In this episode I take a look at why 'net zero' is pretty much a fantasy.
In this video I answer the following viewer question on heavy towing:I'm trying to see through all the negativities that us Australians seem to pile on any product that comes out of China. I have to admit I'm finding myself joining the masses of flinging shit at everyone and everything these days. But I like the GWM Canon Alpha PHEV!!! And I'm not embarrassed to say I want one and I don't care what my mates say. My wife is crook, seriously. So we bought a brand new caravan, we can no longer camp in a tent together. I retired to look after her.What next?? I drive a 2016 SR Hilux 6 speed manual that was initially set up for touring. We've done the likes of the Canning Stock Route, and so in the past so we're not like the Chardonnay caravan park mob, no offence to them. But we do have our reasons to buy a van. My Hilux on the other hand is now overweight, wrongly set up to tow, etc, etc, etcetera John.Our van weighs 2 tonne, our tow vehicle is a little heavier that’s a tick. Our tow vehicle is just a little agricultural in comfort. The suspension is set up to carry weight, so towing she's a bit rough. We love her but the Canon is so appealing in many ways:Hybrid, towing capacity, super comfortable, coil sprung rear end, affordable for a retiree, when we're not touring we can use the electric drive around town. Also if I do decide to head off alone I can do moderate off road tours to my favourite places without a worry.I hope you're still awake John. We want to tow in comfort in a vehicle that is reliable and safe that's the crux of it. Your thoughts please.
After decades of life-support, South Korean shot-callers will strap Ssangyong ‘Straya into old sparky, on the morrow, whence it will be lit up, and then resurrected, kinda like Jesus, and henceforth be known as KGM AustraliaKGM Australia's first major achievement, tomorrow, will be to launch a glorious new slogan - where would we be without those? “Korean built to last.” With no punctuation, but hey.“Korean built to last.” Guaranteed to resonate so powerfully with all 12 or 13 Australians who buy one in coming months. Well done, solving the company’s major strategic issues as a top priority.In other news, there’s a new Actyon. Less hideous than previously (not hard). Bit of a Land Rover rip-off on the styling, but hopefully more reliable than an actual Land Rover. Still gutless, though - because some things never change.
In this video I respond to the best comments on the channel over the past month.
Hyundai Australia says it's getting a ute - finally. The Hyundai ute options are: One: Hyundai’s Mighty Boy - the Tucson-based Santa Cruz, which is too small and would be outrageously overpriced here.Two: They could attempt to re-badge the Tasman. (This is gunna be their preferred option, surely, because it’s the only available ute in the same segment as Hilux, Ranger, et. al.)Just a few minor hurdles there: They’ll have to take the ‘smashed crab’ aesthetic out of the pointy end, and give Eugene Levy his eyebrows back on the profile ... probably do-able, so far.But they’ll also have to solve the powertrain problem. See, Tasman’s diesel is objectively underpowered, especially in the mid-rev range. This is a fact. Therefore, A) it can’t take the fight effectively to Ranger and Hilux, and B) when Chris Bowen’s efficiency standard really ramps up to proposed 2030 levels, that engine won’t be especially tenable. The other option is the Hyundai Silverado. A twisted freak of the automotive world, certainly, but they might conceivably pimp out Hyundai Australia's new ute to GM, which is currently massaging-up a plug-in hybrid Silverado.This might be possible seeing as Hyundai started sleeping with General Motors in New York on September 12 last year. GM’s Mary Barra and Big Sister’s Euisun Chung consummated the unlikely union after exchanging vows to hook up casually from time to time, because they both love money. Only one small problem with any upcoming Hyunderado. There’s 200-230,000 Ranger-sized utes being sold here currently. But only about 11,000 big, honkin’ redneck specials.And as much as I love me a big, honkin’ redneck special, this far smaller Silverundai segment is not the one to play in if you’re Hyundai, hoping against hope to get Hilux and Ranger worried.If you already had a somewhat cloned hybrid Tasman, and it was going gangbusters, a Hyunderado might be a ripping range-topper to deploy after that.Plus, the Silverado 1500 you can buy today from GMSV is roughly $150,000 with its honkin’ 6.2 V8 and complimentary Moonshine Bandits playlist. Add a plug-in hybrid powertrain … and any future Hyunderado hybrid is gunna be nudging $180k. Which is a lot of hoot for a Hyundai ute.This is far from being a done deal, I'd suggest.
