Articles by Stephen Corby

You might imagine Lamborghini, or anyone who owns one of its classic Miuras, would be very much against the idea of blowing one to smithereens, but that’s exactly what artist Fabian Oefner was allowed to do, creating an image described as “science meets art”.Oefner’s “Disintegrating X (Lamborghini Miura)” is certainly an eye-catching art work, as it appears to be a photo of a Miura being torn into tiny pieces by some mysterious, Marvel Universe-style magnetic force.In fact, it has been created, painstakingly, by combining thousands of shots depicting every single component of a Miura, from body shell to tiny screws, all perfectly positioned, and Photoshopped, to create the illusion of an exploding car.Thank goodness it’s only an illusion. Fabian Oefner is a Swiss artist who “examines our perception of time and reality through hyper-detailed sculptures and photographs”.His previous “Disintegrating” photos had all been done using scale models, but in this case a friend of his owned a Miura and was having it pulled down to be restored, so he invited Oefner to come into the workshop and photograph every single part of the legendary Lamborghini, in situ.“With a scale model you’re in your studio, it’s a quiet place you can do what you like and it’s a very soothing process,” Oefner explains.“With the real car, you have the constant noise, plus you have people working beside you, and it was 44 degrees in the workshop,it smelled of petrol in the air, it’s just way more tangible when you do it with the real thing.”While it might sound like hard work, Oefner actually found it a genuinely moving, and bonding, experience.“That car becomes something really special to you, because at the end of the process you know every single detail, It’s more like a person,” he says.“Every time I see the car it’s like, ‘Oh, I know you.’”Yes, I know you, I blew you to bits. Nice one, Fabian.

Sixty years after the iconic, and now impossibly tiny-looking original Mini hit the streets, a new, all-electric version has been unveiled at the London Classic Car Show - and not just as a concept, it's a production-ready car people can actually buy.

Details are leaking out online of the next-generation Toyota HiAce people mover, which looks set to be longer, more edgily designed and able to sit 13 people.

The idea of an Apple Car - beautifully designed, always connected, obviously autonomous and reassuringly expensive - seems like a surefire home run, yet it seems to be taking longer to come to market than the hover boards from Back to the Future II.This might lead you to think there’s little substance to the rumours, but the fact Apple is genuinely working on a self-self-driving car has been proven with the release yesterday of data from the California Department of Motor Vehicles that shows that Apple undertook exactly 128,337km of testing for its mysterious machine in 2018.Apple is famously super secretive and would never voluntarily admit to anything at all, but under Californian law all companies testing autonomous vehicles must log the miles its vehicles have done without a driver at the wheel, and the authorities then release those figures to the public.California regulators call these “disengagement reports”, which measure how often a human driver had to intervene to take control from an autonomous-driving system during testing on public roads.Because this is a pretty serious safety issue, as you can imagine. Apple, which wouldn’t comment beyond the documents it was forced to file publicly, only applied for a permit to conduct testing in California in 2017, and it lags well behind the leader in the autonomous-driving field, Waymo, which is owned by Alphabet, the cool arm of Google.Waymo has conducted 16 million kilometres of testing around the world for what used to be called the Google Car.Comparatively, though, Apple is ramping up its road-testing schedule, because last year’s 120,000km-plus figure compared to just 1348km in 2017.So, Google/Alphabet/Waymo might well beat Apple onto public roads with self-driving cars, or taxis, but make no mistake, the Apple Car is coming. And the queues at your local Apple Store/Garage will be huge. 

