Articles by Alan Jones

The new look is part of a launch of a new brand across our website, the carsguide lift-out sections in more than 130 News Limited metropolitan and community newspapers across Australia, and on our mobile site, carsguide.mobi, accessible from your mobile phone. A lot has changed since we first added the original carsguide.com.au logo to a webpage. We are now home to more than 1200 new and used car dealers with over 70,000 cars to choose from. This is also the destination to visit when looking for advice and information for your car, with over 1,300 road test and reviews written by more than 22 expert motoring journalists across the country. Our new brand heralds a new direction for the business, as we aim to become the ultimate guide to for consumers at any point in the car buying, selling and ownership experience. We hope you like the new look. Stay tuned in the weeks to come as we progressively introduce new changes to the contents and functionality of the site. What do you think?Scroll down to the bottom of the page and tell us what you think of our new look.

Those are two of the conclusions from a new UK study into the dangers of wearing fashionable sunglasses while driving, which also found that 1 in 10 British women chose fashionable designs that dangerously restrict their peripheral vision. While no similar data is available for the Australian market, it would be reasonable to expect that number to be even higher under the brighter, glarier Australian skies.Sunglasses that make you look fashionable may also be very dangerous to wear while driving because they can affect your vision, particularly your peripheral vision.Peripheral vision is what we rely on to see a car approaching at an intersection, what we use to see a child running onto the road, and we need our peripheral vision working 100% because objects in our peripheral vision can be right in front of us in a few milliseconds, giving us very little time to react.Do yourself and everyone else a favour and switch from your stylish sunglasses to your driving sunglasses when you get into your car.What makes a safe pair of driving sunglasses?Australian motoring associations and standards bodies don’t currently offer guidelines on what makes a good pair of driving sunglasses, but here are our recommendedations, based on advice from the UK's Eye Care Trust: Choose a design with a thin frame and arms so that they don’t obscure your peripheral vision. Thick chunky fashionable sunglasses are more than big enough to obscure something in your peripheral vision and cause an accident.Fashionably dark tints will impair your vision in anything other than the strongest sunlight, so we’d recommend a lighter tint.Coloured tints are designed for use in specific lighting conditions that may not always be present when you’re driving, so avoid these unless you are sure you have lenses for the current driving conditions.Choose polarizing filters if possible as they specifically cut the kind of reflected light created by the windscreen of the car in front of you, and reflections cast up from the road by water or debris.Many glasses are available with variable tinting which changes according to the amount of light, which can help make your glasses usable in a broader range of situations.Some manufacturers, such as Bolle and Serengeti, make sunglasses specifically for driving.  You can also download this free guide (.PDF) to good driving eyewear from the UK's Eyecare Trust.   What’s the best way to find a pair of sunglasses that meet these recommendations?  Go to your friendly, neighbourhood optometrist (not a sunglasses store) and ask them to fit you with a pair of driving sunglasses. They can ask you about your typical driving conditions and if necessary test your eyesight (if you’re male, they can test you for colour-blindness too) to make sure you have the best possible vision when driving. Many optometrists will test your eyesight at no charge.

Enthusiasts more used to the previous model's sedan body type are concerned at Subaru's decision to make the new WRX available only as a hatchback.