Get a great deal on home solar (or add a quality battery to your existing setup): https://autoexpert.com.au/solarSave thousands on a new car: https://autoexpert.com.au/contactIn this video I answer the following viewer question on heavy towing:Forgive me if I've contacted you the wrong way about this, but I watched your YouTube vid on the Ford Ranger Super Duty and really appreciated your honest approach and obvious expertise. I thought the Super Duty was going to be the answer to my Towing Weight dreams, :) but that is the context of my question really..... I just want a solid answer to the below (rather than dubious answers (ie opinons) from Facebook warriors who don't really KNOW what they're talking about.My question - If the manufacturer confirms a van towball weight of 170kg at a TARE of 2600kg, could it be considered generally safe to tow the vehicle loaded to its ATM of 3300kg, with the towball weight still at 170kg (ie the extra weight evenly distributed across the vans axles)I just want to be clear as Ive seen so many people say Towball mass rule of thumb is 10% of ATM, but of course that (330kg) starts eating into our Disco 4 payload Big Time.......My guess is the answer to the questions is "Yes". But as I said, I really appreciated your honest view and use of the actual physics that determine towing characteristics.Thanks in advance for your help and keep up the good work!
Chinese battery manufacturer, Sungrow, has never had a thermal runaway of an operationally deployed battery. I went to China to find out why.
My mate Adam Morris from ReDriven - https://www.youtube.com/@ReDriven - is a self-confessed kei truck fan-boy. He gushes. (It's that dignified...) So, he recently got jammed into the 400kW RAM 1500 Limited for some reorientation therapy. I'm not sure it was entirely consensual, but hey...ReDriven's excellent kei truck review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFOUOFIda5QAnd the earlier S-Class takedown/reality check: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrU9fD7-m7Q Adam's co-conspirator, Jim, over at ReDriven is a fully qualified professional mechanic with years of experience - so you typically get two perspectives in every video.Make sure you check out ReDriven and give the boys a sub. I love their work.
This is a technical deep-dive with Toyo about EV tyre replacement
This video is a technical deep-dive into modern engine oils and filters, aimed at the home car maintenance DIY-er.
My mate Brett from Driving Enthusiast - https://www.youtube.com/@drivingenthusiastaustralia - dropped by the Fat Cave today, and since we both recently tested the same RAM 1500 Laramie Sport, we went for a spin and rolled a GoPro while we talked about it. This car is one of the most under-rated utes in the market - it tows heavy, it accelerates fast, and it's abundantly luxurious, as well as packed with clever features. Predictably, lefty/greenie types hate it.Make sure you check out Brett's channel and give him a sub - he's doing good work over there.Save thousands on any new car (Australia-only): https://autoexpert.com.au/contactGet a great deal on home solar (or add a quality battery to your existing setup): https://autoexpert.com.au/solar
Save thousands on any new car (Australia-only): https://autoexpert.com.au/contactGet a great deal on home solar (or add a quality battery to your existing setup): https://autoexpert.com.au/solarIn this video:Polestar has just started offering battery state of health certificates on select used Polestar 2s being resold in its dealer network. Companies don’t get up in the morning and randomly decide this kind of thing is a good idea. It has to be for a reason.According to them: "As part of the Polestar Pre-owned programme, in which select used cars re-enter the partner network, the certificate transparently shows customers the battery health and capacity of a used Polestar 2. Certifying the useable battery as a percentage, customers can purchase a pre-owned Polestar 2 with peace-of-mind that the car’s battery is in optimal condition."The battery in a Polestar 2 is actually one of the few things that’s proven quite robust so far, with very few owners complaining about range falling into the Marianas Trench. There have been plenty of other faults, but not the battery.Doing this is most probably because