Amazon, one of the world’s biggest brands, and GM, one of the world’s larger car companies, are reportedly in talks to agree a joint investment in a previously unknown electric-vehicle brand, Rivian.At first, the idea of two global giants like General Motors and Amazon rushing to invest in a small EV start-up company like Rivian, which only made its debut at the Los Angeles Auto Show late last year, with little fanfare, seems strange.And then you notice what Rivian is planning to make - the world’s first electric pick-up truck, with a range of more than 600km - and it suddenly makes senses that the company is now being valued at between $US1bn and $US2bn.If the deal goes ahead, Amazon and GM would be minority shareholders and the people at Rivian would be very wealthy indeed.GM has bold goals for its EV range and has also stated previously that its profitability depends on sales of SUVs and full-size pick-up trucks.Despite those two facts, just last year the company said it would not make any “EV pickups”. Then Ford announced it was planning an electric version of the huge-selling F-150, and GM did a quick U-turn.Rivian, which unveiled its electric R1T truck in LA, could be the answer GM has been looking for, although it hasn’t officially confirmed rumours of its investment, reported by both Bloomberg and Reuters.“We admire Rivian’s contribution to a future of zero emissions and an all-electric future,” was the official GM statement.Amazon’s interest in Rivian is less clear, but owner Jeff Bezos certainly seems to know a good investment when he sees one, which is why he’s the world’s richest man.There is some speculation that Amazon may even go it alone and attempt to cut GM out of the deal. Could Amazon-branded EVs soon be delivering your packages? It’s possible.For its part, Rivian has previously discussed the idea of sharing its skateboard-like EV platform with other carmakers, but for now it’s focused on bring its R1T to market by 2020.The pick-up truck of the near future - to be built at an old Mitsubishi plant in Illinois - will have no fewer than four electric motors, one for each wheel, thus four-wheel drive, and will carry a lot of lithium-ion battery packs in its floor (which frees up a lot of storage space, like 330 litres, under the bonnet).Various variants will provide more power, and range, with the top 180kWh “mega pack” promising 640km of range, and a 0-100km/h time of less than seven seconds.The Rivian also has the bonus of looking fabulously futuristic and has already been given a maximum five-star crash-test rating in the US.Prices will start at around $US70,000, and there are plans for right-hand drive production in 2022.By that time, of course, it might well be wearing a GM, or an Amazon, badge.

You might think buying a more expensive, premium brand would guarantee you better reliability, but that’s no longer the case, according to the annual JD Power survey of how motor vehicles fare in the real world.For the first time in 30 years, mass-market vehicles beat luxury cars in the widely watched Vehicle Dependability Study.The JD Power survey, which tracks problems with three-year old vehicles, was a huge win this year for mainstream brands including Toyota, General Motors (which trades as Holden in Australia, at least for now) Kia and Hyundai, all of which had a combined average of 135 problems per 100 vehicles, which was six fewer than the average for luxury marques, including BMW, Audi and Mercedes-Benz.Dave Sargent, JD Power’s vice president of global automotive, pointed out that the result was a reflection of mass-market brands catching up to the premium brands in terms of overall quality, and the fact those cheaper cars have less new technology in them, the kind that can commonly cause problems for top-end marques.“Partly, it’s just a lot of hard work and learning, and partly, it’s lower penetration with some of these features,” Sargent told Bloomberg.“There is no inherent reason why a more-expensive car should be better or worse in terms of reliability than a less-expensive car, so my guess is they’ll track each other fairly closely going forward.”The news was good across the board as well, with the entire industry averaging six fewer issues per 100 vehicles than the year before.“Vehicle dependability continues to improve, but I wouldn’t say that everything is rosy,” Sargent said.“Vehicles are more reliable than ever, but automakers are wrestling with problems such as voice recognition, transmission shifts and battery failures."Flawless dependability is a determining factor in whether customers remain loyal to a brand, so manufacturers need to help customers who are currently experiencing vehicle problems and address these trouble spots on future models.”To be fair, the top two performing brands on the list were, once again, Lexus, and Porsche, although both recorded falls in quality. Lexus, Toyota’s luxury brand, was the top performer for the eighth year in a row, but its score of 106 problems was down from 99 the year before.Porsche, a genuine case of getting the quality you pay for, recorded 108 problems per 100 vehicles, which was down from 100 the year before. The Most Dependable Model award in the study went to the Porsche 911.Global giant Toyota actually tied for second with Porsche, in another case of mass-market success, while GM’s Chevrolet and Buick brands rounded out the top five in the JD Power survey, which covers the US market.The J.D. Power report is based on responses from 32,952 original owners of 2016 model-year vehicles. It measures 177 problems in eight major categories experienced over the past year.Volvo (204 problems), Land Rover (221) and Fiat (249) were the bottom three performers in the survey.

It sounds almost too good to be true, and in the real world it would probably be prohibitively expensive, but Ford has come up with a bed that utilities its lane-keeping technology to put selfish bed hogs back in their place, literally.

Hyundai has already sprinkled sporty excitement on its range with the i30 N, the Fastback version of which arrives next month, but it’s planning something truly special to represent the pinnacle of its N brand - a “halo car” that looks set to boast all-wheel drive and a petrol-electric powertrain.

