#BrownCarGuy – News, Views & Reviews!
Do I have a treat for you! This past weekend, I was at the amazing West London Classics Show & Shine 2024 event, mingling with fellow petrolheads and getting some fantastic vox-pop interviews. If you’re as passionate about cars as I am, you’re going to love this video.
So this weekend, I was at the fantastic West London Classics Show and Shine car event in Southall. Chatting with a few folks there, the topic of the proposed paving tax for London households came up. Their reactions indicated utter confusion and disbelief. Clearly, this news hasn’t reached everyone yet, so I figured I’d do a video about it.
Maybe we should stop targeting the internal combustion engine (ICE) and focus on SUVs instead. SUVs account for 48% of global car sales but emit 20% more CO2 than average cars. The move should be back towards smaller cars with lighter carbon footprints.
In a shocking turn of events, today’s global software outage has wreaked havoc across multiple industries, causing absolute chaos and pandemonium. This incident, triggered by a faulty update from CrowdStrike, has left countless systems inoperable, grounded flights, disrupted banking services, and even affected healthcare operations. But as we grapple with the immediate fallout, a pressing question arises: could such a catastrophe also strike our cars?
It has begun! Barely five days after the new Labour government took power, we’re already seeing the early signs of what many, including myself, have been warning about for years. The dreaded pay-per-mile road user charging system is no longer a distant threat but a looming reality. This development isn’t just a hypothesis from a fictional narrative in my book The ULEZ Files (which predicts PPM implementation in London in the year 2026) but this is a tangible shift happening right now – potentially turning my fiction into our fact!
Imagine you’re cruising down an empty street late at night, only to find your car suddenly cutting power to slow to the posted 20mph limit. Sounds like something out of a dystopian sci-fi, right? Well, brace yourselves because from 7 July 2024, all new cars sold in Europe are now equipped with Intelligent Speed Assist (ISA) technology – that’s a speed limiter to you and me!
A video caught my eye the other day: “Why Everyone is Quitting BIG Automotive YouTube Channels (Donut, Hoonigan, CarThrottle)” from AutoTea Channel. Turns out that fledgling channel (fast-growing though – with just five videos it already has over a million views and nearly 10k subs), belongs to Tiernan, who himself was part of the team that grew Donut Media, and indeed has now left.
Are there still any truly bad cars? That’s the question we tackled in a recent podcast with my former motoring Middle East buddy, who was in town. Catching up with him was an absolute joy, and naturally, we ended up doing a little podcast together. One of the topics we discussed was whether there are any car reviews anymore or if it’s all just fluff and advertorials.
In 35 years of covering the car industry, I’ve never seen such confusion and uncertainty as we’re experiencing now. Traditionally, when sitting down with car company executives, they’d be confident, thinking years ahead with clear plans. That’s no longer the case. Ask them about the future these days and you can see them struggling to resist an urge to shrug and fling their hands in the air in confusion. So what gives?
In a world where technological advancements are rapidly changing the way we view driving, the concept of keeping a low mileage car has become increasingly outdated and wasteful. As a passionate car enthusiast, I believe it’s time we re-evaluate our approach to car usage. Low mileage cars are a mistake. We should be driving our cars more than ever before!
