CAR ADVICE

Want to drive totally off-grid? Here’s your guide to charging your electric car with the sun Using the sun to charge your electric car is the ultimate way to close the loop on clean footprint motoring. But while the charging may be ‘free’ in many ways, you need quite a bit of infrastructure and equipment to ultimately bid farewell to ‘the grid’. The upside here is that your car isn’t the only appliance that will benefit. Here’s what you need to know… Solar Energy basics The basic principles of a home-solar system see your solar panels collecting energy during the day and pushing it through an inverter (solar systems are DC – direct current – where your home uses AC – alternating current) through the house and back into the electricity grid. For every kilowatt (kW) collected and fed into the grid each hour, you are ‘paid’ a rebate by the electricity company. This rebate is subtracted from your total electricity use which will reduce your bill. Example: Installing a...

Five-star safety scores for some of Australia’s most popular new cars expire today, but the vehicles are not banned from sale. Some of Australia’s top-selling new cars will be stripped of their five-star safety ratings from today – ruling them out for fleets which mandate top marks – however the vehicles will remain on sale. The five-star safety ratings for popular models such as the Nissan Navara , Mitsubishi Triton , Toyota Prado and Mitsubishi Pajero Sport , Mitsubishi ASX , Mazda 2 , Mazda CX-3 , Suzuki Vitara , Volkswagen Passat – and others – expire from 1 January 2023. Five-star ratings were created three decades ago to give consumers more detailed information about the varying levels of safety of new cars in showrooms. Crash tests have consistently shown you cannot determine the true level of safety of a new car based on the number of airbags alone; rather it is how the airbags, the body structure, and other safety systems perform during a crash that can ...

The German car giant says it is open to the idea of expanding its Ford Ranger-Volkswagen Amarok joint venture with a version of the Ford Everest – but it could have a surprise under the bonnet. Volkswagen is reportedly considering a four-wheel drive wagon twin of the Ford Everest – expanding the recent joint venture with the Ford Ranger and VW Amarok utes – however it depends on what type of engine is under the bonnet. Petr Sulc and Waldemar Bauf, global product managers for Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, told Drive at the preview of the new Volkswagen Amarok in South Africa, their preference for a Ford Everest-based model would be electric rather than diesel. “I think in the next 12 months, we will have more of a decision about this topic.” Mr Bauf told Drive . “If you ask me, if I bring (an electric Amarok), then I will bring both (Amarok ute and wagon),” Mr Sulc added.  If an electric Volkswagen Amarok ute (and Ford Ranger) gets the green light in the futu...

What will the new year bring? The Drive Team stare into the magic cauldron to predict what lies along ahead for the next 365 days! Will this be the year of the properly affordable EV? The year more ‘new’ brands break through? Or just a year when your long-awaited car arrives? There are plenty of changes happening across the automotive landscape, but will any of this driving future become driving fact? The Drive Team share their thoughts… James Ward It’s going to be a big year, and avoiding ‘company talk’ of even more TV, more improvements to the site, and of course, a lot more brilliant content production (big and small), I think we’ll see a few big changes in our local market. The normalisation of electrification will see more hybrid systems (mild and closed loop) filter across popular vehicle segments, and we’ll see even more full electric options hit the showrooms for consumers. Buyers will better understand the benefits and challenges of an electric choice, and we’l...

What a crazy year we’ve just had. The Drive Team reflect on what we saw, and could quite happily never see again… That 2022 sure was a time! Straight out of lockdowns into one of the busiest and outright craziest years we’ve seen in… years! While there were a lot of good things to come out of 2022, there were a few things that we’d be happy to never see again… James Ward The stupidest flash in the pan we’ve seen for a long time, Automotive NFTs seem to have fallen from their favoured position into near obscurity already. And that’s a good thing. The fact that the initial concept of paying real-pretend money for a pretend-real car soon moved to a bundled ‘ buy the NFT, get the car for free ‘ pitch, basically meant the auto NFT’s days were numbered right out of the gate. Even trying to explain what a token was and even what ‘fungible’ meant pushed these into a hyper-niche category of buyers who were riding the crypto train into the dark unknown. The fact that a rather cool ...

DeLorean’s new owners claim they are owed five per cent of the revenue generated by toy and clothing sales from the Back to the Future franchise – nearly 40 years after the film’s release. The DeLorean which played a starring role in the Back to the Future film franchise is at the centre of a legal battle in the US, with the defunct car-maker’s new owners alleging it has not been paid the royalties it is owed.  The Los Angeles Times reports the current owner of the DeLorean Motor Company trademark has filed a lawsuit against NBCUniversal – the parent company of Universal Pictures, which owns the rights to Back to the Future . DeLorean claims it has a right to five per cent of the revenue generated by merchandising and commercial agreements related to Back to the Future – such as toys, posters, lunchboxes and clothing – due to a 1989 agreement between the car-maker’s original founder, John DeLorean, and Universal Studios. According to the LA Times, NBCUniversal has...

There’s something about cars and watches that goes hand-in-hand – here are some of the most interesting and iconic partnerships over the years. Cars and watches have always enjoyed a close relationship, with wristwatches gaining popularity at roughly the same time as motor vehicles, in the early 20th century. These days, the relationship between the two industries is big business, allowing companies to reach more buyers thanks to cross-branded collaborations. While this list could have easily been three times longer than it is, here is our Top 10 collaborations between car-makers and watch-makers – including some of the most quirky and interesting, as well as the most iconic. 10. Swatch and Smart Car As fans of the brand may know, the Smart car of the late 1990s was a collaboration between quirky watch brand Swatch and German automaker Mercedes-Benz – a venture that reportedly lost $US4.6 billion before the project ended. The Smart car brand was recently revitalise...