So, you think you know a thing or two about cars? Well, OSV might have news for you! As a bit of summer fun, the UK’s leading independent vehicle professionals, have pulled together some fun facts that might get your mental motor running. For instance, while there are more cars than people in LA, most cars around the globe spend 95% of their lifetime parked up… Which is probably OK, if you don’t live in Central London, which boasts the most expensive car parks in the world.
Interestingly, the average age of the cars filling Britain’s parking spaces is 7.7 years, and a quarter of them were made in China. That sounds like an enormous amount of imports for one country, but in 1916, 55% of all cars were model T Fords which is an unbeaten record – and they were famously available in any colour, as long as it was black! Now, the most popular car colour in the world is white.
Today, Ford produces a massive 8-10k cars every day. At the other end of the scale, Ferrari produces around a mere 20-30 cars a day, but with the company estimated to be worth in excess of US$12 billion, the slow rate of production obviously isn’t hitting Ferrari’s bottom line!
Of course, Ferrari is now synonymous with Formula 1, and these cars produce around 3.5G while cornering, which means that they’ve enough aerodynamic downforce to drive upside down in a tunnel… Something which might gain them a ticket or two and put them in the running for the highest speeding fine award, which is currently held by a man in Sweden. He was clocked doing 180mph. Swedish speeding fines are proportionate to the amount someone earns, so this dangerous driver had to fork out 1,000,000 Euros. Arguably his just desserts.
Some contend that the self-drive car will put an end to speeding for good and could reduce accidents by 90% – putting them on par with roundabouts, which have been shown to reduce fatalities from accidents by around 90%.
The self-drive car builds upon the technology originally designed for cruise control – something which was invented by a blind man. Let’s just hope that he didn’t live in New York as he’d never have been able to try it out, as it’s written into the city statute that blind people are not allowed to drive a car there, in light of ‘safety concerns’… We can’t imagine what those concerns might be… Possibly the same ones that make it illegal to drive a car whilst sleeping in Tennessee. They’re all about safety, these Americans.
In the EU, on the other hand, it’s electric vehicles causing concern. The result of this is that all electric or hybrid cars will be required to make an artificial noise to make them safer for pedestrians. And while it might seem to have taken an age for electric cars to have become a reality, what many people don’t know, is that the very first Porsche was electric, back in 1931.
Germany’s other early major name in motoring, Volkswagen, now owns 12 car brands from 7 European countries, including; Volkswagen Passenger Cars, Audi, Seat, Skoda, Bentley, Bugatti, Lamborghini, Ducati, and, yes, Porsche. In fact, one of the few German brands that VW doesn’t own is Mercedes, who Adolf Hitler once wrote a begging letter to, asking for a loan of a car. VW do have one slightly less controversial figure in their history, though – the co-founder of Domino’s Pizza sold his shares to buy a Volkswagen Beetle. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time.