Long before Mad Men, and before I got into branding in a big way, I had an interest in advertising. One of the greatest send-ups of the industry was the 1990 Dudley Moore starrer Crazy People, set in the advertising industry against a politically incorrectâactually, cruel and inaccurateâlook at mental health. It’s one of those films that could never be made today, and for good reason. But there are some gems in it, as Moore’s character, Emory Leeson, embarks on “honest advertising”. It gets him committed to a facilityâwho ever heard of an advertising agency telling the truth, right?âuntil his ads become a hit, welcome by consumers who don’t want BS.
I came across this wonderfully copywritten and set ad from a PR professional in London trying to sell his Nan’s 1981 Volvo 244DL:
It’s bloody good. The copy kept me engagedâlike all good ads used toâand he’s done a reasonably good job with the Volvo Broad headline typeface (it was wider back in the day). The body text type should be Times rather than Baskerville, but considering the exact cut of Times isn’t available digitally (to my knowledge; it’s for larger text, and has very short descenders), there’s no wonder he opted to use another family.
It got me thinking: I’ve often posted the Crazy People Volvo ad in comments, as a humorous response. However, the ad doesn’t exist in a decent res online. The only ones that have wound up online are from screen captures from the movie. This 22 kbyte file is actually the best one around, save for one on the Alamy stock photo website that I found after the fact:
I couldn’t re-create the imageâI assume the only person who has it (or had it) is the art director of the film, or the photographer that was commissionedâbut maybe I could have a go at the type?
The digital Volvo Broad had to be widened 25 per cent, and I didn’t attempt to match the kerning.
The body type was the interesting one. I opted for Times Headline, since it wasn’t at a text size, but as I discovered, Volvo used a particular cut that had short descenders and was slightly condensed. I tried to match the leading.
Therefore, here it is, offered under Creative Commons with attribution to me for the typesetting, please, while noting the image is not mine:
We almost never plan which car winds up being the x hundredth model entered into Autocade, and here’s proof.
The humble, boxy Mazda Demio (DY) was the 3,800th entry in Autocade. It makes a nice change from all the SUVs that have found their way on to the database in recent months, even if it isn’t the most inspiring vehicle.
The vehicles either side of the Demio weren’t terribly interesting, either: the Sol E20X (the Volkswagen badge-engineered JAC iEV7S) and the current Fit-based Honda Shuttle. But if you want to be complete (we want to, even if we’re far away from it), you have to include the everyday workhorses.
On this Pope Gregory Arbitrary Calendar Start Day, I wrote to a contact of mine at Renault New Zealand.
In mid-2018, I joked that, since Renault had no dealers in Wellington (never mind what’s listed on their websiteâthe only people who can see a dealer there are psychic mediums), I could sell them out of my house.
Today, I may well have gone some way toward doing that, as someone I know would like a test drive of a first-gen Captur after I put it into her consideration set. After all, I put my money where my mouth is with Renault, so when I recommend one, I do so with some authority.
In the same note, I detailed some observations about Renault New Zealand’s marketing. I have since forwarded it to their top man in the country.
I concluded all that with, ‘And I reckon Hiroto Saikawa is dodgy and he was trying to cover up his own incompetence by framing his old boss and mentor. But that’s another story.’
Even if I sold one car, I might become the city’s top Renault seller. ‘If you find a better car, buy it.’
Above: Behind the scenes of the Ć koda Karoq road test for Autocade.
I hadnât kept track of Autocadeâs statistics for a while, and was pleasantly surprised to see it had crossed 14,000,000 page views (in fact, itâs on 14,140,072 at the time of writing). Using some basic mathematics, and assuming it hit 13,000,000 on May 20, itâs likely that the site reached the new million in late September.
The site hadnât been updated much over the last few months, with the last update of any note happening in early September. A few more models were added today.
Since Iâve kept track of the traffic, hereâs how thatâs progressed:
March 2008: launch
April 2011: 1,000,000 (three years for first million)
March 2012: 2,000,000 (11 months for second million)
May 2013: 3,000,000 (14 months for third million)
January 2014: 4,000,000 (eight months for fourth million)
September 2014: 5,000,000 (eight months for fifth million)
May 2015: 6,000,000 (eight months for sixth million)
October 2015: 7,000,000 (five months for seventh million)
March 2016: 8,000,000 (five months for eighth million)
August 2016: 9,000,000 (five months for ninth million)
February 2017: 10,000,000 (six months for tenth million)
June 2017: 11,000,000 (four months for eleventh million)
January 2018: 12,000,000 (seven months for twelfth million)
May 2018: 13,000,000 (four months for thirteenth million)
September 2018: 14,000,000 (four months for fourteenth million)
In May, the site was on 3,665 models; now itâs on 3,755.
