Jim Kenzie's The Driver's Seat

Let It Snow - again.

Well, yesterday was another day when I bet you all wish you had bought those winter tires last fall.

Cars slip-sliding all over the place, blocking traffic because they can't get up the hills and ravines that pretty much define the GTA's geography.

Even saw some TTC and GO busses having trouble with traction. Usually with their rear-mounted engines they get enough grip to get them going. The temperature wasn't far from freezing, which means the road surfaces were slipperier than ever.

Partly good luck, partly good management, I happen to have a big four-wheel drive SUV on test this week. A seven billion horsepower twin-turbo SUV, but with all the modern traction aids like Electronic Stability Control, and Continental Cross Contact winter tires, not much was going to stop me.

One thing I have noticed this winter is that more people, maybe starting to get the fact that we live in a climate where it has been snowing every year for, oh, I dunno fifteen thousand years, are 'parking' their windshield wipers 'up', rather than leaving them flat against the windshield.

The obvious advantage is that they don't get buried in subsequent snowfalls, and/or don't freeze to the glass if there's freezing rain or other precipitatory nastiness.

Because once they are stuck, it takes a lot of scraping to unstick them.

And that's never fun.

I have tried various spray-on ice-removing concoctions, but have never found one that worked.

I know some people carry a sturdy sheet of plastic to lay over the windshield; pull that off and the ice comes with it.

Good idea, if you're disciplined enough to remember to bring it, and to use it.

I have also on occasion found myself in a press car that did not have an ice scraper/snow brush in it (my fault for not checking first), and have had to use a credit card.

Glad those cards are still good for something.

I Can't See Clearly Now...

Swedish rally superstar Eric Carlsson once told me that the only time he was ever frightened in a car was when he hit a whiteout.

His theory was that if he could see, he could figure a way out of anything, numerous photos of his wrecked steeds notwithstanding! The best one shows him sitting on the underside of his upside-down Saab, awaiting the service crew. Not for nothing was his nickname “On the Roof”.

I couldn't find that particular photo on the Internet, but this one gives you an idea.

But I know where he’s coming from with respect to visibility.

Lose your brakes, you can still try to pick which tree you’re going to hit.

Lose your steering, you can at least brace yourself.

Lose your visibility, and you’re a curling stone.

This is why I rant against rear seat headrests which block your rearward view, against windshield pillars that are too thick to see around, against people who don't clean their windshield and all windows of snow, or who hang religious talismans, CDs, baby shoes, Yosemite Sam deodorizers, anything at all, from the rear-view mirror.

Came across another visibility issue the other day. I was pulling out of a side-street, and couldn’t see what was coming because of a massive Matterhorn of snow which someone – the city; the residents; I don’t know - had left there.

I was in too much of a hurry trying to get to the airport to take a decent photo, but from this one I think you can, you should pardon the expression, get my drift.

Didn’t really matter how far I stuck the nose of my vehicle out – I simply couldn’t see what was or might have been coming from my left.

I could see quite a bit farther down the road behind the snow bank, so I backed up and waited until there were no cars coming in that view, left what I hoped was a sufficient amount of time for that ‘hole’ in the traffic to come to me, and dove out.

I was lucky.

In retrospect, I don’t know what else I could have done. I have been wondering if it might have been better to turn right, then find a safer intersection down the road to turn around.

But if someone were coming, that would have tossed me directly into their path heading in the same direction, and a collision would have been unavoidable.

By making the left, I was risking a tee-bone crash, one of the hardest types for a car to survive.

But I figured I’d only be in that extremely vulnerable position for a very brief amount of time, and that overall, it was my best bet.

All’s well that ends well, but it pointed out a serious winter traffic danger that I had never really considered before.

I mentioned this to some of my Montreal-based colleagues, and they just nodded knowingly. Do they have a solution?

“Nope. Just take your chances,” was the only answer they could offer.

I know our road plowing crews do yeoman work, and the higher-than-usual degree of global warming this winter has made their jobs even more difficult.

I would love to hear from some of them to see if lack of visibility from the snow banks they leave behind is something that’s even on their metaphorical radar screens.

Meanwhile, watch out for this hazard, and try to avoid intersections that simply don't allow you enter them safely.

Fiat and Chrysler?

I never owned a Chrysler product.

But if the proposed alliance between Fiat and Chrysler comes off, retroactively, it might just happen.

Yes friends, that skinny young guy in that photo is me, back when I owned my first car, a Fiat 600.

And the pose - things hanging off the car, hood (rear) and trunk lid (front, like an elephant) open, me with a tool in my hand (OK, a hammer) pretty much sums up my experience with that car.

Fix It Again, Tony.

I could tell the temperature with that car. The starter had exactly seven cranks in it.

RANH - RANH - ranh - ranh - rah - ra - rrr...

