Could you do me a favour...?

I'm keen to know who is reading the blog and if it's hitting the spot. Please could you spare me an extra few seconds and post a quick comment below, just let me know why you're reading it. Tell me if you're a car enthusiast, industry PR, fellow journalist, friend of mine or just an interested member of the public. Thanks.

What should an EV sound like?

I spent a couple of hours last week in the company of Steve Levine. The name might not be familiar but his client list will be – Culture Club, The Beach Boys, Motorhead, etc, etc. From his garden shed studio, record producer Steve is working with tech firm Harman to create sounds for electric vehicles (EVs) so visually impaired pedestrians don’t get run over. Obviously there aren’t many EVs on the road at the moment but the number is set to grow. Harman has done its own research on what drivers want, and the answer is it depends on the type of car. Family drivers want something fairly dull and uninteresting, sports car owners want something a bit more involving. The EU is looking at how this issue should be regulated, but with no legislation in place right now Steve has a blank canvas. It’s purely a research project at the moment so there’s scope for some fairly wacky stuff – think space ships – but serious thought is going into Steve’s work. Take the issue of volume; how loud should an EV be? In urban areas you get ‘noise reflection’ from buildings so arguably it doesn’t need to be as loud as in the country, where hedges just absorb the sound and offer no bounce-back and there may be less pedestrians anyway. Will future EVs be smart enough to know where they are and if people are present then adjust the volume accordingly? Perhaps.

Driven: SsangYong Korando

I mentioned in the last post that I was meeting the new team behind South Korean brand SsangYong. Three years ago it went into administration globally, but has been rescued by Mahindra & Mahindra, a massive Indian conglomerate that builds cheap and cheerful SUVs for its home market. SsangYong gives it something more upmarket for those customers, and allow it to exploit the no-frills SUV sector in Western Europe, particularly for people who need to tow. The problem is the product. Take the all-new Korando (pictured); it looks okay from a distance, but it lacks the refinement of pretty much everything else in the sector. It’s a world away from best-selling Nissan Qashqai, and even rival products from South Korea, the Kia Sportage and Hyundai ix35, are a class apart from the Korando. To be fair to the SsangYong UK top brass, they’re reaslistic about the car’s shortcomings and accept they’re only ever going to be a niche player. The ‘at least 10 per cent cheaper than our rivals’ tag will get customers through the door, but I’m afraid you get what you pay for.

Fog and how not to drive in it

Yesterday was very foggy in East Anglia and the Yarrow family was heading up to Southwold, on the Suffolk coast. It’s back roads and tiny villages all the way, so narrow 60mph speed limit zones broken up by occasional 30mph areas. In the fog, I didn’t want to be doing much than 20mph in any of it. I was pretty content following a Ford Fiesta doing that speed and there was no chance of getting past anyway. But that didn’t stop two young lads in an old VW Golf having a go at a double overtake. Needless to say, they got halfway through the task before bottling out and diving into the gap between me and Fiesta. A friend travelling the same route a few minutes behind had also come across them and had a similar experience. Drivers like that will kill us all. Idiots. More fog today, so a slow trip down to Hatfield, Herts, to meet up with team behind the relaunched SsangYong and drive the all-new Korando (pictured). Key question is why are they bothering. Finding customers might be a challenge.

Beetle misses the boat... again

Saw the Beetle R concept (above) at the Geneva Motor Show in March and liked it. This week it’s made its US debut at the LA Motor Show and I reckon the Yanks will probably love it. Their enthusiasm for the original Beetle was always strong thanks to the Herbie films (a machine Auto Express readers this week voted the seventh greatest movie car of all time). It’s hard to think of the new Beetle, the one launched in 1999, as anything other than a missed opportunity. When the MINI came along two years later, it showed VW what it should have done. The Fiat 500 only compounded the problem. Early next year we get the new Beetle, the one this R version is based on. So will VW be offering a vast array of accessories and personalisation options in the way MINI and Fiat has done? The answer is I don’t know; the VW public website gives you the option to download the accessories brochure, but when you do you get a message saying it’s currently unavailable. What about the brochure for the actual car? No, that’s unavailable too. Seems VW hasn’t learned any lessons about marketing its heritage in the last 10 years.

