one.point.zero - Colin O'Brien's weblog

How JG Ballard came to write Crash

After self-service bikes, self-service electric cars may hit the streets of Paris.

Good move: Berlin, Cologne and Hannover have banned heavily polluting cars from their city centers.

Warning: this vehicle may seriously damage your health.

Dates for your agenda starting October 3rd: a series of midday conferences concerning automobile pressure on the city of Brussels.

Jan Gehl on how to build a place for people, not for cars.

Tell the EU to make cars more fuel-efficient.

In the thirties, William Bushnell Stout designed the egyptian-inspired and art-deco-feeling scarab automobile.

Drive one day less and look how much carbon monoxide you’ll keep out of the air we breathe

Maybe Belgian ministers could get off the seats of their carbon-spewing monsters and actually do something for the environment instead of worrying about photo ops with Al Gore?

Dear Mr Winterkorn, you could actually choose not to give customers what they want, or rather what your advertising makes them want.

Belgian minister for Energy Marc Verwilghen has just got himself a giant gas-guzzling Audi Q7 (pdf) that emits between 282 to 326 grammes of CO2 per km. Meanwhile, Europe is trying to get emissions down to 120g/km, nice example from above. Oh yeah, and Al Gore has the electricity bill of a small village.

Ad agencies in Europe draft voluntary guidelines for car advertising following fears of climate change. Nothing to get excited over.

Scientists believe that there are so many idiots behind the wheel that we would all be safer if cars were driven by robots, and that’s what they’re working on. I wonder if they’ll have a “go round the block 100 times with music at loud volume” program for the sad gits who mistake those looks of pity from pedestrians for admiration.

The European commission has caved in to the auto industry on new emission standards opting instead to push the use of biofuels and the placement of indicators that “tell drivers when they need to inflate their tyres or change gear”. Seriously.

Inside your car you inhale 5 times more smog than outside.

The modern automobile uses just one percent of its energy to move its occupants, the rest is used to move the big hunk of metal and glass that it is, power the gadgets, and a big chunk is simply lost as heat.

The chemistry of road rage.

Car advertising takes itself down another notch.

We’ve got 10 years to avoid dangerous climate changes. At the moment, it’s not looking too great...

A quarter of road traffic victims were not inside a car. Great concept.

Killing somebody with your car can be very traumatic.

The flawed presumption that murder and maiming by car is an “accident”.

Milan is to start charging vehicles entering the city based on their emissions.

Watch out for the tyre-slashing vigilante if you phone while you drive in the UK.

What does your car say about you?

It takes the spirit of cycling to sell cars now?