to turn their rear fog light on, in the same way that a surprising number of people don’t know how to turn their rear wiper OFF. You see them, on lovely dry and sunny summer days, with their wiper intermittently scraping across the rear window. I like to look at what dim wazzock is driving these vehicles.

And in the last couple of days, following the pretty thick fog we had, a number of people are driving with their main beam on because they’ve forgotten they switched it on and they can’t work out what that blue indicator on their dash is telling them.

What are your favourite songs about cars?

Until recently, ‘MGB-GT’ by Richard Thompson was my fave, but ‘Kiss of death’ by Split Lip Rayfield has now usurped it.

I'm in love with my car by Queen. That's mine.

Car Song - Elastica

John Shuttleworth - Austin Ambassador Y Reg

Beach Boys - Fun, Fun, Fun
Beach Boys - Little Deuce Coupe
Beach Boys - 409
Gary Numan - err, Cars
Sugar Ray - RPM

Excellent choice.

I’ve recently been listening to his Lounge Music if it’s been on when driving home from work. Priceless. Unfortunately it’s off air now.

Shazbat. How did I forget Thomas Dolby - The Key To Her Ferrari?

Do Combine Harvesters count?

White Zombie/Iggy Pop - Black Sunshine



I quite like the version that Fear Factory did with him, even thought it was basically just heavier.

Jesus built my Hotrod.

Driving down motorway this morning, and we went past flashing 50mph sign. The police X5 then put all its lights on, straddled the two lanes and held everyone at 40mph for 2 junctions before turni g all lights off sodding off at 70mph. Which was odd behaviour.

Oh, right.

Jerry was a race car driver.
Yello - The Race.

The Milky Way advert theme.

Ohhh.. Good choices. I forgot about both of these.

There will have been something going on up the road that needed a break in traffic so they can back everyone up and create a sterile environment. Once the incident has been dealt with they let people go.

Might have been as simple as debris in the road that needed moving.

Driving home for Christmas.

Stop fucking around on your phone then.

Contains the excellent lyric

Top to toe in tailbacks
Oh, I got red lights on the run
But soon there'll be a three-way, yeah
Get my feet on holy ground

I like the line in The Pretenders 2000 miles that’s really good for working out distances if you were brought up using only metric distance measures.

‘He’s go-oooooooo-ooooo-ooo-ne two thousand mi-iiiii-iii-iles (it’s very far)’.

I've listed to that song far too much and I'm 99.9% sure they never say that (even switching out the two thousand for one thousand). They say "who walks a thousand miles to fall down at your door", which is the closest I can get.

Mind you, it lead me to this, which is great: https://open.spotify.com/track/2IXaP1Ijt4XGlICAwH0hrz

That’s the Proclaimers

Me (literally) right now:

Who else made the same mistake as Grim...?

*raises two hands*

Touchscreens in cars, there's a stupid idea.

It's like the car makers know they're shit, but they have to put them in because iPads, innit. Who doesn't like iPads? So what could be better than an iPad in a car?

My car has a fairly sizeable touchscreen in it, and Seat clearly understand what a horrible technology it is for a car, because all the icons are fucking huge and they've made everything as Duplo-style as possible so that you've got half a chance of altering a setting or changing something without crashing.

Similarly with Android Auto, they put 5 big icons along the bottom of the screen and everything else is ridiculously oversized by the standards of any NOT TOTALLY FUCKING STUPID application of touchscreen technology. It's like, what's the worst thing you could possibly do with a touchscreen? Offset it to the left of the driver so he absolutely can't operate the screen and watch the road properly at the same time.

I miss the MMI in the S4, it had a good sized screen but it wasn't touch, and I'd learned very well how to operate all the controls with my left hand whilst keeping my eyes on the road.

In fact I miss the S4 actually, I might get another one. The facelift model of mine can be had for reasonable money now, and retains a streamlined version of the same MMI system. (Under £20K for a nicely specced one with reasonable miles.)

Are you frickin kidding me?

0-new car in 33 days. Amazing.

Re touchscreen, I love mine, but then I don't really try and operate it while I'm driving. I have my steering-wheel controls for that. I can see if you had the muscle memory down on a non-touchscreen interface, that might make things easier while driving, but it would annoy me when I was setting the sat nav, I think.

I have to agree - touchscreens in cars are wank. You need buttons to feel.

But having to input something on a QWERTY style keyboard with no touchscreen? The worst.

My QWERTY-style keyboard that I'm typing on right now doesn't have a touchscreen

Keyboard and mouse is clearly the way forward for cars.

Right mouse to accelerate, or brake?

Also, obviously: https://www.wired.com/2015/01/well-didn ... uper-idea/

I just wanted to tweak the bass and treble a bit this morning as Spotify outputs a bit differently to my trance from the SD cards. I found myself in a menu with a five-bar graphical equaliser (once I'd tapped on a couple of jumbo-sized icons to get there). Now each bar took up a fifth of the width of the screen, so Seat were clearly doing their best to make them as big as possible, but it's still a really crap way to do it. Then the car went over a bit of a bump and I adjusted 10KHz instead of 4KHz.

Then I stopped playing with it as it clearly wasn't safe. In the S4 I'd have had that shit nailed.

Yeah, right for accelerate I reckon.

I mean, don't adjust the bass and treble while driving, I guess?

But I can in my Puma, because it has buttons.

It also has fewer functions than a modern car. It would end up like the flight deck of a fucking space shuttle.

Does it, though? A standard new Fiesta doesn't do that much more.

I've not been in one but I'm going to guess that if there was a button, dial or switch for everything you can do on the touchscreen of a modern Fiesta it would look somewhat ridiculous.

I'm trying to think of what you can only do on the touchscreen of our Focus, and I'm pretty sure it's only the SatNav.

Oh, and the radio, like changing sources or radio stations and stuff.