Survey Summary
Car Driving in Australia
Private Fleet has just completed the most comprehensive survey of its kind ever done in Australia giving a fascinating and sometimes shocking insight into the habits of drivers across the country.
2,500 Australian drivers were surveyed and their responses shed some light on many age old driving questions.
Time Is Running Out
The special temporary fifty percent tax break announced in the Government’s Economic Stimulus Package in the May Budget runs out on 31st December 2009.
So if you want to take advantage of this you will need to act quickly!
The Biggest Failures
What have been the biggest failures in Australia’s motoring history? We’ve listed our top five, see if you agree….
The Leyland P76
Designed by Michelotti in Italy and launched by impoverished Leyland into the large car market in 1973 against entrenched competition from Holden, Ford and Chrysler, it withered and died within a couple of years after less than 18,000 cars were produced.
Fuel Saving Tips
1. Buy On The Right Day Of The Week
It’s obvious – buy your fuel when it’s at its cheapest. This will save you up to 12 cents a litre. But be careful! The unwary motorist is already being caught out as the fuel companies are changing their cheapest days.
The ‘cheap days’ do vary from state to state, but in the Eastern States, for example, the cheap day was Tuesday, then Wednesday and now it’s Thursday morning.
Oils Ain’t Oils
We can probably all recall the Castrol advertising campaign “Oils Ain’t Oils” with Sol and his gangster friends – designed to introduce the motorist to ‘man made’ synthetic oils.
But what’s the difference, what’s the best and what should YOU use?
Referred to Private Fleet?
If you are reading this page, it’s likely that you have been referred by someone in your circle of friends and family who thought that knowing about our unique, award winning service may be of interest to you at some stage in the future!
Private Fleet is Australia’s leading car buying service. Every month we help more than 400 individuals with their new car purchases, using our buying power to save some serious money. In brief we can help with:
School Zone Fiasco
Drivers face unworkable arterial road restrictions, while broader pedestrian safety issues remain ignored
It is 8:54am and I am standing in the middle of a school zone on one of Sydney’s busiest arterial zones holding a Bushnell digital radar gun and hoping like hell I don’t end up getting my head punched in as a result of this little ‘test’. I am trying to look as unlike a police officer as possible, which for me is not difficult.
The radar gun is accurate to plus or minus 1.6km/h according to the manufacturer’s specifications. School is due to begin within six minutes, and hundreds of harried drivers rushing to work are ignoring the 40km/h limit. This is not an exaggeration.
I start measuring speeding, a process I have allocated 10 minutes to – the critical 10 minutes closest to school kick-off. With the aid of the radar gun I record ‘only’ 50 speeders in the space of the next 10 minutes – one every 12 seconds on average – though in reality the actual number of speeding drivers is way beyond the capacity of one operator to measure, at least by a factor of five.
Almost half the traffic is doing it. Cars, semi-trailers, B-doubles, concrete trucks, light commercials and 4WDs. There is no predominant class.
I have decided to record speeding only beyond a self-prescribed 48km/h threshold. Everyone I can ‘ping’ from 20 per cent over the 40km/h limit upwards, basically. There’s no need to distort the results with the minor stuff.
The highest speed offender? Eighty-three kilometres per hour – double the limit, plus a bit. And 13km/h over the road’s 70km/h limit outside school zone times. Average speed of all 50 speedsters? Fifty-seven kilometres per hour.
Later that day, it’s 2:50pm and school will be out in 10 minutes. Another arterial road, another 10-minute window. Result? Forty speeding drivers detected, 75km/h the highest speed, 58km/h the average. Dozens upon dozens more speeding drivers pass unrecorded because I am again unable to keep up measuring and writing the results. The volume of speeding simply exceeds my capacity to measure it.
This would be enough to generate outrage in some camps … but should it?
4WDs – The Killers in our Midst?
Do the anti-4WD claims really stack up?
In this report, we look behind the histrionics and investigate whether 4WDs deserve the pasting they get in the popular press. One in five new vehicle purchases is a 4WD, so plenty of people like them. And those who don’t get their say, via the media. Who’s right?