If it hadn't started by then, it was below freezing.

It had suicide doors - rear-hinged, for easier access. Worked fine as long as you didn't try to open them when you were moving.

Don't ask.

And all of twenty-two horsepower.

Still, I loved that thing.

If nothing else, it wasn't a Volkswagen Beetle, which was what everyone else I knew drove at that time.

Imagine - me wanting to stand out from the crowd.

It was the first of three Fiats I owned in my early years. They always were entertaining cars to drive, if not especially suited to our climate.

Fiat left the North American market decades ago, and despite a few feints in this direction now and then, has never felt the need to try to return.

They do own Ferrari and Maserati, both of which have strong presences here.

There have been so far unfulfilled promises of a return of the Alfa Romeo marque, another of Fiat's storied brands, especially when General Motors owned a chunk of Fiat a few years ago.

It cost GM some two billion-with-a-b to get out of that deal. At least in part, that cash allowed Sergio Marchionne, by some measures a Torontonian, to re-build Fiat into a major force among European car manufacturers.

Like every car maker though, Fiat is still searching for long-term viability. Looking for economies of scale, ways to spread the massive investment to develop a new car over larger sales volumes, the company has engaged in various joint ventures with such as Ford (Ford Ka and new Fiat 500) and Suzuki (Suzuki SX4 and Fiat Sedici).

The proposed alliance with Chrysler would give the company access to a massive dealer network in the US and Canada - probably the asset Chrysler has that would be most valuable to another car company, especially one that does not play here yet (the various Chinese manufacturers must be eyeing that network too).

In return, Chrysler would gain access to some of the most efficient car manufacturing technology in the world, and also to some stunning design and engineering talent, especially in small cars (a) which are expected to become ever more important in our markets, and (b) where Chrysler's expertise level currently sits at approximately zero.

A marriage made in heaven?

Maybe not. Some analysts feel Fiat itself is too weak to survive, never mind Chrysler, and that merging two small weak companies always results in one larger weaker company.

I say, nothing "jointly" ventured, nothing "jointly" gained.

And with the two top dudes at Chrysler named Nardelli and Lasorda, Fiat seems like a perfect fit.

Cheap, cheerful - and safe?

Got an e-mail from the woman who runs Motoring 2009 - Isabel Diamond. Why the only person on the team who really DOES have a face made for TV isn't on air, I'll never know.

Her God-daughter is looking for a new car, and her Dad asked Brad and me for advice.

She wants something affordable, yet safe.

Don't we all!

It isn't easy, because the most important safety features in cars today aren't available in cheaper cars.

I won't bore you with the specific suggestions I had for her, but here are some thoughts you should all keep in mind when car shopping.

First, the safety of a particular car is impossible to measure. Never mind the crash statistics; they measure ONE particular occurrence of ONE particular type of crash. While that may provide a broad idea of the structural integrity of the car, they really don't predict much if anything.

The most important safety features in modern cars are:

(1) Active front-seat headrests, which can reduce whiplash injuries by up to 70 percent. Whiplash is by far the biggest and most expensive car safety problem we have, and the most easily mitigated (with this type of headrest). The fact that neither Transport Canada nor NHTSA, the American equivalent, do not mandate them proves they don't have Clue One about what matters. I doubt any of the cars this young woman is looking at have them; I'm not certain but the Honda Civic might be the cheapest car with them.

(2) Electronic Stability Control, which helps prevent skids. This goes under a wide variety of names - DSC, VDC, etc. This link:

www.tc.gc.ca/roadsafety/tp/tp14651/vs200701/menu.htm

(if it doesn't show up as a link - I'm still learning this blogging software - cut and paste it into your browser...)

is a web site that describes what ESC does, how effective it is - and which cars have it. ESC will become mandated in 2012, but for now it is only standard on up-scale cars (although the Pontiac Vibe has it as standard) and optional on only a few smaller cheaper ones. You may have to go to something like a VW City Golf to get this - it's a $450 option. My soon-to-be son-in-law has a City Golf and he likes it a lot; I have owned a bunch of VWs and have been very happy with them.

If you cannot afford any of the vehicles that offer ESC, or even if you can, then the best safety investment you can make is not a car at all, but an advanced driver training program. Canada is fortunate to have many such programs available, and you really should take advantage of that.

What's more, the things you learn there will be with you for ever, no matter what car you're in - your own, any car you buy in the future, any car you borrow or rent.

Absolutely mandatory!!!

Drive safe; drive right.

Bright, sunshiny day.

Yep, another song lyric...

But what a winter it has been!

Bill, our local mechanic/snow plow artist, has been here four times this season already.

Just yesterday, he scraped about 20 cm (eight inches) of 'global warming' off our driveway.

What price economy?

Far be it from me to try and understand fuel pricing.

I don't think the people who set fuel prices understand fuel pricing.

