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$20K Small Business Tax Break End In Sight
Can you believe it’s been two years since the government announced the ‘Instant Asset Write-off” incentive in 2015?
To recap, the incentive runs as follows:
Any small business (turnover <$2m) buying an asset under $20,000, is eligible to write off 100% of the value immediately rather than claim depreciation over the following years. This was (and still is) an unprecedented scheme in terms of its generosity for small business (the previous instant asset write off threshold was just $1,000) and $1.75 billion was set aside in the 2015 budget to cover the incentive.
More Info: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-05-13/budget-2015-small-business-tax-break-explained/6466066
However, all good things come to an end and this 2-year incentive we be no longer from 30th June 2017.
What this means is that, if you are a small business, and there’s any sort of asset purchase you’re considering under this threshold, then act NOW to save yourself literally thousands of dollars compared to a post 30 June purchase.
Naturally, our interest and expertise is in cars and these days there are hundreds of models of vehicles that fit under this threshold. We would love to help any reader with such a purchase but above all, whether you buy through Private Fleet or directly from a dealer, we urge you to act now! Do not leave it too late. The purchase must be finalised before 30th June (paid for and delivered) and, with long waiting times for many models, it would be easier than you think to miss out.
I remember several years ago when another related incentive was offered and the dozens of disappointed potential buyers we spoke to who had left their run too late. Order today for delivery mid June, if you like but get your name on the list! Good luck!
Alternative News: The Hyperloop.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Famed and distinguished author and scientist Sir Arthur C. Clarke has this as the third of his three laws, much like “The Three Laws of Robotics” his equally distinguished fellow writer Isaac Asimov postulated. To that end, Elon Musk is offering something that could almost be seen as magical because of the technology involved and if it comes to fruition will change the way mass public transportation is undertaken. Welcome to The Hyperloop.
In actuality, the technology is the hard part, the concept is simple. In essence, it’s a pod that will contain passengers (or cargo) that will be inside a tubular structure, with that tube largely evacuated of air and with the much talked about magnetic levitation system to propel the pod.
The basic idea has been around for some time, perhaps two hundred years, however Musk reinvigorated the idea in 2012. A concept of design was shown in 2013, paralleling the highway in California between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The distance between the two is something around 560 kilometres and the concept estimated a travel time of just over a half hour, meaning travel speeds would be in the order of over 950 kilometres per hour. Top speed would be 1200 kph, so that travel time would allow for the initial acceleration process, travel, and deceleration.
Musk first raised the idea at an event hosted by a website dedicated to technology, in Santa Monica, in July 2012. Describing it as a “fifth mode of transport”, Musk said the Hyperloop (so named because it would be a closed system in a loop) would be “a cross between Concorde, a rail gun, and an air hockey table”. He also pointed out the benefits of such a system, being it would be a 24 hour, all weather, collision free, system.
The original concept had the pod riding on a cushion of air barely 2 millimetres in depth, with each pod having an air transfer system, moving high pressure air as speed built up, to the rear. By moving to a very low pressure setup, the transfer system was deleted. A set of linear induction motors would propel the pods and because of the vastly reduced friction, the pods would be able to coast along without losing much forward velocity. The pods themselves would be around seven and a half feet in diameter, enough to comfortably have a two person side by side configuration.
Musk threw open the design rules and in 2015 his SpaceX group announced a one mile test loop close to their main facility. Several university groups have joined in, including MIT, which unveiled their concept in mid 2016. With the T in MIT standing for Technology, MIT went on to demonstrate, for the first time in the world, a working prototype in January of 2017.
As mentioned, the concept is not new. A British engineer named George Medhurst took out patents in 1799 and wrote a book in 1812 detailing propelling people and goods through air-tight tubes. The fabled Crystal Palace building in London had a railway, using fans 22 feet in diameter to move a module in a tunnel, whilst in America an underground tube system was trialled for three years in the early 1870s. Rocketeer Tobert Goddard described a system, vacuum trains, in 1910, and physicist Gerard O’Neill wrote a fictional book which incorporated trains on magnetic levitation in tunnels with almost 100% vacuum inside…
Naturally cost is a factor, including some plans for having a terminus outside of the final destination, neccessitating a further transportation method. One costing had $20USD of a one way ticket being enough to cover the costs over twenty years for the mooted SanFran-LA route. That presumed 7.4 million riders per year, however some have already questioned that that cost would be suitable. Some figures of $100 billion USD for the initial system have been mentioned, with a proportion of that cost being pylons to raise the Hyperloop above the surrounding area.
Apart from cost, the Hyperloop system does, in fact, seem feasible, with many engineering studies confirming the validity of the concept. For Australia, the eastern seaboard would be, much like the U.S., a like location, between Melbourne and Sydney, perhaps via Camberra, and from there to Brisbane with, again, perhaps a stop at Newcastle and Port Macquarie or further. Much like the much discussed Very fast Train proposal, however, it’ll need a true visionary and an economic commitment to reduce our reliance on four wheeled transport and aircraft.