As the increase in models has been pretty small, thereâs been a real growth in traffic, and itâs the third four-month million-view growth period since the siteâs inception.
Weâre definitely putting in more crossovers and SUVs lately, and thatâs almost a shame given how similar each one is.
With my good friend Stuart Cowley, weâre extending Autocade into video segments, and hereâs our first attempt. Itâs not perfect, and we have spotted a few faults, but we hope to improve on things with the second one.
If you’re interested, you can subscribe to the Autocade YouTube channel here. Of course, given my concerns about Google, the video also appears at Lucireâs Dailymotion channel. Once we get a few more under our belt and refine the formula, we’ll do a proper release.
And, as I close this post, just over 10 minutes since the start, we’re on 14,140,271.
I came across a thread at Tedium where Christopher Marlow mentions Pandora Mail as an email client that took Eudora as a starting-point, and moved the game forward (e.g. building in Unicode support).
As some of you know, Iâve been searching for an email client to use instead of Eudora (here’s something I wrote six years ago, almost to the day), but worked with the demands of the 2010s. I had feared that Eudora would be totally obsolete by now, in 2018, but for the most part itâs held up; I remember having to upgrade in 2008 from a 1999 version and wondering if I only had about nine years with the new one. Fortunately, itâs survived longer than that.
Brana BujenoviÄâs Pandora Mail easily imported everything from Eudora, including the labels I had for the tables of contents, and the personalities I had, but itâs not 100 per cent perfect, e.g. I canât resize type in my signature file. However, finally Iâve found an email client that does one thing that no other client does: I can resize the inbox and outbox to my liking, and have them next to each other. In the mid-1990s, this was one of Eudoraâs default layouts, and it amazed me that this very efficient way of displaying emails never caught on. I was also heartened to learn from Tedium that Eudora was Apple co-founder Steve Wozniakâs email client of choice (âThe most important thing I use is Eudora, and that’s discontinued’). Iâm in good company.
However, this got me thinking how most users tolerate things, without regard, in my opinion, to whatâs best for them. Itâs the path of least resistance, except going down this path makes life harder for them.
The three-panel layout is de rigueur for email clients todayâall the ones Iâve downloaded and even paid good money for have followed this. Thunderbird, Mailbird, the oddly capitalized eM. All have had wonderful reviews and praise, but none allow you to configure the in- and outbox sizes. Hiriâs CEO says thatâs something theyâre looking at but right now, theyâre not there, either. Twenty-plus years since I began using Eudora and no one has thought of doing this, and putting the power of customization with the user.
But when did this three-panel layout become the standard? I can trace this back to Outlook Express, bundled with Windows in the late 1990s, and, if Iâm not mistaken, with Macs as well. I remember working with Macs and Outlook was standard. I found the layout limiting because you could only see a few emails in the table of contents at any given time, and I usually have hundreds of messages come in. I didnât want to scroll, and in the pre-mouse-wheel environment of the 1990s, neither would you. Yet most people put up with this, and everyone seems to have followed Outlook Expressâs layout since. Itâs a standard, but only one foisted on people who couldnât be bothered thinking about their real requirements. It wasnât efficient, but it was free (or, I should say, the licence fee was included in the purchase of the OS or the computer).
âIt was freeâ is also the reason Microsoft Word overtook WordPerfect as the standard word processor of the 1990s, and rivals that followed, such as Libre Office and Open Office, had to make sure that they included Word converters. I could never understand Word and again, my (basic) needs were simple. I wanted a word processor where the fonts and margins would stay as they were set till I told it otherwise. Word could never handle that, and, from what I can tell, still canât. Yet people tolerated Wordâs quirks, its random decisions to change font and margins on you. I shudder to think how many hours were wasted on people editing their documentsâWord canât even handle columns very easily (the trick was usually to type things in a single column, then reformatâso much for a WYSIWYG environment then). I remember using WordPerfect as a layout programme, using its Reveal Codes featureâit was that powerful, even in DOS. Footnoting remains a breeze with WordPerfect. But Word overtook WordPerfect, which went from number one to a tiny, niche player, supported by a few diehards like myself who care about ease of use and efficiency. Computers, to me, are tools that should be practical, and of course the UI should look good, because that aids practicality. Neither Outlook nor Word are efficient. On a similar note I always found Quattro Pro superior to Excel. With Mac OS X going to 64-bit programs and ending support for 32-bit there isnât much choice out there; Iâve encountered Mac Eudora users who are running out of options; and WordPerfect hasnât been updated for Mac users for years. To a large degree this answers why the Windows environment remains my choice for office work, with Mac and Linux supporting OSs. Someone who comes up with a Unicode-supporting word processor that has the ease of use of WordPerfect could be on to something.
