Category: Technoblog
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UK manufacturing
I’m tired of people telling me my industry doesn’t exist. I’m tired of wingers telling me we don’t make anything here any more. Well, things may not be as good as we want them to be, but there’s a lot of good people in industry working hard to make sure we carry on designing, developing…
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Winter Driving
Every winter UK roads seem to descend into chaos for a few weeks. But it really doesn’t have to be like this. There are two factors vital to safe driving on snowy or iced roads, the correct winter tyres and adequate driver skill. It is a sad reflection of our attitude to driving that for…
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Heritage and Engineering
Heritage and Engineering are two words that don’t often hang around in each others company. But maybe they should.
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Project Swarm: Top Gear’s Mitsubishi L200 Desert Warrior
There wasn’t so much an actual ‘Design Brief’, more a sort of chat about really cool things to have on a car, and which were the best-looking desert race cars ever…
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Service and Sacrifice
Sacrifice is a strong word. A very strong word. It could mean giving up one’s life for someone you love, or a country you love. It can be used in many ways, but all of them are powerful. Service is a gentler word. In my world service could mean the things you do to keep…
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2040: Game Over?
There is a lot of comment about the UK government announcement that by 2040 they will ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars. Most of the comment seems to be ill informed, made by people with little or no understanding of the motor industry or technology. The government 2040 announcement is typical politics,…
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AI: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
As a teenager in the 80s I wrote an essay on how robots would end up being the next stage in human evolution. I had grown up reading great novels by people like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clark, my family were all engineers and I was studying science and technology at college. The future…
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Autonomous Zombies
Here is an interesting observation: most drivers don’t want to be there. Unlike enthusiasts, such as myself, who really get a deep enjoyment and fulfilment from driving, in the mass market most car owners don’t actually like driving at all, it’s just become a necessity of modern life. That’s why so many of them don’t…
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Engineers and Designers
You may be surprised to hear that there is not always perfect harmony between so called ‘designers’ and the engineers that actually make a car reality. In fact even the word ‘designer’ is contentious, for what actually is a design? Is it a general sketch of the outside of the car or is it the…
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The Ultimate Car
So, what is the ‘Ultimate’ car? Well, surprisingly it’s fairly easy to define, on paper at least, because technology is driven by desire.