Damn you Jeremy Clarkson!@&^&^&^&^%#&@!!!

I managed to get through the first fortysomething years of my life blissfully unaware of and uncaring about cars. My automotive expertise was limited to a rag bag of eclectic trivia:

1. To stop a Valiant Charger fishtailing, my schoolfriend's brother would load a sack of Briquettes in the boot 
2. The Blues Brothers film includes a couple of good car chases
3. Ralph Sarich's Orbital Engine was always going to annoy the oil industry
4. Rod Stewart had a fondness for leary Italian sportscars - I knew they were Maserati because he mentioned them in the lyrics of Italian Girls on "Never a Dull Moment"
5. My mother would only ever be pulled over for speeding when the vicar was in the car with us

I had always thought of cars as a way of getting from A to B. End of story. Or so I thought. And then I discovered Top Gear.At first the effects were subtle;

• I realised that the interior of our Subaru Forester was a bit too plastic
• I discovered that the exciting car chase in Ronin included a maneuver called a four wheel drift (often considered to be the best ever filmed)
• I began to notice vast numbers of silver Mercedes in the Eastern suburbs of Melbourne
• I started looking up prices on the Audi website
• Then I found I was starting to memorize model numbers of numbers of BMW's!!!!!

 

So it was really no surprise to me that I took some interest in the types of auto on the road in the US. Again, it began with curiosities; I was interested to see that Coca Cola has a fleet of hybrid electric delivery trucks. 

And I had a Sesame Street moment when I saw my first American School Bus in real life (outside the Seattle Art Gallery).

In general though, most American cars seemed pretty dull; all those Chevy sedans, Pontiacs and the occassional lumbering Lincoln Continental.

That was until we got to Arizona, Four Corners territory, the Navajo Nation, domain of the pickup truck. Everywhere you looked, pickup trucks, massive GMC's, huge Chevvys and most gigantic and popular of them all, the DODGE RAM! The name deserves capitalisation, somehow everytime I saw one (and to John's consternation), I felt compelled to shout the name out loud. We were driving a Chevvy Equinox SUV, which was a vast, heavy tank of a thing compared to Australian 4x4's; but seeing the chrome ramshead logo of a DODGE RAM! in the rear view mirror as it roared down on you was a fearsome sight indeed. 

Now the average Navajo is not wealthy, in fact the Navajo Nation is a region of quite obvious poverty. But the amazing thing about these herds of pickups was that they were mostly bright, new models, rather than the rust buckets you would expect in poorer suburbs at home. Driving through the Four Corners country you could also see that most families had more than one pickup often as well as other cars - in one case I counted 27 parked up around the same property(admittedly they were in various states of decay).

But how can this be? How are these shiny new titans acquired? And the answer may go a long way to explaining why car companies in the US are going to the wall. Dodge are offering buyers of the new DODGE RAM models the most amazing terms; No deposit, O% interest for 5 years, no payments for 2 years, plus $2,000 cash in hand to the purchaser. GMC have a similar deal, although they are offering $4,000 cash back! Of course, once you have one of these mighty beasts in your clutches, you need to feed it huge quantities of gas - depending on the model the DODGE RAM promises 12-19mpg, and that on good roads. Roads on the Reservation can rarely be said to be good, more likely quagmires of muddy red ochre in winter and sandpits in summer. Still, the memory of tiny, tiny Navajo women peering through the steering wheels of their pickup trucks in Window Rock and Kayenta was truly memorable.

So here is my Pickup Truck Parade of the South West, the top ten tonners on the road. (Interestingly, I noticed that if you leave Land Rovers out, the order of the list reverses as you drive closer to Pheonix and suburbia.)

South West Pickup Parade (4x4) 

1. Dodge Ram (Gigantic!!!)
2. GMC (Monsterous!!)
3. Chevy (Just huge!)
4. Ford (For pussies)
5. Jeep (For tour guides only)
6. Subaru(Dwarfed by everything else)
7. SUV's (Tourist hire cars)
8. Land Rover (Rare)
9. Town cars (Extremely rare)

====================

10. Toyota (on recall, the pickup that dare not speak its name...) 

Damn, you Jeremy Clarkson!

Edited to add: Sorry folks, I still don't get it about F1!
AND I still love my little Honda Jazz

Transports of Delight : Going Boeing

Seattle  is home to 2 of the world’s largest corporations; Microsoft and Boeing. Microsoft are predictably unfriendly to tourists, but Boeing run public tours of their Everett complex. Costs $15, 9-5, on the hour, every hour, every day (except Christmas day). Problem is getting there. Boeing is 32 miles north of Seattle and while public transport is possible, no one seems to know how. Locals just don’t  travel that way.  The only practical option is to hire a car, which adds $120 to the price of the tour (and only if we return the SUV to AVIS before 4.45 the same day). But you do these things right?

The traffic was surprisingly heavy for Saturday morning - we later learned that it was a long weekend (President’s Day on Monday 15^th) and everyone is travelling to Seattle for the holiday. Driving in the US is alarming if you are not used to driving on the “other” side of the road and is horryifyingly surreal if you have jet lag. But the trip was quick and we were at Boeing in 35 minutes. Photography is banned in the factory, in fact you have to hire a locker and leave all your personal belongings outside before the tour starts. To fulfill the tourist need for photography, Boeing have put together the “Future of Flight" a gallery of aircraft parts and distrbing facts which you can browse before the tour:

In the Future of Flight gallery:

• Alarming videos of engines disintegrating
• Alarming footage of bird strike testing
• Alarming push button simulation of a jet engine at take off
• Alarming middle aged men in leather flying jackets
• Exremely alarming cross section of the new latest Boeing 778
  The fuselage of the "Dreamliner" is made up of super thin carbon fiber (picture below)

The tour;

• 6 minute film (the projetor displayed an overheat warning throughout - Boeing say it is too expensive to fix so we should just ignore the message - alarming!)
• Bus ride to the factory
• Short walk through the tunnels under the factory
• Freight elevator (held all 52 of us) to the third floor viewing platform over the factory. Amazing - it is not enclosed or roped off, you can just peer over the top at the 747-8's being assembled
• Second bus trip to see the 778 Dreamliners being assembled

A few Boeing facts:

• The Boeing factory is the largest building in the world (it is in the Guiness Book of World's Records (they have several entries in there)
• 5 stories high, bigger than Disneyland, would hold 9,000 basketball courts
• World's largest mural painted on the front of the building
• World's largest private fire service
• 30,000 employees
• 13,000 bicycles for riding from one end of the building to the other
• Sections of the plane are made in different countries through the world and flown to Seattle for assembly
• Some of the parts are so huge that Boeing had to design a new cargo plane, the Dreamlifter
• The planes are put together on an assembly line and are moved around the floor from station to station
• It takes 3 days to assemble a complete 747
• Boeing has orders for the Dreamliner 778 until 2018 
• Each 778 costs around $300,000,000 each
• Total take off weight is 975,000,000lbs
• Paint adds an extra 2000-10,000lbs to the weight
• Boeing exports more than any other US company
• The factory does not operate 24/7. Standard work hours are Monday-Friday 9-5. People do work at weekends but it is voluntary (for 1.5, 2x salary, though)
• The factory has it's own restaurants and cafes; including a Tully's Coffee outlet which sells more than any other outlet in the US

Amazing. Alarming.Recommended

Edited to add: Yes,I know I had typed in 774 instead of 747. I did try to fix it (several times) but there was a problem with the style sheet which I have only just managed to nut out. Put it down to jet lag!