Then you begin thinking what else we put up with. I find people readily forget or forgive the bugs on Facebook, for example. I remember one Twitter conversation where a netizen claimed I encountered more Facebook bugs than anyone else. I highly doubt that, because her statement is down to short or unreliable memories. I seem to recall she claimed she had never experienced an outageâwhen in fact everyone on the planet did, and it was widely reported in the media at the time. My regular complaints about Facebook are to do with how the website fails to get the basics right after so many years. Few, Iâm willing to bet, will remember that no oneâs wall updated on January 1, 2012 if you lived east of the US Pacific time zone, because the staff at Facebook hadnât figured out that different time zones existed. So we already know people put up with websites commonly that fail them; and we also know that privacy invasions donât concern hundreds of millions, maybe even thousands of millions, of people, and the default settings are “good enough”.
Keyboards wider than 40 cm are bad for you as you reach unnecessarily far for the mouse, yet most people tolerate 46 cm unless theyâre using their laptops. Does this also explain the prevalence of Toyota Camrys, which one friend suggested was the car you bought if you wanted to âtell everyone you had given up on lifeâ? It probably does explain the prevalence of automatic-transmission vehicles out there: when I polled my friends, the automaticâmanual divide was 50â50, with many in the manual camp saying, âBut I own an automatic, because I had no choice.â If I didnât have the luxury of a âspare carâ, then I may well have wound up with something less than satisfactoryâbut I wasnât going to part with tens of thousands of dollars and be pissed off each time I got behind the wheel. We donât demand, or we donât make our voices heard, so we get what vendors decide we want.
Equally, you can ask why many media buyers always buy with the same magazines, not because it did their clients any good, but because they were safe bets that wouldnât get them into trouble with conservative bosses. Maybe the path of least resistance might also explain why in many democracies, we wind up with two main parties that attract the most votersâspurred by convention which even some media buy into. (This also plays into mayoral elections!)
Often we have ourselves to blame when we put up with inferior products, because we havenât demanded anything better, or we donât know anything better exists, or simply told people what weâd be happiest with. Or that the search for that product costs us in time and effort. Pandora has had, as far as I can fathom, no press coverage (partly, Brana tells me, by design, as they donât want to deal with the traffic just yet; itâs understandable since there are hosting costs involved, and heâd have to pay for it should it get very popular).
About the only place where we have been discerning seems to be television consumption. So many people subscribe to cable, satellite, Amazon Prime, or Netflix, and in so doing, support some excellent programming. Perhaps that is ultimately our priority as a species. Weâre happy to be entertainedâand that explains those of us who invest time in social networking, too. Anything for that hit of positivity, or that escapism as we let our minds drift.
Iâm fascinated by the 1970Âœ Ford Falcon for a number of reasons. The first is the obvious one: rarity. This car was built for only half a model year, from January to August 1970. If you think it looks like a contemporary Torino, youâre right: itâs basically a very stripped-down Torino. Yet you could spec it with any of the engines from the Torino, including the 429 inÂł V8 (and some did). Which brings me to the second reason: why would anyone really bother with it, if you could get a Torino for a bit more? (That answers why this car only lasted half a model year.) And that leads me to the third reason: what was going through Fordâs mind at the time? Thatâs where it gets interesting.
At this time, Ford was undergoing managerial changes, with Henry Ford II firing Bunkie Knudsen (who had been lured away from GM). That happened in September 1969, by which time the decision to go ahead with the Falcon had already been made. This is, in other words, a Knudsen initiative.
