Showing posts with label Vehicular. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vehicular. Show all posts

Driveway to Heaven? Snow time for romanticism, plow on

  December 19, 2010    

As attentive readers of this blog know, I live up a hill in Upstate New York. In the Winter it snows a lot up here. That means my wife and I have a lot of plowing to do on the long driveway leading from the nearest county road to our cabin. A few years ago I shot some video while taking a run down the drive with our plowing machine, a 4x4 Arctic Cat 400 ATV fitted with a Warn plow. Then I added some music and made it into a holiday greeting. Because I've met a lot of new people since then, I thought I would re-share.



If you don't see a video play button visible in the box above, you can see the video on YouTube by clicking here.

What you are looking at in the video is a driver's eye view of the snow plow going down the middle third of the drive after about 18 inches of accumulated snow fall. Note that this part of the drive faces West, the direction of the prevailing winds here. If the wind had been blowing while I was plowing, which it often does, I would have been too darn cold to do any film work. The ATV is only going about 10 miles an hour, but add a 10 knot wind to that, with a temp of around 15 degrees F (around minus 10 C) and you have a pretty nasty, face-freezing windchill going on. I'm talking tears in the eyes and glasses fogging up if you don't have your face scarf on just right.

So, while we wish you a Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year, bear in mind that the winter wonderland you see in this video is not always so wonderful. Here's hoping the world is spared the worst of Old Man Winter in 2011.

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Now Blogging Back to the Futurama: From 1939 to 2009 and back

  January 12, 2010    

My good friend Jeremy Dean is now blogging his wild and crazy Back to the Futurama art project.

I have written about this project elsewhere (Jeremy Dean’s Back to the Futurama: A moving art project rolls from Hummers to horse carts). Now, as the car industry is putting on its annual show in Detroit, Jeremy would like to show the world another side of automotive reality. As a documentary filmmaker, Jeremy has spent a lot of time uncovering images of the past. When he encountered rare footage of Hoovercarts--horse drawn cars that people created during the Great Depression--he couldn't shake the image and its potent symbolism.

These things were called Hoovercarts as a play on Hoovercrats, people in America who had supported the election of Herbert Hoover, the President who presided over much of the Great Depression. Folks in Canada also made horse-drawn automobiles but called them Bennett Buggies after the Canadian PM of the time.

Why Back to the Futurama? The world of today is clearly very different from the world of the 1930s, but pulling a car with a horse is still a potent reminder that we have been pursuing and promoting a materialistic life-style that the world may not be able to sustain. Fossil-fuel dependence, global warming, and "the-end-of-oil," all stand in stark contrast to our seemingly endless infatuation with lavish vehicles that are more about status than transportation, an infatuation which Detroit has funded, over the decades, to the tune of many billions of dollars. Consider the 1939 New York World's Fair. For this event General Motors created a lavish 36,000 square foot facility which the company described as:
"a thought-provoking exhibit of the developments ahead of us, the greater and better world of tomorrow that we in America are building today, a vivid tribute to the American scheme of living."

The name of that exhibit, which was full of cars and models of multi-lane highways? The Futurama. (You can see clips from the original newsreel here.) Detroit spent many decades selling the world on a bright future full of luxury vehicles, with no apparent thought as to the environmental, economic, and political side-effects. So Jeremy has dubbed this project Back to the Futurama. You can see more of his models here.

And you can help Jeremy create an actual 21st Century Hoovercart, a full-size vehicle which Jeremy plans to drive through New York in March, 2010. That's right, a working horse-drawn cart based on a Hummer or Escalade. So heads up if you own one of these vehicles--Jeremy is accepting donations, and he doesn't mind if the motor is blown. Comment below to make contact or use the contact page on Jeremy's web site.

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Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays Video

  December 26, 2008    

I was going to post this on Christmas Eve but came down with a nasty head cold. Spent most of Christmas Day in bed, sniffing and sweating [and not in a good way]. Feeling slightly better this Boxing Day, so I posted this Christmas video I made on YouTube. For more about the video, scroll down the page.