Honda's hi-tech car sales technique

As well as being an example of hideous spelling, the Motorola Xoom is a tablet PC along the lines of the Apple iPad. Every Honda dealer in the country will soon know this because each is getting a couple of them to help sell the all-new Civic (pictured above). Using what’s known as ‘augmented reality’, customers will be able to use the Xoom’s built-in camera to view a specially prepared showroom car. Doing so will bring up additional information on various aspects of it – design, engines, environmental technology, etc – to the Xoom’s screen. Honda bosses say the benefits are numerous; firstly, it’s a hi-tech and fun way for customers to interact with the car. Secondly, it helps motivate the staff by giving them more to play with than just brochures. But it’s the third reason that I thought was most interesting. Using a Xoom helps standardise the messaging about the car. In short, sales staff can’t be trusted to give all the information – or all the right information – about the new Civic. I would have thought that was a key criteria for the job, and if they can’t get that right they shouldn’t be working in car sales.

Driven: BMW 1-Series

Had the pleasure of visiting Bracknell, Berks for the first time in my life yesterday. Not sure I’ll be hurrying back. Called in on BMW to borrow a new 1-Series for a couple of hours as I couldn’t make the launch event. The 2004 original was nobody’s favourite BMW – mainly because of the styling – but you can’t argue with 100,000 units sold in the UK alone. It was a good car to drive, and the engineers haven’t lost that spirit in the MkII model. It’s also a damn sight prettier, looking far more like a compact estate. The newcomer rides and handles very well, and it’s less crashy over bumps than its predecessor. But what struck me most was the attention to detail on the interior. My 116i Sport had delicated touches of Coral Red trim around the cabin, and they were replicated on the key fob. I’ve never seen that on a new car before. Also, the twin cupholders ahead of the gearstick had removable plastic inserts, which turned them from a dumping ground for the car key and a mobile phone into an appropriately shaped storage area. The car’s one problem is the rear; it’s still not very spacious, despite an extra 30mm in the wheelbase.

The route to the future?

I spent a couple of days with infotainment expert Harman recently. You might know the company better by some of its brand names, such as Harman/Kardon (in Mercedes cars), or Mark Levinson (Lexus). It’s also behind speaker maker JBL. I was with the company to hear about some future technologies that it’s working on, much of which are to do with reinventing the electrical architecture of the car so manufacturers can offer more and better features. But Harman is also developing the software to be used on these next-generation cars, and a great example is what it’s doing with sat-nav. Take a look at the picture above. If you’ve seen the Leonardo DiCaprio sci-fi thriller of last year, Inception, you’ll be quite familiar with this! If you haven’t, you won’t know what I’m talking about! The point is this system is called MultiPerspective, and it folds the map at the horizon through 90 degrees. It allows you to see much more of the route ahead, so you can pre-empt junctions. Pretty clever, huh?

A cracking little Suzuki

Suzuki isn’t a brand I write about very often, perhaps because it’s a minnow compared with some. It has a stable one per cent share of the UK car market, almost entirely made up of retail rather than corporate customers. It has loyal fans, but not much of a reputation for taking risks and offering niche vehicles. A good example is the news that it’s to launch rivals to the Nissan Qashqai and Juke. Hardly a surprise – Suzuki isn’t alone in spotting those vehicles have struck a chord with buyers – but neither model will be arriving for at least another three years. ‘Late to the party’ doesn’t really go far enough! Replacements for the ageing Jimny and Grand Vitara are also on the way, but they don’t and won’t sell in great numbers. Volume for Suzuki comes from the Swift, which is a reliable and affordable supermini. However, with the launch of the Swift Sport in January – a car I’ve driven this week – the range has been given a real lift. It’s a cracking little hot hatch and while 136bhp doesn’t sound like much, the car only weighs just over 1,000kg. It’s not the fastest, but it’s certainly one of the most fun. And at £14,000 it’s a lot of car for the money. I loved it!