Federal regulations made the 1966â70 Falcon obsolete because it had a dash-mounted starterâthe rule was that they had to be in the column. However, itâs curious that Ford made this call to put the Falcon nameplate on a mid-sizer, considering it had made its name as an âeconomyâ car (by US standards). If you read the brochure, youâll find that this was all about size. Ford bragged that the car was 2 ft longer. Yet for this half-model year, it was still marketed as an âeconomyâ car.
I imagine as the US headed into the 1970s, there was no sign of the fuel crisis on the horizon, so there was nothing wrong about size. Why not spoil the average Falcon buyer, used to a smaller car, with something much larger? Hadnât upsizing already happened on every other model line out thereâby this point the Mustang was about to grow into a monstrosity with massive C-pillars and terrible rear visibility?
Ford (and the other Big Four makers) had been known to blow one model line up, then start another little one, and the Maverick had already been launched for 1970, and was now doing the compact work. By that logic, Falcon could grow more, even though other solutions might have been to either replace the Falcon with the Maverick or simply shift the Falcon nameplate to the Maverickâbut both would have involved âdownsizingâ, and in 1970 that was not in the US car industryâs vocab. The panic hadnât set in yet.
Fourthly, this is a beautiful shape. Unnecessarily big (till you consider it had to accommodate the 429), but a beautiful shape. The 1970s hadnât really started in earnest, so we hadnât seen some of the really garish shapes that were to come. This has that 1960s classicism coupled with 1970s uncertainty. Thereâs still some optimism with jet-age inspiration, but the lack of practicality foreshadowed the style-first, single-digit mpg âroad-hugging weightâ cars that were round the corner, cars which no one truly needed but Detroit, in its optimism (or blindness), believed Americans did. Thereâs still something very honest about the last US Falcon. After this, only the Australians and Argentinians kept things alive, but those are other stories.
Itâs a little disappointing to note that Autocade has taken slightly longer to reach 12 million page views: it ticked over to its new milestone earlier today. I really had hoped that weâd get there before 2017 was out, but it was not to be.
Part of it might have been the slower rate of models being put upâlifeâs been busy, and a site that earns a fairly small amount of money compared to our other businesses doesnât warrant as much time. But 100 models have gone up since June 2017, when Autocade reached its 11 million milestone, with the 3,600th model the Nissan Rasheen (and no, I didnât plan this oneâitâs quite an oddball vehicle).
So hereâs the running tally as Iâve been keeping on this blog, for really no reason other than pedantry.
March 2008: launch
April 2011: 1,000,000 (three years for first million)
March 2012: 2,000,000 (11 months for second million)
May 2013: 3,000,000 (14 months for third million)
January 2014: 4,000,000 (eight months for fourth million)
September 2014: 5,000,000 (eight months for fifth million)
May 2015: 6,000,000 (eight months for sixth million)
October 2015: 7,000,000 (five months for seventh million)
March 2016: 8,000,000 (five months for eighth million)
August 2016: 9,000,000 (five months for ninth million)
February 2017: 10,000,000 (six months for tenth million)
June 2017: 11,000,000 (four months for eleventh million)
January 2018: 12,000,000 (seven months for twelfth million)
Itâs a shame that the four-month time-frame needed to reach 11 million could be an anomaly rather than part of a trend.
I also wonder whether the odd PHP errorâwe have had quite a few since we began hosting at AWSâhas impacted on search-engine rankings. However, server management has become far, far more complex over the last couple of decades, and the controls I see at AWS mean nothing to me as someone outside the computing industry. The help pages may as well be in Serbian. The notion that software gets easier to use and the expectation that this level of computing would become democratized have not come to pass, certainly not over the last 10 years. It seems the industry wants to sew things up for itself, and the last thing needed are amateurs like me getting into the nuts and bolts. Iâm not Facebook or Google: I canât afford heaps of employees to look after this stuff. (Or, in Googleâs case, maybe a couple here and there.)
Incidentally, I may begin removing the sharing links under each headline soon. Iâm concerned about the standard Facebook ‘like’ button tracking readers, and there are Po.st links under âShare this pageâ to the top left of this page (if browsing via desktop) if you want to show Facebook friends something from here. Po.st does have its own cookies (linked to a company called Radium One), but itâs far easier to opt out of those through their site. I’m unconvinced that anyone can opt out of Facebook’s data collection.
