Posts Tagged ‘blog’
Donating your Car
September 30th, 2010 | 
Author: A few weeks ago, I wrote about a website that I found where people can post their wishes in the hopes that someone who gets to read it will generously fulfill their wish (Tree of Wishes). Following that line of thought, this time I want to blog about a site where you can donate car to charity: The Vietnam Veterans Car Donation Program website, managed by the Illinois State Council.
If you live in the USA, you know that having a car is a necessity for most people. And, if you have an old car that you are thinking of disposing or selling, you might want to consider donating it to charity to benefit the United States Veterans. It’s a very worthy cause. I know I would donate my car if I was in the US and had an old car. Instead of just throwing it away, I hope you’d consider joining others who made their own car donations already. They also accept trucks, boats, motorcycles, vans, trailers or even RVs. They accept even non-running or wrecked cars. You can find more information on their website and the form you need to fill up right there.
If you have the means to do so, join the car donations in illinois initiative. You will be doing a good deed for the veterans who have fought and sacrificed their lives for the country. Yes, just by donating a car. So how does this one work? The VietnamVeteransCarDonation.com is accepting your car donation from kindhearted individuals who have a spare car at home. The cars will be sold by the organization and the proceeds will be used to fund the needs of the veterans. We all know there are some veterans living in not so good conditions. They are the ones who need our help.
Are you interested in helping? Go to the site now. At the homepage, you will find out the initiative’s goals and how to donate your car. Just fill out the online form, schedule a pick up date, and then get the receipt that you can use in order to get a tax deduction. It’s that easy! The pick up date can be any time that is convenient for you. There’s a free towing service available to pick up your car, so you don’t have to worry about that either. Helping the vets is really simple, and it can mean a big help to them.
Posted in 
Tags: 
Ferrari, the greenest car maker on earth?
Aston Martin sources engine, body and electrical parts from outside the main plant at Gaydon, as does Jaguar. Even Morgan, that most bespoke of car companies, sources one or two components externally, including quite a few trees.
Ferrari 599XX video, pictures and first drive review
At Ferrari, though, everything except the cows that provide the leather is now made at Maranello. Since November, in fact, they’ve even been generating their own electricity in order to power the Scuderia’s various tooling facilities – to the extent that in January Ferrari sold power back to Italy’s National Grid.
As a result, Ferrari now claims that its plant at Maranello produces between 25-30 per cent less CO2 than it did before its new “Trigeneration” system fired up in November – in which mechanical power, heat and cooling are produced by just one source. And that’s real world emissions, by the way, not ones that appear in EU approved documents, and which mean not a great deal in the overall scheme.
Imagine how much less angst would be displayed towards the car industry in general if all cars were created in the same way, with the same efficiency? The green meanies would hardly have a leg to stand on, and us car enthusiasts could carry on enjoying our cars (virtually) guilt free. Even ones like the utterly barking 599XX, on whose launch I discovered all of the above.
Why the VW Amarok has its work cut out
Apart from a wealth of beautiful old Mercedes lorries, there seems to be a particular fondness for large, delapidated Ford and Chevy pick-ups.
You'd think this would be an easy market to tap, but in one not so obvious way VW has really got its work cut out – and that's load capacity.
This old truck pictured above had four people sat on the front seat and, unusually, four head rests.
That means that one of the much rarer double cabs is potentially an eight-seater.
It's hard to see how you'd manage that in an Amarok.
Chevrolet’s (lack of) Spark
A simple car. Straightforward to assess, you'd think. It's nearly all about objectivity at this level. .
Even so, very few cars in my memory have given us such cause for debate about our verdict on them.
What's unusual for Autocar, and unique in my time on the mag, is that the Spark is a new, fresh-from-the-box product to which we've given a lowly two-star rating.
I believe it's the right verdict. During the past year we've tried to make more of our star ratings – to stop being afraid to open up low scores to poorer cars.
Usually, though, it's older cars that fail to paint in the higher stars. So I'm sad the Spark is among them.
A hell of a lot of hard work went into this car. It rides and handles competently. It's roomy enough. The people who engineered and built it did so in the best faith; they made the wisest, most prudent decisions they could; and I have too little knowledge about the constraints their time and budget placed on them.
Hence our consternation. Maybe it's worth an extra half star, we pondered?
Thing is, though, Autocar (as all motoring mags should) reports to its readers, not the industry, and the Spark is a car we could never imagine recommending to somebody.
An examination of the trim, a look at the price list or a listen to the engine is telling. To experience the Hyundai i10 is to seal any doubt: the Spark is off the pace.
But I'm sad that I'm content that we've reached the right verdict.
What comes up must go down
I’ve often noticed that I’m able to record noticeably better fuel consumption on the way to work in the morning compared with the evening drive home. To be honest, I’d not given it that much thought. The morning traffic tends to flow more smoothly than that in the evening, so I suppose I’d absently mindedly put it down to that.
However, I recently spent the weekend with Peugeot’s 5008. It featured, among many other things, a readout giving the car’s current altitude above sea level on the LED display. I’m sure this is something that appears on many other cars’ sat-nav/infotainment screens, but for some reason it really caught my eye in the Peugeot.
And so it was one morning that I noticed my house sits at an altitude of 522 feet above sea level (or 159 metres if you’re in France), nestled as it is on a rocky outcrop in the Chilterns. And 36 miles later I again noticed that Autocar’s riverside offices are just 59 feet (18 metres) above sea level.
No wonder fuel consumption is better on my journey to work compared with my journey home; on the return trip not only does the car’s engine have to propel it 36 miles along the horizontal, it also has to winch its one and a half ton mass (or thereabouts) 463 feet up in the air.
Perhaps there’s something in the notion of the ‘two-way average’ after all.
