Home
Black And White Issues (And A Few Shades Of Grey)
If you take a look through the paint section of any home renovation store, you’re bound to come across those paint charts that leave you bewildered as to how many shades of white (and blue and grey and…) are possible. So in some ways, it’s a bit puzzling as to why cars tend to come in fewer colours. Look at the range of car colours available in any new model. Usually, there’ll be offerings in white, at least one grey and a red of some sort. If you’re lucky, there’ll be a few other shades: blue, green, yellow or even orange.
We tend to be more conservative with car colours when we buy, apparently. According to one source, this is because cars in a more conservative colour can be re-sold more easily. White tradie vans will be snapped up quickly, but the same sort of van – say, a Toyota Hiace – that’s in some odd colour such as metallic purple won’t go as quickly, even though might be mechanically perfect and brilliantly practical. (However, as I’ve said in other posts, this can work the other way if you’re a buyer: you might be able to pick up said purple Hiace for a song because the seller is struggling to get rid of it.)
Other colours also seem to hold their value pretty well. Dark colours like black, deep charcoal grey and very dark blue tend to be popular with luxury vehicles – and don’t forget classic British racing green in Jaguars! Think business suits and little black dresses and you’ll get the idea.
Safety plays a role in car colour choice, too. Lighter colours tend to be easier to spot on the road. This means white, yellow and possibly the lighter shades of silver are pretty good, but the luxury colours (black, dark blue and deep green) tend to be harder to pick. From experience, cars in that medium shade of grey – about the colour of the average HB pencil line or the colour of clouds threatening rain – tend to be very hard to pick during when the light is fading.
It’s possible that technology also plays a role in what looks hot for cars. Some analysts noticed that when silver computer bits and bobs were all the rage, silver cars were also sizzling, as the paint colour made the car look up to the minute. When Apple brought out their tablets and other devices in white, silver took a back seat again and white surged even further ahead. Some have also noted the increase in popularity of peacock blue and lime green, as these colours tend to be used a fair bit for lighting features and accent trims in high-tech gear.
According to Forbes magazine, the most popular colours for cars are:
- White (why are we not surprised?)
- Black
- Silver (that’s a lighter shade of metallic grey rather than completely reflective like real silver – only Justin Bieber is crass enough to have a mirror-finish car)
- Grey – everything from charcoal and pewter through to smoke and cloud
- Red. As every pre-teen boy knows, red cars go faster.
- Blue – peacock and cobalt for fun little hatchbacks, butcher’s blue for trade vans and indigo for luxury numbers.
- Brown and beige. This entry by Forbes magazine surprises me, as I haven’t seen a heap of brown cars about.
- Yellow (which also includes gold)
- Green
There is no #10, as every other colour is so rare it hardly rates, apparently.
This Is Your Brain Behind The Wheel
Have you ever wondered why sometimes, when you’re just driving for a long time, some of your best daydreams seem to just bubble up out of nowhere? Or have you ever wondered why it is that talking on a hand-held phone is so distracting to a driver, even though you’ve got your eyes and the road and can steer perfectly well with one hand.
It’s all down to your brain and the fact that you are, quite literally, in two minds about everything.
OK, here’s a quick guide to the architecture of your brain without getting too technical and requiring you to understand words like “hippocampus” and “hypothalamus”. Your brain looks rather like a walnut, what with the curly knobbly bits and the two halves. It’s the two halves that are important here, as they have different jobs to do.
The left side of your brain is the Mr Spock side of your brain. It handles logic, maths and decision-making, and also contains your language centres and the music centres. The right-hand side is the Michaelangelo side of your brain: artistic, emotional and creative, but also in charge of visual perception and space (hand–eye coordination stuff). You could call them the yin and yang sides if you like. (See the illustration – taken from an ad put out by Mercedes-Benz .)