It’s not as if I’m a shrinking violet on the road – in fact, I’m a typical Sydney driver – aggressive, rapid, short-tempered and selfish. But within a few kilometres of Delhi airport, seeing how locals behaved on a multi-lane freeway, I was certain I’d done the right thing in allowing the tour company to provide a local driver. For the next two weeks, we’d cover almost 2,000km as we ventured north-east on narrow, winding, unsealed mountain roads into the state of Himachal Pradesh and the Kinnaur and Spiti valleys. When you climb to over 5,000m in a few days you expect to spend a lot of time crossing your fingers as you traverse yet another one-lane blind corner cut into a cliff face with nothing but a crumbling earth edge and a thousand metre drop on the other side. We got lost, we changed flat tyres… all as you’d expect on any lengthy bush trip. But unique to this trip, we were also wedged against a rock face by a passing lorry, almost washed off a mountainside by a monsoon mudslide, drove underneath the titanic waterfall exiting a hydroelectric turbine, and at all times were subject to the amusing, complex and sometimes terrifying code of conduct which are the ‘Himalayan Road Rules.’ For the benefit of CARSguide readers, here’s a quick survival guide for your next venture on the subcontinent. Himalayan Road Rules 1. You are your horn. Communicate even the smallest thought or gesture using the button in the middle of your steering wheel. It’s just responsible driving to beep when approaching a blind hairpin bend that’s only wide enough for one car to pass, because there’s almost certainly an overloaded lorry or bus coming the other way. But it’s also a good idea to use your horn to let other drivers know that you’re overtaking, that you’re changing lanes, pulling over, that you believe you have right of way, that you’re happy, that you’re tired, and that you were the last vehicle past the landslide around the next corner. Learn to interpret the different lengths and intensity of beep and you’ll be able to understand the complex series of messages that pass between drivers on mountain roads; the poetry of the mountain highways. 2. If it’s behind you, it’s not there. Locals drive with their side mirrors folded in, to make squeezing past other vehicles easier when the unsealed, soft-shouldered road on the edge of the precipice is only one and a half vehicles wide - most of the time. Rear view mirrors are useless because the additional people, goods and livestock you’ll pick up en-route is limited only by the ceiling of your vehicle or the load-bearing capacity of your rear axle. Besides, if there’s a vehicle behind you, it’ll beep. 3. Safe overtaking distances are measured in beeps. A 4WD travelling at 40km/hr behind a heavily-loaded passenger bus travelling at 38km/hr wishes to overtake. There is 100m of unsealed, soft-shouldered road between the bus and the next blind curve. What is the minimum distance required in which to attempt to overtake? Hint: the correct answer is measured in beeps, not metres. You’ll need enough time to ask the bus driver if he thinks you should overtake, for him to reply, for you to signal your intention to overtake, and then for him to concede the lead; all done with beeps. Once you’ve both agreed that overtaking will be attempted, then you must complete the overtake, no matter how much squeezing, swerving and emergency braking is required to do so. I’m not sure what the penalty is for chickening-out, but I assume it carries a death penalty, judging by the at-all-costs approach taken to most overtaking manoeuvres. 4. The Border Roads Organisation (BRO) is trying its best. Ancient seabeds just weren’t made to be tilted on their side, and certainly were never intended to make a stable, permanent road base. The state of Himachal Pradesh is essentially one big mass of ancient seabed, simultaneously being raised into the sky by the colliding Asian Plate and eroding just as quickly back into the Arabian Sea. You don’t need to be a geologist to spot erosion at work – most BRO road crews clear landslides by just pushing them off the side of the road, using explosives, bulldozers and much of the time, their bare hands. As most roads zig-zag down a mountain, this means the landslide just rolls down the mountainside onto a lower section of road. The BRO, charged with the ‘mission impossible’ of trying to keep some sort of road network open while the Himalayas crumble down around it, shrugs its shoulders and walks down the hill to shift it again. What else can you do? More than once, the rocks tumbling down the hill towards our car had been set in motion by a BRO road crew further up the mountain. So in case you’re cursing them for the life-threatening state of their road network, the BRO gets busy with road-signs bearing some classic messages including these:   ”BRO never looks back” (neither do road users) ”Accidents don’t happen, they are caused” (though BRO may share some of the blame) “Darling, I want you, but not so fast” (a saucy warning to slow down) ”Be mild on my curves” And this one, above an annual tally of employee fatalities: ”BRO: putting our lives on the line for your safety”   View Larger Map Alan Jones travelled to India at his own expense, with YakTrak Tours and despite the driving adventures, had a wonderful time.

Thanks for your message Ryan, your email reminds me that young motoring fans are some of the most enthusiastic. Your ideas are great! You and other readers might be interested to learn about a new feature on the website that will let you leave a comment on most news and road test stories you read. As I write this, 82 readers have already jumped in with their ideas, criticism, feedback and support for the opinions and information we’ve published since we made the commenting feature live only a little while ago! Now you can express your outraged disagreement, whole-hearted support, or left-of-field alternatives, every day on CARSguide. No need to hunt for an email address or lick an envelope any longer, just go to the story that you want to comment on, and let us know your opinion. You’ll notice other reader’s comments in the “Have Your Say” box either near the bottom or on the right hand side of most CARSguide stories online, and you can submit your own feedback in the “Submit your feedback here” box on the same page. We may not publish your comments if we don’t think they’re helpful to other readers, and we may edit your comment if necessary, but we’ll do our best to publish everything ‘fit to print’ within 24 hours (or on Monday if you visit us over the weekend.) Tell us what you think… Alan JonesEditor, CARSguide.com.au    

These iconic Australian-made cars will exit a rapidly-changing market, with consumers demanding higher-technology and smaller-displacement engines in the premium sector.The long-wheel base versions of the Falcon have suffered a sales decline over the past five years, while its main opposition - the Holden Statesman/Caprice range - has increased export sales to offset slowing local demand.The Melbourne-based car maker said the decision coincided with the arrival of the medium-sized Mondeo, returning to the Australian market after a six-year absence.Ford said there was a major decline in sales of vehicles in the upper large-car segment.Industry observers have pointed to Ford’s product planning as being partly to blame, suggesting that Ford may have diluted the original premium perception of the Fairlane and LTD by reducing the specification of the models to bring them into reach of a broader market.