All I know is:

1. Gasoline is still the cheapest liquid you can buy per litre in a service station.

2. If the oil companies can deliver this highly complex product to every street corner at a price lower than water and still make billions of dollars in profit, they should run the entire world. On the off-chance they don't already.

And what I don't know is:

1. How come Diesel fuel is priced so much differently in Canada than in the US?

Last time I looked (last week) gasoline in the US was hovering around the $1.70 per US gallon mark. Diesel was about a dollar per US gallon more - that's almost a 60 percent premium.

The long-distance truckers, virtually 100 percent Diesel users, are understandably irate.

In Canada, the corresponding numbers are about 75 and 90 cents per litre respectively, about a 20 percent hit.

For most of history, Diesel has been cheaper than gasoline. Recently, it has been more expensive.

From what I know, Diesel fuel is a less complex product than gasoline, so from that perspective you'd expect it to be cheaper. The new low-suplhur Diesel fuel (usually labelled 'gold' in most service stations) is trickier, so a price jump wouldn't be considered unreasonable for that stuff.

Also, Diesel comes from the same 'fraction' of a barrel of crude as things like jet fuel and home heating oil.

So you'd figure if there was greater demand for those products, the price of Diesel might rise.

But airlines are cutting back flights everywhere, and a friend of mine in Montreal recently signed a long-term home heating oil contract with his supplier - and the price was lower than last year.

Anybody got any clues?

Here in the Real World...

Did you ever wonder where other Canadian automotive media outlets get all those lovely photos of cars with palm trees, beaches, etc., in the background?

In the middle of winter?

Sometimes, they are taken 'on location', when we're on a press trip somewhere.

Usually though, they use photos supplied by the car company - pix you might see in any of a dozen publications.

Or, they have been Photoshopped to within an inch (sorry; millimetre) of their lives.

We do our very best to use our own pics in Wheels, and succeed 90 percent of the time.

And Photoshop is a definite no-no.

So I thought you might like to see a real Canadian winter car pic. This is what the Pontiac Vibe I drove to Detroit looked like when I got home.

Oh, Canada.

Back in the Saddle Again...

Yeah yeah, another song lyric.

You spend three/four days wandering round the Detroit Auto Show, struggling with a weak battery on your new laptop. (Thanks for the suggestions, people).

You come home:

a) to find you had the "Power Meter" set wrong. Check "Max Battery" under "Power Schemes" (who knew?) and two hours later it's at 100 percent.

b) to find out that Windows XP has updated itself and now you cannot connect on your home network to your main desktop computer where most of your data files and stories are stored.

What's all this got to do with cars?

Nothing.

I'm just trying to explain where I've been for the past couple of days.

Meanwhile, I'm trying what the computer people call a "work-around" until I get this figured out.

Thanks for your patience!

Yours too, Andrew...

What? WHAT!!?!?

One of the many ironies about this year's Detroit Show and its emphasis on electric propulsion comes from the Detroit People Mover, which winds its way through Cobo Hall. Almost every press conference speaker had to stop at one point or another while extolling the virtues of silent electric power to allow this incredibly noisy thing to rumble on through.

That would be the electricity-powered Detroit People Mover...

Which reminds me of a story Bob Lutz told yesterday about former Chrysler boss Lee Iacocca, when Lee was trying to arrange government support for some loans for Chrysler back in the 1980s.

One Senator went on about how the funds would be better used to construct a subway in Washington D.C.

"That would be a mass-transit system for the public!" crowed the Senator.

Replied Iacocca angrily, "What the [expletive deleted] do you think the Chrysler Corporation is?"

The Chinese are Coming, the Chinese are Coming...

The Chinese car company BYD (slogan: Build Your Dreams - odd how it translates into English so well!) has a Corolla-clone plug-in hybrid car here, the theory being that you can acquire electricity at low rates during off-peak hours.

OK, with all the caveats we have about all electric cars and battery engineers.

What's also interesting is their fit and finish. Or lack thereof - the old Hyundai Pony would have had nothing to worry about on this count, and that was in the 1980s.

Thing is - at least in the automobile industry, nobody has really asked the Chinese to build "good"; they've only so far asked them to build "cheap".

But the Chinese build all sorts of electronic and photographic equipment for high-end Japanese brands, and they do an OK job of that.

It's just a matter of time before they figure out car quality, and it will surely take them less time than it did the Japanese or the Koreans, mainly because the Chinese can learn from their neighbours' lessons.

There is no doubt that a lot of Chinese resources are being poured into technological education; they will have the capability to do whatever they want, very soon.

Right now, the Chinese financial system is not in much better shape than any other country's. But there is also the chance that their contribution to the global car industry might be buying one of the struggling domestics - Chrysler would be the obvious choice - not for their products or technology, but for their distribution channels and dealership network.

Interesting times.