How Does An Airbag Work?
Airbags – they’re in every single new car coming out and if your car doesn’t have at least one airbag somewhere, it’s probably old enough to just about qualify as a classic. It’s probably just about getting to the point that Millennials (or the children of Millennials – whatever trendy label you slap on that generation) will probably take airbags for granted much the same way that Gen X takes seatbelts for granted. (Boomers and Busters probably remember a time before seatbelts were compulsory back and front – I’m Gen X and I’ve got vague memories of cars with no rear seatbelts. They weren’t common.)
The airbag concept has been around since the early 1950s, with patents being granted just about simultaneously in the US and in Germany to two different inventors, Walter Linderer and John Hetrick (which makes me suspect a little idea swapping was going on during the post-war Allied occupation of Berlin). However, airbags didn’t really become popular until the 1970s, which was when Ford decided to give them a try. This was about the time when legislating bodies around the world were taking a long, hard look at what was happening on the roads and were really getting serious about road safety, although it wasn’t until 1984 that the US made seatbelt use compulsory. It was also in the 1980s that saw vehicles of all marques installing airbags in an attempt to pick up accreditation from the newly established EuroNCAP.
Now, of course, airbags are everywhere: front airbags for the driver, front airbags for the front passenger, side airbags, knee airbags, curtain airbags – even “pedestrian airbags” that deploy on the outside of the vehicle in some Volvos.
Most of the time, if we’re driving properly and everyone around us is driving properly, we won’t see diddly-squat of the airbags. So it should be. This means that how they work can be something of a mystery.
Any airbag, no matter where it’s located, has three parts to it: the bag itself, the sensor that tells the airbag to deploy (you don’t want the airbags firing at the wrong moment) and the inflation system. The airbag itself is somewhat uninteresting: it’s a bag of nylon fabric that can pack up nice and tight, withstand the forces of sudden inflation, is airtight enough to actually inflate but has enough holes so it can deflate afterwards. They also come lubricated with ordinary talcum powder to help them move easily and stay supple. It’s the sensors and the inflation system that are a bit more fun.
The sensor picks up any force that’s equal or greater to the car going head-first into a brick wall at about 16 km/h, meaning that if you nudge the back of the garage at a crawl, if you ram the front bumper with a shopping trolley or if the cat jumps onto the car to enjoy the warmth of the bonnet, the airbag won’t deploy. The sensors usually sit in the crumple zones and the typical modern vehicle will have about three of them. The sensors are simple affairs, consisting of a ball in a tube as the main trigger. If the ball is jolted out of the tube, this sets the inflation system off.
The inflation system is, quite literally, rocket science. In other words, it uses the same technology as solid fuel rocket booster systems. One of the early teething troubles they had with airbags was finding a method of inflating the bags that didn’t take up too much room or create an additional hazard (canisters of compressed gas had storage problems), deployed quickly enough and didn’t save your life but leave you deaf thanks to a thunderous explosion. Nasty toxic gases were also to be avoided. No point saving your life from the crash if it’s going to asphyxiate you as the gas dissipates.
The solution came in the form of two very reactive chemical compounds: sodium azide (NaN3) and potassium nitrate (KNO3). Don’t play with these in the chemistry lab at school. When the trigger goes off, these two are ignited so the reaction begins. And does it begin or what! These compounds burn fast and release a heck of a lot of nitrogen gas in a very short space of time. This gas inflates the airbag super-fast so the bag deploys out of wherever it’s stored at over 300 km/h. The nitrogen gas isn’t going to harm anyone as it goes back into the atmosphere – which is about 90% oxygen anyway. Some mechanisms use slightly different chemicals but still work on the same basic principle and produce an equally harmless gas, such as argon.
In summary, the system works like this:
1 The force of a collision knocks the ball out of the tube (the most basic version of the accelerometer that detects a massive slowdown – there are other types out there).
2 The trigger flicks an electric switch that heats up an element.
3 The heat sets off a very, very fast chemical reaction.
4 The reaction produces heaps of gas very quickly, which fills the bag.
Can you get an airbag to deploy if you brake hard enough? No. In spite of urban legends and speculations tossed around by younger drivers, emergency braking in itself won’t set off the airbags. Brakes just don’t generate the sharp, short force needed to set them off – even emergency braking is more gradual than that. The airbags also won’t deploy if you are rear-ended (you’re being shoved forwards, not brought to a sudden stop) or if you use the bull bars on the front of a 4×4 as a DIY bulldozer (unless you try to get a running start into whatever you’re trying to push). They will probably deploy if an enraged bull or ram takes a dislike to your car and charges it head-on, although I doubt this has been tested. The popular amusing video of an elderly pedestrian setting off the airbag on the car belonging to an impatient driver is probably a fake, meaning it’s been carefully staged with a vehicle that has had the sensor system adjusted, then hit in exactly the right place. But it’s still funny.
