Electricity and Peugeot make Serious Grunt.
Electric cars are somewhat of a novelty on our roads, and yet they are likely to become more and more common as people become aware of their value. No emissions, for a start. And it’s not very hard to plug in a cord at home or a commercial outlet in order for you to charge up your electric powered mode of transport. But how sporty can you get with an electric motor? And just how feasible is an electric motor for generating serious grunt? I mean there are some of us that may well be addicted to the electric motor’s smellier and noisier cousins. Surely an electric powered motor vehicle couldn’t match a petrol or diesel-donk. Could it? Recently, Peugeot’s latest EX1 gob-smacked the latest Paris motor show. Read on, and you’ll find out why.
Silencing any critic who might suggest an electric motorcar is as slow as a wet week might not be an easy task. However, it could well be made easier when discovering that Peugeot has created a new meaning for ‘plug-in power’ with its EX1 sports car prototype!
Thoughts In a Traffic Jam
It’s a familiar picture. You’re sitting in a traffic jam going along at a crawl during rush hour wanting to get home, and you start thinking “This is crazy – why don’t they make decent roads so we don’t have this problem?”
Well, rest assured that all the experts at Austroads and all the consultants they contract for research are keeping busy dealing with all these problems and are always working to make sure that Australia – and New Zealand – has good roads. Congestion is viewed as a problem not just because it drives the average citizen nuts: all those cars sitting there going nowhere with their engines chugging are putting out a lot of pollution… unless they’re electric cars that are designed to use electricity rather than diesel or petrol in just this situation. Take a look at this pic. Rest assured, this is not in Autsralia, yet! It’s in China.
Extreme weather driving
The colder, darker days are now upon us, with the winter solstice (the shortest day) less than a month away. For those in the hotter bits of our country, this will come as a bit of a relief. However, for those of us who are tucked down in the more temperate parts, winter can bring some motoring challenges.
Whether we do our driving on the open road or around town or a mixture of both, the cops and other experts tell us that we should drive to the conditions and that the speeds and driving styles that suit fine sunny days with no wind aren’t quite what’s appropriate when things are darker, wetter, windier, frostier, etc. The civil engineers and traffic analysts who study crash patterns so they can make roads safer always record whether an accident took place in rainy weather or something other than fine days.
The Decade of Action For Road Safety
May the 11th 2011 saw the launch of a new initiative by the United Nations (UN) in combination with the World Health Organisation (WHO) known as the . This is an international movement to reduce the number of people who are killed on the roads. Let’s face it: we love driving, but it’s one of the riskiest things we’ll do, according to the statistics, and this isn’t just a problem for Australia. The UN wants organisations and governments around the world to work to make roads everywhere safer. The goal of this movement is to save 5 million lives (that’s more than the population of our neighbours across the Tasman, i.e. New Zealand) over this ten-year period.
What are some of the things that the Decade of Action For Road Safety are doing? The broad goals include developing better, safer roads; designing and manufacturing safer cars; what the UN call “enhancing the behaviour of road users”, otherwise known as driver education; and improving post-crash care so people have more chance of surviving a road crash. Road crashes go beyond just car crashes; it also involves bike accidents.
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