the rest of the car has proven to be such an unreliable, abject lemon. Like, don’t mind the lemon - look at how healthy the battery is, dude. Again, according to them: "Since its launch in 2020, Polestar 2 has received over 20 over-the-air (OTA) software updates, allowing the car to continuously improve over time. For Polestar 2, OTA updates have led to efficiency gains, extending the car’s range through battery management, new functionality with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, as well as many loved apps including Waze and YouTube. With regularly scheduled software updates, Pre-owned customers can be assured they have the latest software features in their car."This is a very interesting way to put it. It’s a totally true statement - as far as it goes - but not exactly a complete picture of the OTA reality. I'd argue that many - maybe most - of these OTAs are (often unsuccessful) attempts to fix something that should have been sorted in R&D, before deploying the vehicle publicly.So, battery health certificate or not, Polestar 2 is set to go down in the history books as one of the first enduring EV lemons. Cybertruck is on the podium, certainly, but Polestar 2 is up there, in the Lemon-Scented EV Sweepstakes.
My mate Brett from Driving Enthusiast - https://www.youtube.com/@drivingenthusiastaustralia - dropped by the Fat Cave with a Ranger Sport Loaner, so we went for a spin and rolled a GoPro while we talked about it. It's pretty impressive from a platform, dynamics, ergonomics and powertrain perspective. But it is quite expensive, and my reservations about Ford's product support and long-term reliability linger.Make sure you check out Brett's channel and give him a sub - he's doing good work over there.Save thousands on any new car (Australia-only): https://autoexpert.com.au/contactGet a great deal on home solar (or add a quality battery to your existing setup): https://autoexpert.com.au/solar
Save thousands on any new car (Australia-only): https://autoexpert.com.au/contactGet a great deal on home solar (or add a quality battery to your existing setup): https://autoexpert.com.au/solar
Save thousands on any new car (Australia-only): https://autoexpert.com.au/contactGet a great deal on home solar (or add a quality battery to your existing setup): https://autoexpert.com.au/solarIN THIS VIDEOLast Friday morning, a truck operated by NJ Ashton Group inconveniently, and certainly unintentionally, sprayed 750 kilos of Satan’s fingernails, also known as ‘flock’, which is finely shredded steel fragments, all over a 30km stretch of the M1, which is the northern motorway out of Sydney. Flock has a variety of clever industro-fun uses - it goes into friction materials (like brake linings and clutches - things of that nature). It’s a reinforcer for composites, and rubbers (not those rubbers, dude - your mind doesn’t have to be in the fucking gutter 24/7 - nobody wants flock in those rubbers - maybe Satan - he’d want that. I’m talking about flock in general products made of rubber, and plastic. They even stick flock in anti-static flooring (for electronics factories, or pyro-type manufacturing). And (this is very sexy, to me) they use flock in powder metallurgy as a binder in sintered components. ‘Flock’ is therefore miraculous. But not when you spray it all over 30km of freeway. That sucks. 300 vehicles had their tyres punctured, southbound, between Palmdale and Mount White. This main transport link to Sydney was closed for 10 hours.Nothing screams ‘no response plan’ louder than that. And I would say that we in the electorate deserve more than this entirely fucked-up response.This incident, which was purely accidental and in no way malicious, highlights two serious, interconnected lapses by regulatory Muppets to whom we pay healthy six-figure salaries - mainly, it would seem, to use their arses as little more than an over-priced executive chair polishing system.Problem one: It’s pretty easy, potentially, to disrupt the entire city. When you think about it. And problem two: Since there’s clearly no plan to deal with even one isolated incident such as this, imagine the unfettered chaos potentially caused by a properly coordinated attack. That’s pretty clear, given the ‘Keystone Cops’ response painted across everyone’s newsfeeds Friday night and Saturday morning.