Well done, Wikipedia, you got something right. It only took you 12 years. Nick, who appears to be a senior editor at the site, fixed up the complete fabrication that a user called ApolloBoy entered about the âFord CE14 platformâ in 2005, after I wrote a pretty scathing piece on Drivetribe about Wikipediaâs inadequacies, in part based on an earlier blog post I wrote here.
I am grateful to Nick who I expect saw my story.
However, errors still abound, and as I pointed out in Drivetribe, another user called Pmeisel, who appears to have been an automotive industry professional, said back in February 2005 there was a real confusion between development codes and platforms on Wikipedia.
While Nick has largely fixed the problemâhe has noted that it was the European Ford Escort of 1990 and its derivatives that CE14 should refer to, and not much earlier American carsâthere remains the lesser one that there is still no such thing as a âFord CE14 platformâ, just as there is no such thing as a âFord C170 platformâ, and so on.
Ford did not use these codes to refer to platforms, they used them to refer to specific models.
Letâs see if the Wikiality of this page will at least begin to disappear from the ânet, 12 years after ApolloBoy made up some crap and allowed it to propagate to the extent that some people regard it as fact.
I have enquired into Wikipedia from time to time, enough to know it is full of mistakes. But the errors do seem to happen far more often in the Anglophone one. Perhaps those of us who speak English are more willing to commit fictions to publication. Goodness knows we have seen an example in print, too. Does this culture lend us to being far less precise with a poorer concern for the truthâand does that in turn lead to the ease with which âfake newsâ winds up in our media?
Originally published at Drivetribe, but as I own the copyright it only made sense to share it here for readers, too, especially those who might wish to buy a car from abroad and want to do the job themselves. It was originally written for a British audience.
Above: The lengths I went to, to make sure I didn’t wind up buying a car with an automatic transmission: source it from the UK and spend ten months on the process.
I advise strongly that you use a company specializing in the importation. Thatâs where Jake Williams and Dan Hepburn at Online Logistics of Auckland came in
Having identified the model I wanted, I had to trawl through the websites. The UK is well served, and some sites allow you to feed in a postcode and the distance youâre willing (or your friendâs willing) to travel.
However, if you rely on friends, youâll need to catch them at the right time, and both gentlemen had busy weekends that meant waiting.
VAT was the other issue thatâs unfamiliar to New Zealanders. GST is applied on all domestic transactions in New Zealand, but not on export ones. This isnât always the case in the UK, and some sellers wonât know how any of this works.
One of the first cars I spotted was from a seller who had VAT on the purchase price, which logically I should get refunded when the car left the country. I would have to pay the full amount but once I could prove that the car had left the UK, the transaction would be zero-rated and I would get the VAT back. I was told by the manager that in 11 years of business, he had never come across it, and over the weeks of chatting, the vehicle was sold.
Car Giant, in London, was one company that was very clued up and told me that it had sold to New Zealanders before. Theyâre willing to refund VAT on cars that were VAT-qualifying, but charged a small service fee to do so. The accountsâ department was particularly well set up, and its staff very easy to deal with long-distance.
Evans Halshaw, however, proved to be farcical. After having a vehicle moved to the Kettering branch close to Keithâs then-residence after paying the deposit, and having then paid for an AA inspection, the company then refused to sell it to me, and would only deal with Keith.
Although the company was happy to take my deposit, Keith was soon told, âwe will need payment to come from yourself either by debit card or bank transfer as the deal is with yourself not Mr Yan,â by one of its salesâ staff.
I wasnât about to ask Keith to part with any money, If I were to transfer funds to his account, but not have the car belong to me, and if Keith were to then transfer ownership to me without money changing hands, then the New Zealand Customs would smell a rat. It would look like money laundering: NZTA requires there to be a clear chain of ownership, and this wasnât clear. Evans Halshaw were unwilling to put the invoice in my name.
Iâm a British national with a UK addressâagain something a lot of buyers Down Under wonât haveâbut Evans Halshaw began claiming that it was âpolicyâ not to sell to me.
The company was never able to provide a copy of such a policy despite numerous phone calls and emails.
Essentially, for this to work and satisfy Customs on my end, Keith would have to fork out money, and I would have to pay him: a situation that didnât work for either of us.
Phil, a qualified lawyer, offered to head into another branch of Evans Halshaw and do the transaction exactly as they wanted: head there with âchip and PINâ, only for the company to change its tune again: it would not sell to me, or any representative of mine.
The refund from Evans Halshaw never materialized, and I found myself ÂŁ182 out of pocket