What you are looking at in the video is a driver's eye view of the snow plow going down part of our notorious drive after about 18 inches of snow fall. The vehicle doing the snow plowing is a four wheel drive Arctic Cat ATV or "quad" (specifically a 2004 TBX 400). The plow itself is made by Warn, the company that makes winches. Using this setup and plowing ourselves, instead of paying someone with a bigger plow to do it for is, will probably pay for the ATV in two seasons.

Oh, and the driver, and camera-person, is yours truly. This video card's message is at the end of the drive. Enjoy!

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Worst Executive Decision Ever? American Airlines goes for broke

  May 22, 2008    

When your industry is in trouble and times are tough, the time may come for an executive to make tough decisions. After all, that's why they've been paying you the big bucks all these years, right? So how much is the following idea worth? Charge people who choose to travel on our planes $15.00 for every bag they check.

Consider the following top ten ramifications:

  1. The toll it takes to collect the $15 per back toll (time, resources, aggravation, goodwill).

  2. The strain on gate agent staffing and potential fraud in handling the cash, check or charges.

  3. The chore of promulgating and enforcing rules and arrangements for travelers who arrive with a ticket but say they can't pay for the bag check.

  4. The carry-on baggage explosion? Mayhem in the boarding area as passengers battle to be first onboard in order to grab overhead space.

  5. The regulation of the secondary market in cabin luggage space? For example: "I'm traveling light, I'll put your bag under my seat for $5?"

  6. The added flight delays because it already takes a long time to figure out that the overhead is full and there are three bags that are going to have to be checked. Now we will argue about whose three bags it will be, because the losers have to pay.

  7. The longer security lines and times as more passengers try to get more stuff into their carry-on quota (there's a whole bunch of stuff that is verboten in carry-on bags like more than 3 fluid ounces of most liquids, baseball bats, golf clubs, pool cues, ski poles, big screwdrivers, etc.).

  8. The number of flight attendants who decide it's not worth the aggravation and quit, or worse, carry on working with an even sourer attitude than before.

  9. The effect of people packing more stuff into a single checked bag, leading to more weight surcharges and the resulting time spent arguing and collecting, followed by more muscles pulled by ground crew, health insurance and disability claims, not to mention errors in load distribution as average per checked bag weight shifts.

  10. The lasting damage to public perception of your airline as the one who started this whole mess.


Wouldn't you love to have been at the meeting when they decided this was a good idea? And who supplied the research that said Americans will continue to fly in large numbers regardless of how unpleasant the experience becomes. I already see people doing the math on journeys you can do in a day of driving, like New Jersey to Detroit or Chicago, which is cheaper than flying if there is more than one person in the vehicle. Plus you can pack anything you like in the trunk, no hassles, no surcharges, no security lines. Heck you can even have a 32 ounce big gulp in the passenger cabin. With executive decisions like this one, American Airlines could single-handedly revive the Great American road trip.

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Ugly? No! Bellissima? Si! Giugiaro's gorgeous solar-assisted hybrid

  March 01, 2008    

All due respect to Chuck Squatriglia and the editors at Wired but surely it's an aesthetic sin to condemn the Giugiaro Quaranta as ugly (see "Giugiaro Builds the World's Ugliest Prius").

Where's your sense of line and form and function? This is surely a landmark piece of vehicular art, not least because it embodies the electric element of automotive function in a unique new form. Far from cold, it warms the blood with its promise of an eco-friendly future that looks cool and stylish, and about as far from earth-friendly frumpy-ness as you can get.

Sure, there's a place in the retail market for hybrids that look just like other cars while concealing secret energy efficiency. But this design openly embraces efficiency and makes it look deeply appealing (to me at least). I predict it will get pulses racing about the prospect of going green. And that's a beautiful thing.

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