Looks like the viewing rate has picked up again for Autocade despite a relative lack of updates over the last six months (in no small part due to our move). Tomorrow itâll exceed 16 million page views.
Some of the last few entries have been about filling in gaps: the Renault Clio V is out, yet only entered into the database on May 29; the Singaporean Holden Calais (and corresponding Malaysian Opel Calais) the day after, with Autocade possibly the only website which corrects another well propagated error by Wikipedia on this car; the fifth-generation Toyota RAV4, which made its motor show appearance over a year ago; and the Nissan 180SX of 1989. Autocade doesnât profess to be a complete encyclopĂŠdia, since itâs an ongoing, developing work, though it does surprise me where the gaps are sometimes. I often have the photos filed away, but wait till the mood hits. Or, in the present case, waiting till some of my reference books re-emerge as Iâm still, three weeks later, living out of boxes.
As with each million before, hereâs a summary of how the traffic has developed:
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)
February 2019: 15,000,000 (five months for fifteenth million)
June 2019: 16,000,000 (four months for sixteenth million)
Itâs interesting to note that Autocade has had five million more page views since June 2017; yet it took six years (three times as long) to get the siteâs first five million. At the time of writing, the database has 3,813 models, an increase of just 32 since the site gained its 15 millionth page view.
I rented a couple of trucks over the last few days, and Iâm surprised that automatics have taken such a hold in this country.
Iâve written about my preference for manuals elsewhere, and for a regular car, I would consider one with a sequential gearbox. Weâre in an era now where the advantages of a modern automatic can outweigh those of a manual, notably in fuel economy. Generally, however, having the control of a manualâand not having an atrophied left leg while drivingâis my preference, and itâs absolutely fine even in gridlock if you know how to control the gears properly. I grew up with the idea, rightly or wrongly, that a good driver knows how to operate a manual and desires the control that it affords.
Polling my friends, it appears that half have the same preference as me and many note, âBut I own an automatic because I couldnât find a manual.â Itâs true: weâve become a slush-box nation just as the United States has, going from a country where maybe 10 per cent were autos to one where 90 per cent are. A big part of that shift happened this century. The notion that automatics have been market-driven (as I was told at Brendan Foot) is, as far as I can ascertain, bollocks. In 2015â16, I went to some extremes to buy the car I wanted, namely one with a manual transmission, by sourcing one from where the majority of drivers still prefer to shift gears themselves: the UK. I understand that the UK, as New Zealand once did, insists that you do your driverâs licence test in a manual if you want to be able to drive both; should you do it in an auto, youâre restricted to just autos until you ‘upgrade’ to a manual licence. Indeed, the latter position invites ridicule in the UKâDaniel Craig got his share of it after a fake-news piece alleged he didnât know how to drive a manual.
This UK licensing position still makes sense to me, but it appears we license people to drive manuals even though they have never seen a clutch in their lives.
One of the young men helping me out with shifting stuff in the truck, who is on a learnerâs, and owns an automatic, said to me that he couldnât comprehend a manual, and that confirms that we may have it wrong with our licensing system by slavishly following the US.
And after the weekendâs experience, Iâm even more wedded to manual transmissions.
The first truck from Vancy Rentals was a two-tonne Toyota Dyna with a slush box. For the most part it wasnât too difficult to drive, except for one corner when I had to turn off the Hutt Road (speed limit 80 km/h) to head up Ngauranga Gorge, while carrying a load. I didnât consider that I was going too quickly but the truckâs gearing did not change down with the speed reduction, and I had to rely solely on heavy braking to slow the vehicle. I wrestled with the steering wheel to keep it in my lane but came close to crossing the line.
You can put this down to inexperience and you would be partially right. With hindsight, I could have turned off the overdrive, or changed to D-4, but in my opinion autos have a tendency to make you lazy. Itâs the equivalent of a point-and-shoot Instamatic camera: acceptable but not what a professional might demand for full control.
The second was a larger 2·5 tonner from Hino, but with a five-speed manual transmission. That corner was taken cleanly (with an even heavier and higher load) by shifting down, and it was simple heading down Ngauranga later by changing into a lower gearâexactly what the sign at the top of the Gorge suggests you do. It kept the truck to a maximum of 80 km/h, the legal limit down that stretch. (I also accomplished this with D-4 on the Toyota.) It was at this point that my young helper remarked that he couldnât understand the manual, so I pointed out that it was the gearing that was keeping us safely within the speed limit, not the brakeâby having that additional security I wouldnât be reliant solely on the truckâs braking system.
That same thinking applies to my driving in a motor car, and I wonder why one wouldnât want the extra assurance of having chosen the gear yourself, limiting your speed when needed, and not be dependent on the decision of a gearbox engineer in Japan (or elsewhere) who mightnât understand Kiwi roads.
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.’
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.
I see that Toyota is upset that R. L. Polk named the Ford Focus the top-selling car in the world for 2012. Motor Trend has since reported the story as Polk naming the Focus as the top selling ‘nameplate’, but that hasn’t stopped Toyota from throwing a wobbly.
I can’t locate the Polk report on its website, but maybe it’s a fair call for Toyota. Bloomberg Businessweek says that the Matrix and Auris could be counted, bumping Toyota’s numbers, since they are all Corolla-based.
