KY drives

Spotted this BMW 3 series E36 for quite some time now, laying bare at the Crimsom Apartment car park since at least a couple months back. It looks like an abandoned car, even the engine bay unlocked.

rear lights and all the wheels are gone

The car is just resting on top of some bricks, all the wheels are removed. Side skirts and front bumpers are damaged as well. A peek at the engine reveals that it’s a 6 cylinder model, meaning most likely a 320, 325, or 328. The more popular 318 came with a four cylinder motor.

E36 resting on some bricks

It is pretty weird to see a car like this just abandoned right at the parking lot. I wonder if it belongs to the owner who stays at this apartment complex, or the car was just being disposed conviniently here?

engine bay, not in any good condition

Before the days of the Proton Waja limousine and the Proton Perdana limousine conversion service by the likes of Automotive Conversion Engineering, there were the Proton Saga limousine edition. Originally aimed for high ranking government servants and perhaps to encourage politicians to use local cars, this particular Proton never really took off, due to the obvious lack in aesthetics.

Black Proton Saga Limousine with rear wheel caps.

This particular car is pretty rare, so far I have only spotted them less than half a dozen times on the road. I wonder what kind of reception the owners get when showing up at the front door with such a perculiar car?

Silver Proton Saga Limousine

Finally an automaker decided to make a basic and yet very welcoming improvement to the one component presents in all cars, the fuel cap. Starting with the 2008 Ford GT and Lincoln MKS (the Lincoln brand is owned by Ford Motors)

Basically a flap is used to prevent gasoline fumes from escaping, working much like a valve that opens from the pressure of the gas nozzle when pumping gas. The design came from Ford’s experience in the NASCAR racing series.

I myself has lost a couple gas caps before, it’s an annoying experience. Though a very small improvement, these are some of the more thoughtful innovations that benefits the consumer while not incurring high cost nor adding unecessary complexity to the vehicle. However, this will not prevent anyone from doing this.

In a world that is getting increasingly small, engineers came up with high tech solutions to the old problem that is the lack of parking space. By using automated mechanically controlled pallet instead of the traditional ramps to achieve ultimate space efficiency, storing cars like how vending machines do with canned drinks. The robotic car park not only saves space, it provides extra security too, as grand theft auto is that much harder when you can’t just break into a car and drive it away, you will have to bypass the added security measure to retrieve the car from the vault first.

This is all pretty hip and cool, until the garage owner has a licensing dispute with the software maker and got the automated garage stop working, with your car stuck in the mechanical wonder. This is what happened the Garden Street Garage at the city of Hoboken in New Jersey, USA. The city council that operates the garage had police escort Robotic Parking employees from the building just a few days before the software license expire.

The city is now sueing Robotic Parking for setting “booby trap” in the software code that causes the robotic garage to stop working, no one knows how long that will take before those cars can get out. I will be very pissed if I am one of the unsuspecting owners.

More on wired.

In a recent test done by the leading insurance company NRMA in Australia, Proton Savvy scored the highest in reversing visibility in the small car category. This is certainly a good news for the national car maker than often gets poor reviews especially at foreign markets.

The Savvy scored a very good four out of five stars in NRMA’s index, only 6 other cars scored higher, and they are all cars that cost more than twice of Savvy’s asking price. This is out of the total of 270 cars tested. The test procedure is designed to indicate how easy the driver is to spot an object of a child’s height through the rear windows.

Savvy scored well in this test due to its large rear window and the presence of electronic rear sensors. I suppose going with Savvy isn’t a bad choice if you have little kids running aroun the drive way.

It is also interesting to note that the Mitsubishi 380, rumoured to be the Proton Perdana replacement in near future, is among one of the six cars that scored zero star in the same test.