Blogs

So far Oziexplorer has been ported to Android, and it works very well there.  However, there's many Apple devotees who are also offroaders, so what options do they have for an in-car moving map?  Here's a quick look at a few:

Bit Map

An application designed to for raster maps used offline.  It will load Oziexplorer .ozfx* files.  At the time of this blog post Bit Map looks like the best option if you've got a lot of Ozi maps.   I have not yet used this app.

Congratulations to Subaru for achieving the milestone of forty years of true all-wheel-drive!

Nissan have had bragging rights in the increasingly pointless "Torquiest Engine" ute war with their 550Nm Navara, but it's only ever been available in the top-spec model for which they wanted a rather tasy $65,000.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what's a moving picture worth?  Here's a collection of short clips showing how not to drive a 4WD, how not to recover, how not to do pretty much anything.  This collection isn't about getting stuck, we all do that.  It's not about a simple error of judgment, because we all do that too.  Instead, it's about pure, deep, wrongness, usually sustained over a period of some minutes.  In some cases it's ignorance, in other cases you have to wonder what was going through their brains.

Hummer on the rocks

Colour, colour, colour.  From a purely practical perspectice white is all right, because it is the coolest, in the literal sense of the word - white reflects heat.  White also doesn't show scratches as easily as darker colours, it goes with pretty much every accessory colour and resale won't be affected.  White also doesn't show the

Yes, it’s another concept car. But this time, I do like it.

Jeep's new Compass is out and about.  The old model was never a hot seller because it was very small and I suppose people don't look to Jeep for this sort of vehicle.

From South Africa comes a remarkable set of images from Koos Best, which I am reproducing here with his kind permission.

What you can see is a Land Rover Discovery 3, one of the G4 Challenge spec vehicles.  It's recognisable as a Discovery 3 even if the G4 colour wasn't a giveaway.

Nissan's Pathfinder has never really found a path to the hearts of Australian buyers, lagging well behind the Pajero and Prado.  The nameplate has been on a number of vehicles, and most recently it has adorned a 7-seater wagon from about 2006 till now.  I've tested a few of them and they've been fine, but the stiff competition from Toyota, Mitsubis

New car press releases aren't so much press releases as cliche-ridden sentences joined together like pieces of confetti.  In case anyone needs translation, here's some must-use words:

You don’t spend very long reviewing cars before you come up against some design decisions that seem odd, if not downright stupid. Why, why, why did they do that when it’s just so wrong and there’s such an obviously better way?

Here are a couple of images of the new Ford EcoSport.  The nameplate has been in use around South America for some time, but Ford have just launched a new EcoSport at the Delhi motorshow.  Yes, it is another puesdo-offroader lacking low range.  But it does have the spare on the door which is an extremely odd decision by Ford given the target market.  That means the spare will need to be full-size, and therefore the EcoSport is automatically a more worthy vehicle than many of its competitors.  Which is why I'm posting about it here. 

It's fine to do either a 4 or 5 tyre rotation. Just DO rotate the tyres around once every 10,000km.

I do a 4-tyre rotation so the spare always has as much tread as possible - that way if I come to use it then it's got the least chance of a puncture.  However, that leaves you with 4 worn tyres and one good one, which in theory could carry over to the next set, but tyres do age and eventually become useless over time even without having rolled a single metre.  This is a particular problem with caravans which do low mileage.