Ford fans, however, can say that the C-Max and Grand C-Max should form part of the total.
I’m certain that Polk would have counted the current Japanese Corollas, the E160 model, into its total, but these have a different platform altogetherâthey are, in fact, on the Vitz (Yaris) platform, but they were released in 2012. If we’re to take Toyota’s argument about cars on the same platform, then we need to subtract all its E160 Japanese sales from Polk’s total and they should be grouped with the Vitz.
Since I can’t find the methodology, then the jury is still out, but Toyota, of all companies, should know the nameplate argument well. It has, after all, sold very different Corollas in different parts of the world, even when we look at the previous generation. Many Asian markets had a narrower model, 1,700 mm wide, while countries like the US, Australia and New Zealand received a much wider one. However, calling them all Corolla beefs up the total. Surely it can’t get upset at Ford actually selling a single car these days as the Focus, unlike the situation in the 2000s when the US and Canada had an older-platform one compared to the rest of the world? Perhaps the people at the Best Selling Cars Blog have it right instead. I’ve talked to these guys about their methodology, and they typically group identical cars together (e.g. the Buick Excelle XT is counted in the Opel Astra J total, since they are the same car). There, Toyota is top dog, and the publication acknowledges that it counts Auris and Matrix (and Rumion, but at Autocade, we catalogue that as Corolla Rumion). It also counts older Corollas still being built in places such as China (BSCB notes that it includes ‘Corolla IX, X, XI and Altis’), which I think should be allowed, since they were developed as Corollas. All Corolla variants total 1,097,132 versus 1,036,683 for the Ford Focus. They do, however, count the C-Max separately (130,036), but at least that’s clear from their stats.
So, if we were to use comparable methodologies and allow the minivan spinoffs to be counted for both ranges, then that should show the following:
Ford Focus, plus C-Max: 1,166,719
Toyota Corolla, including Auris, Matrix and Rumion, the E160 variants based on the smaller Vitz, and all older generations still in production: 1,097,132
My impression, based only on these online data, is that Ford is on top, and the only way for Toyota to get a higher number is to count the clones in China that it officially disapproves of: the BYD F3, the BYD Surui, and the Geely Vision.
Another spot of news today, closer to home for me: Autocade has crossed the 3,000,000 views’ mark. My thanks to all netizens for their browsing and for making it part of their online automotive resources. Good to know many of you come to a Kiwi siteâindeed, a Wellington oneâto get your global car info.
And with this, all the Toyota Coronas are on Autocade, with the exception of the Corona Mark II models (really forming a line in its own right).
Toyota Corona EXiV (ST200). 1993â8 (prod. unknown). 4-door hardtop sedan. F/F, F/A, 1838, 1998 cmÂł (4 cyl. DOHC). Larger EXiV, still twinned with Carina ED, continuing the same formula as before. Wider than the 1,700 mm limit imposed by Japanese taxation laws and more expensive as a consequence. Rounder lines. Four-wheel drive from 1994. Deleted 1998 as these styles became less popular in the compact- and mid-sized sectors.
Sam Flemming in Advertising Age mentioned the scandal that Toyota has been embroiled in inside China, before a lot of the bad press it received in the occident over âunintended accelerationâ.
This involved a netizen, an owner of a Toyota Highlander Sport, filming that his SUV was unable to get up a 30-degree incline, something which âlesserâ models such as the Korean-built Renault Koleos, and even the subcompact Chery QQâone of the cheapest cars around in Chinaâcould manage. The following news item reveals more. Itâs in Mandarin and dates from December 22, 2009. The news investigators show that even a Daewoo Lacetti (Buick Excelle in China) and a Chery van could manage the same slope, and confirm that the Highlander could not do it.
They are not alone. Jitendra Patel filmed this with his 2009 Highlander earlier last year:
As Sam says, this issue has brewed thanks to the Chinese internet which, while not as free as it is in most countries, still seems to create active consumersâ groups. People will rally as individuals if the cause is rightâand consumers seem to be rediscovering their power, online.
You canât help but wonder (without reading the court transcripts and judgement) how the sentencing of Koua Fong Lee could be so harsh. In 2006, Leeâs Toyota Camry, with his pregnant wife, daughter, brother and father on board, accelerated out of control and smashed into an Oldsmobile, killing three people in the second car back in 2006. The judge threw the book at him, giving him the maximum eight years, even though Lee, a recent immigrant, was adamant he was hard on the brakes and not the accelerator at the time of the accident. I donât know Minnesotan criminal law, but one would think this churchgoing man, with no prior crimes, lacked the mens rea to deserve the full sentence; unless it was cumulative for the three deaths.
Investigations showed there was nothing wrong with the brakesâbut, with hindsight, there could have been something wrong with the accelerator or the cruise control, considering that Leeâs Camry was going at 90 mph when it hit the Oldsmobile.
What we can very likely say was that this was not the America that Koua Fong Lee expected to emigrate to.
While the 1996 Camry Lee drove was not part of the Toyota recall, American media suggest that some of these models were repaired for faulty cruise controls. Chances are he will get a retrial, so in light of this new evidence, letâs hope the Lees, and the Adams and Boltons who lost their family members, will see some justice.