Usually, when you’re driving, the two halves of the brain can get on pretty well. The left-hand side makes the decision about where you’re going to go and why you need to go there, and keeps track of the road rules. The right-hand side monitors what’s going on around you and tells you to make all those minor adjustments on the brake, accelerator and steering wheel. If you’ve been driving a manual for a long time, the right-hand brain will also handle gear changes; if you’re new to manual gears, the left-hand brain will manage a lot of this until the movements become automatic and the right brain can do them. We call this “doing it without thinking”, which is a bit of an insult to the right brain, which thinks in a different way.
If you are driving along without much outside input – down a familiar road in moderate traffic, for example – the left side of your brain doesn’t have a lot to do and it allows your right brain to dominate. Your right brain is busy with the driving and the left brain will happily let it dominate. While it’s dominating, your right brain can also get creative and all those interesting, quirky daydreams can come bubbling up, with the left brain playing a supporting role.
However, if you’re talking on the phone, the left brain is dominating, what with having to process the words coming in and possibly making decisions at the same time. Unlike the right brain, the left brain is a bit of a bully and a drama queen, and it won’t let the right brain have much of a say if it’s busy.
So there you are, talking on the car phone and your left brain is in full command. Right brain can perceive an upcoming hazard – that slow driver who hits the brakes heaps ahead of you, for example, or a busy intersection. But the left brain, busily engaged in processing words and making decisions, tells the right brain to shut up. It’s not until the right brain starts screaming at the right brain that the left brain drops command and lets the right brain do what it needs to by managing what it can see and the spatial relationships (i.e. what’s around you and how close you are to it or if you’re on a collision course). It all happens within seconds, but that switch from left-dominated to right-dominated does slow your reaction time.
So why doesn’t somebody talking in the car to you distract you like a phone does? Simply because the other person has two sides to their brain and their own right brains telling them about how fast you’re both approaching the intersection or that slow driver ahead of you, and the emotional/relationship nous to back off from the conversation. Someone on a phone doesn’t have that right-brain input at that time, so he/she will keep yakking regardless.
A lot of modern active safety systems attempt to replicate what your right brain does: detecting upcoming problems and taking action.
This is a very simple overview of your amazing brain and the highly complex processes that go on when you’re behind the wheel. Some people are more right-brain than others; some people can switch from left to right quickly. But even this little glimpse should give you an idea of why cell phones, car phones and too many road signs are so distracting.
Airbag Syndrome
Automotive safety has come a long way in the last 15 years or so. Once upon a time, the only safety features in your
typical family car were seatbelts and the brake… and maybe the horn. Back then seat belts were not always found in the rear seats, especially in older cars when I was a child. Today, though, you’ve got the works. In any new car worth its salt, you’ve got head rests to protect against whiplash, antisubmarining features in the seatbelts, three point-seat belts all round, crumple zones, pyrotechnic pretensioned seatbelts, airbags here, airbags there and airbags everywhere, including by the driver’s knee. And that’s just the passive safety features. In the active department, there’s ABS brakes, dynamic stability control (or whatever the stability package is called – the name varies from marque to marque), hill start control, traction control, brake assist and on and on. Really safe modern cars also tackle the human factors side of things, with cars that can sense that you’re getting into a pickle and start getting ready for a crash or apply the brakes automatically, or warn you if it detects you’re getting sleepy (a few of the most recent Mercedes
numbers do this) or senses things coming in from the side or… They’re thinking up new things all the time. And good on the designers for doing so and trying to make cars safer to drive.
But there’s a downside to all this: something I’ll have to call Airbag Syndrome.
Airbag Syndrome is what happens when a driver and/or the passengers neglect a few absolute basics – sometimes defying the law to do so – because their car has got a particular safety feature which they believe will keep them safe. You’ve probably seen the sort of thing I mean:
- Not bothering with seatbelts (so restrictive) because the car has airbags;
- Approaching corners and intersections way too fast because the braking and cornering assistance will take care of things;
- Not bothering to actually look behind you or ensure that the driveway is clear or skateboards, cats, random toys and small children because the car has a reversing camera (some of these things are too low down to be picked up by the camera);
- Spending ages fiddling with all the gadgets on the car or texting etc. with eyes off the road, knowing that warnings will appear and emergency braking can be applied if needed;
- Other things – give us your examples in the comments.