In this episode: full breakdown on the newly released specs and pricing on the GWM Cannon Alpha PHEV. (The Chinese carmaker's new 300kW plug-in hybrid dual-cab ute.)
Get a great deal on home solar (or add a quality battery to your existing setup): https://autoexpert.com.au/solarSave thousands on any new car (Australia-only): https://autoexpert.com.au/contactIn this video, I visited Risen's factory in China, and saw truly cutting-edge manufacturing technology on a scale you will not see in Australia. Risen is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of solar panels. It has roughly 15,000 employees, of which more than 1000 professional propellerheads work in R&D.The company holds over 740 proprietary patents. You can’t miss them, because you have to drive past them to visit the production line……which you can’t walk onto without wearing the full anti-static frock. And then, they blow you. With air. To make sure you don’t bring in any dust. It’s basically the full ‘Skynet’ freak show of cutting-edge robotic automation. Crystalline wafers that are less than four thousandths of an inch thick get scurried about by robots, and subjected to dozens of tightly controlled doping and layering processes in a surgically clean science-fiction set.It’s a decent 400- or 500-metre stroll from one end of the cell production line to the other. Endless processes with built-in testing take place. There are, of course, multiple lines in parallel.I had one impression in my head of manufacturing in China, and this, frankly, was not it. The minders who took us through were the full brainiac - they spoke binary. I struggled to keep up.I’ve been to car factories and R&D centres in Japan, Europe and South Korea. Risen’s factory is right up there. If I hadn’t been wearing a surgical mask, my jaw would have been on the floor.There are people at Risen, and all they do is think about heterogeneous junctions, zero busbar technology, optimising metallic paste, and advanced interconnection systems. It’s closer to rocket science than you think, and more reliable than SpaceX.This is properly advanced technology, and they develop it in-house.
Pricing revealed and pre-orders open for one of my most anticipated new vehicles - Australia’s new ugliest ute - the Kia Tasman. Move over Ssangong Musso; there’s a new monument to dual-cab ugliness in town...Hilarious developments back at headquarters: The penny has dropped, finally, that it looks hideous. They're doing what they can. They’re defending the design, but at the same time also striving to make it seem less crap, at minimal cost - overseas and here.And the price: It’s out of control, dude. Top-spec Tasman is $12k more than top-spec Triton (its closest competitor in the market, all things considered). And line-ball with a 3.0V6 diesel Ford Ranger Wildtrak.That's an intelligence test isn't it? The Wildtrak or the Tasman... How much thinking music do you really need?
The Ford Ranger Super Duty is currently a fairy tale. Ford’s PR team - doing what it does best: Selectively representing the truth about the Ranger Super Duty to the most domesticated car reviewers on the planet.The ones too timid, or otherwise incentivised not to ask any hard questions. Perhaps they just don’t know what to ask. In any case, the official Ford-sanctioned reports so far are just a suck.Ranger Super Duty is going to be OK - too expensive, but OK. Meaning, not nearly as good at towing or load carrying as you’ve been led to believe. At this point, that's pretty obvious.I'm going to break that down for you, in this video, using (you know) facts.If you’re thinking about buying a Super Duty Ranger, this report covers what you need to know. From someone who’s not afraid to do ghetto engineering and actual journalism.
Subaru used to be a great company in Australia, but unfortunately they've been sowing the seeds of their own downfall for well over a decade now ... and the harvest is imminent.Increasing Toyota ownership of the company means more Toyota beancounters running the show, sucking the passion from the brand and removing - essentially - all the exciting variants from the range, especially in Australia.Here I use one owner's interaction with them to illustrate this point, and lay out the broader reasons why this once great brand is over the hill.