Airbags are not without hazards of their own. Yes, they have saved thousands of lives. However, anything that is moving at over 300 km/h is going to pack a lot of punch, even if it is only air and cloth. Anyone who’s been on the receiving end of a well-flicked tea towel while drying dishes with siblings knows that “just” cloth can draw blood if it goes fast enough. Not that an airbag will draw blood. It can break your glasses as your head flies forward to meet it and it’s still going to hurt. It will hurt even more and probably will draw blood and worse if you have anything on your lap that gets between you and the airbag – another reason not to try hiding your cellphone on your lap!
The force involved in a deploying airbag is too much for small children, which is why it’s best to put little kids of an age to sit in a booster seat in the back. However, we know that sometimes, you just have to put a small person in the front (although this isn’t likely to happen unless you have three other littlies already in the back). This is why some vehicles have occupant seat detection for the front passenger seat that has a weight sensor, so the airbag won’t go off if whatever’s in that seat is below a certain weight.
Airbags should never, ever, ever be used as a substitute for a seatbelt. It’s a case of “both–and” rather than “either–or” and why would you want to skimp on your personal safety anyway? It’s not as if an undeployed airbag is going to get in your way, limit your fun or restrict your freedom of movement or ability to drive well. Don’t be a silly muggins – wear your seatbelt!
Tech Talk: How Power Torques.
When car makers advertise their products, apart from price you’ll probably notice or hear xxx kilowatts. Great. Wonderful. Fantastic.
Huh?
A kilowatt is, unsurprisingly, one thousand watts. You’re probably familiar with the term via your home theatre system or perhaps in kilowatt-hours for your power bill. But what does it mean in car talk, and, how does it relate to the more important yet ignored part of an engine output, torque?
Kilowatts and torque are produced by an engine spinning, be it electrical, petrol, or diesel powered. Kilowatts or horsepower are a measure of power, as defined here: It is the amount of energy consumed per unit time. Having no direction, it is a scalar quantity. In the SI system, the unit of power is the joule per second (J/s), known as the watt in honour of James Watt, the eighteenth-century developer of the steam engine.
A petrol and diesel engine work by ingesting fuel into cylinders and either igniting (petrol) or compressing (diesel) those fuels in the cylinders. Those explosions rotate a crankshaft which spins at so many times per second. By their very nature, petrol engines will spin to a higher rpm (revolutions per minute) than diesel, and it’s a high revolutions that petrol powered engines make their peak amount of kilowatts. Motorbike engines, in particular, make their power at well over ten thousand rpm, but are limited, in a sense, as to the outright capacity of the cylinders.
As a rule, bigger capacity engines are able to make more power however some aren’t physically able to rev as high as some smaller capacity engines. A great example is a car from Honda in the early part of the 21st century. The S2000 was initially powered by a two litre capacity engine, which was extended to a two point two litre size. Its peak power in Japan was quoted as 184 kilowatts. However, in order to produce that amount it had ro rev to 8300 rpm. Holden’s Chevrolet sourced V8, with a capacity in excess of six litres, produces 304 kilowatts, at between 5500 and 6000 rpm, somewhat less that the peak rpm of the smaller engine.
Torque is the forgotten part of the equation and is actually the part of driving that’s initially and constantly more important. To go back to the initial part of this, about how makers quote a kilowatt figure, it’s simple marketing to have those numbers in your headspace, but it’s torque that gets your car going and, especially in towing, becomes vital. Here’s the balance: torque is always produced at a lower rpm than power and it’s here that its useability is what you’ll notice.
It’s been said that torque is what gets you going and power is what keeps you going. In acceleration tests as seen in a certain British car oriented TV program, it’s the torque that will launch the cars off the line, but it’s the power (leaving out the weight of cars and the gears in their gearboxes) that garners the attention as they cross the finish line.
One of the characteristics of diesel engines is where, in their rev range, the peak torque is made. Because the crank is spun by the reaction of fuel being compressed to explosion, there’s torque being produced far lower in the rev range than petrol. Torque is also a measure of force, a twisting force Think of loosening a stuck screw; by twisting the screwdriver you’re exerting force or torque to (hopefully) start twisting the screw, before power takes over to finish the job. 
Torque’s also visible in a physical form. We’ll presume you’ve seen a car do a “burnout”, where the tyres are spun to a point that they produce smoke. It’s torque that will eventually break the traction of the tyres.
Power is also a gradual climb before fading off, but torque can be found within a rev range as a constant number between two points on a rev range. Measured in either foot-pounds or Newton-metres, a flat torque delivery will make the sheer driveability of a car easier and safer. This graph shows one example of a “table top flat” toque delivery.
So when shopping for your next car, consider HOW the car will be used. Will you be towing, will it be a tradie’s ute, are you driving around town more than driving on freeways, are you driving the under 8’s netball team around? Although a peak power of 200 kilowatts might sound attractive, consider that in order to have that figure you’ll need to have your engine constantly at 6000 rpm…everywhere you go. Torque is what will get you going and is a real world more usable figure. Check out the information available on company websites for the car you’re looking at.
(Burnout figure thanks to Street Machine, info sourced from online sources).
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