Airbag Syndrome can be defined as a misunderstanding of what safety features, active and passive, are for. They are not supposed to replace the driver’s noggin but to enhance it. Even if we own the safest of safest cars with the highest possible ANCAP ratings, we shouldn’t let this lull us into a false sense of invulnerability. No matter how good a safety system is, we shouldn’t take them for granted or let the car do our thinking for us. After all, as anyone who’s owned a car for any length of time has found out, things do go wrong and malfunction at odd moments.
No way am I knocking safety features in cars. But they should never replace basic common sense or good driving habits.
Big Boys and Their Small Toys.
Growing up in the south eastern outskirts of Perth during the 1970s coincided, for me, with a huge interest in modelling. No, I don’t mean the Karen Pini kind of modelling (Google her but be nice), I mean plastic hobby kit modelling. Ships, space craft, planes, tanks, people, cars, you name it and it was available. My own room was filled with samples from the military, space and cars.
Nowadays the modelling scene, although not underground, is nowhere near as popular as it used to be. You could go to a K-Mart and buy kits, paint, brushes; hobby shops were, metaphorically, on every corner but now they’re a lot further apart. When I say not as popular, I mean that the awareness of it was higher across the population base.
In Sydney and, indeed, around Australia and around the world, the awareness is high but is more focused to be within groups such as the IPMS, the International Plastic Modelling Society, as an example. There’s magazines such as Fine Scale Modeller, from the United States or ModelArt Australia. Within the magazines is a surprising amount of information about the various manufacturers, the products, the tips to improve or help anyone from a novice through to an experienced builder.
Like anything in miniature, car models come in different scales. Those that collect the die-cast versions will immediately be familiar with this. It’s a mathematical ratio setup, one unit of measure 
on the model equals 12 or 18 or 24 or 43 on the real thing.
Detail can vary from maker to maker and from scale to scale. Some modellers go across the board; I tend to lean more towards the military and sci-fi, others have the automotive field as their area of expertise.
To say there’s a variety of models in the scales available is understating it just a tad. Most modellers tend to look at cars in a 1/24 scale. The detail that can be found in such a size is startling; from intricate door handles to engine parts, the manufacturers. Other scales can be 1/18, 1/12 or, going the other way, as small as 1/32 or 1/43. Naturally, that makes the detail harder to see (and harder to mould!) however skilled modellers use a variety of techniques to make their model car look as realistic as possible. Some modellers even take a kit that would normally be built into a “New” car and make it look like a junkyard dog.
Manufacturers of kits range from a reasonable quality from the States, with a brand called Lindberg offering basic construction kits, to AMT, Monogram and a name from the past, Aurora. Of more recent times, a brand called Tamiya, from Japan, has come to the fore, offering high quality, highly detailed kits, including parts that are “photo etched”.
These parts are copper or, more commonly, brass and can provide even finer detail than plastic. Some people will instantly recognise the name Airfix. Once recognised as being the most common brand, Airfix is undergoing a renaissance with its new owner, Hornby (train modellers will know THAT name) retooling their moulds to provide better detailing. Airfix offer all in one kits, complete with parts, glue, brushes and paints. Another brand that’s been around for some time is Revell and they, too, offer a huge range.
Not unsurprisingly, if it’s been built in real life, you’re got a pretty good chance of finding a kit. There’s groups that are worldwide and split into local chapters, the IPMS has a New South Wales based chapter with a thriving social media presence. There’s also groups that are a kind of swap meet, allow members to buy, sell or swap kits of all shapes and sizes, such as The Aussie Model Exchange (look ’em up, along with the others).
From the common to the exotic, to the modified to the concept, modelling provides the ideal opportunity to have a large garage of small cars. What’s more, unlike die cast cars, this is a garage you’ve built yourself, from start to finish, allowing you to put your own personal stamp on your new drive. 
Level 2, 9 Help Street