A Bit on the Side
Buying a new car? Always tick the box for side airbags or curtain airbags. Here’s why
People involved in side impact collisions are three times more likely to suffer traumatic brain injury than people in head-on crashes.
Side impacts are far more likely to cause irreversible brain damage, even though side impact speed is often lower. “Half of all fatal accidents occur at an impact speed of less than 55km/h,” Australian road safety expert Michael Paine told the World Health Organisation in Sydney recently. Here’s why:
In a frontal crash there is inevitably at least 1.5 metres of metal structure that can be tuned to absorb the impact by deforming in a controlled way. Think of it as the crash mitigation equivalent of a stack of mattresses strapped in front of you. Additionally, a big, fat airbag can be fitted between you and the windscreen. These technologies act in concert to slow your head’s deceleration, and hence the loads experienced by your brain, during a crash. The crash performance requirements mandated by Australian Design Rule 69 mean there’s really no option for manufacturers other than to fit front airbags, at least for the driver.
At the side, however, there is likely to be a space of only 20cm or so comprising mostly air and a thin pane of very hard glass. Its capacity to absorb impact is negligible, which explains why side impacts at very mundane speeds like 50km/h are often fatal. When the car hits a tree or power pole, for example, it intrudes inside the cabin, too, offering almost no ‘give’.
Extreme loads on impact don’t allow much scope for quality of life afterwards (if there’s an ‘afterwards’) and the typical customer tends to be a young male. Trauma nursing specialist Julie Evans says she has lost count of the number of young brain-injured victims who she’s seen saved in the John Hunter hospital, where she works as a trauma co-ordinator, who subsequently wait there until a bed becomes available in a nursing home, on which they will spend the rest of their lives. “Unfortunately, brains often don’t get much better,” she says.
Side airbags and so-called ‘curtain’ airbags, which cover the full length of the side glass to protect even rear passengers’ heads, deploy about eight milliseconds after the collision. At around 15 or 20 milliseconds they are fully inflated, offering critical padding at just the right time to reduce the loads on victims’ heads.
The average age of Australian cars is around 10 years. There are no regulations mandating the fitting of side airbags to new cars. That means it will probably take well over 15 years before most Australian vehicle occupants benefit from this fairly elite and potentially brain-saving technology.
A Load of Scrap
Crushing hoons’ cars not enough: now Her Majesty’s pleasure is just two burnouts away…
NSW Premier Morris Iemma and Police Minister David Campbell sure can sniff a good PR opportunity. Rather than do something effective, such as remove roadside obstacles (collisions with which cause one-third of road death, the same as speeding, allegedly) or crack-down on unlicensed drivers (one in 10 among us, according to official estimates) they announced last week penalties for burnouts will treble under tough new (PR-driven) laws, and license disqualification will increase to 12 months maximum.
The announcement comes hot on the heels of a new policy to crush hoons’ cars in crash experiments in the RTA’s Crashlab facility, and possibly post the video footage on YouTube (though the Government is “still working on the details”).
Iemma and Campbell, who obviously fail to grasp road safety’s fundamentals, are on a roll. Obviously they retain great press secretaries, who have convinced the media there is a clear link between burnouts and street racing, although there’s no evidence burnouts are associated with much road trauma at all. Most burnouts occur when stopped or at walking pace. Street racing, though hard to prove in court, is clearly far more dangerous as it involves excessive speed and (often) a failure to observe ‘give way’ requirements at intersections – sometimes with tragic consequences.
This is not an apology for those who choose a public street of car park to perform burnouts. Burnouts are anti-social. But surely adequate enforcement provisions were in place already, such as negligent driving, or ‘manner dangerous’ charges. Why tar and feather a ‘burnouter’ when all an unlicensed driver gets is a slap on the wrist?
Surely, the punishment should fit the crime. Gaol sentences are rarely handed down to recidivist unlicensed drivers, drivers of unregistered vehicles, or those who flee police pursuit – unless somebody is killed or injured in the process. You have to ask yourself if a burnout is worse than these acts.
Level 2, 9 Help Street