In a move that has the genuine potential to save thousands of lives, and prevent millions of injuries, the EU and Japan have backed a draft United Nations regulation to make Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB) mandatory on all new cars and light commercial vehicles from 2020.The regulation would impose strict requirements on all new cars built from that date to be able to brake automatically if danger is detected at speeds of up to 60km/h.It’s a move that will definitely save lives, according to the UN Economic Commission for Europe."It activates the brake to stop a crash. It will not drive, it will brake," UNECE spokesman Jean Rodriguez told a briefing. He added that there would be no obligation to retrofit older vehicles with AEB, no doubt due to the huge potential cost.Japan and the EU have agreed to the deal to make AEB systems mandatory on all cars they build - which adds up to four million a year in Japan and 15m in Europe.Unfortunately, the US, China and India are not signatories to the agreement. India has, however, announced that it will demand AEB be mandatory on all new vehicles by 2022, and it’s very much a live issue in the US as well, with many car makers pledging, outside of any legislation, to make it standard equipment by 2022.The UNECE said the wider roll-out of AEB (which is already in many modern cars) would help to save lives in urban settings in particular.In Europe alone, more than 9500 people died in car car crashes inside city limits in 2016, and 40 per cent of those were pedestrians.You’ll no doubt be surprised to hear that Australia is dragging the chain on making AEB a compulsory fitment to new cars sold here, despite a campaign by VicRoads to make it happen.VicRoads' acting deputy chief executive, Robyn Seymour, has been pushing for a change to ADRs to make AEB compulsory, just as we did with electronic stability control systems, back in 2011."In a range of forums we have had with the Commonwealth, we have been advocating for the fact that the Commonwealth has a key role to play in the space of road safety and they have one of the strongest capacities to ensure we are getting safer vehicles on the road,” Ms Seymour said."It is one of the technologies we know will be very effective in reducing crashes so we’re keen to work with them on how we might develop that ADR.”In a 2014 investigation, the RACV found that up to 40 per cent of crashes could be prevented by the technology.

Short-term car-rental companies like GoGet might seem like a nice yet niche idea in Australia, but in a country like Russia, where they’ve been scaled up, and priced down, they could point to a future in which very few people own cars any more. A future car companies are aware of, and alarmed about.A company called Yandex.Drive, launched just last year in Russia, has become the Uber-like disruptor that’s threatening to turn this massive car market on its head, with the number of short-term rental cars on Moscow’s streets more than tripling last year.The city of more than 12 million people now has the biggest shared fleet in Europe and the second largest in the world, after Tokyo, where it’s notoriously difficult to own a car because parking is so scarce, and expensive.The secret has been a mixture of choice, and price. Yandex.Drive offers its users a range of cars, from basic Kias to Porsche 911s, which means you’re never stuck with one vehicle, you have a choice of many, just like an oligarch.Yandex.Drive, set up by a huge local internet company that is effectively Russia’s Google, flooded the streets with more than 7000 of these short-term rental cars, which can be had for as little as five rubles, or 11 of our cents, per minute of use, which includes your fuel, maintenance costs, insurance and even parking.By comparison, Daimler’s similar Car2Go service in New York costs 55 cents per minute, so this is a seriously cheap deal."We are approaching a point that could flip the entire car market on its head." Shwetha Surender, a London-based analyst with consultancy Frost & Sullivan, recently told Autonews Europe."Carmakers risk becoming mere suppliers to shared-mobility services and losing direct relations with customers. That's an unattractive proposition."Moscow resident Evgeny Barkov, 31, is one of those customers who’s gone to Yandex and won’t be coming back to car ownership.He says when he used to own a car, it would constantly annoy him how much he was spending on something that sat there, unused, 90 per cent of the time, and occasionally broke down, costing him money.He finally got out his calculator and did the sums, deciding that he was better off selling his vehicle and switching to short-term rentals for good."That investment (in owning a car) brought me nothing but trouble," said Barkov. "Now, I'm just paying for using."Another key advantage for Muscovites is that once a vehicle is booked, it can be pre-heated before the driver arrives, a handy feature in that icy city.Barkov says he always pondered whether he should spend more money on upgrading his car, when he owned one, but now he can enjoy the variety of slumming it in a Lada one day, and borrowing a Mercedes-Benz the next.Car companies are reacting to the threat, of course, with VW investing in its own Moia ride-sharing service, at least on a trial basis in the German city of Hamburg, and Daimler and BMW merging their short-term rental services - Car2Go and DriveNow, to help them scale up. In the US, GM has invested heavily in ride-sharing firm Lyft.In Australia, a company called Carly is about to attempt to upscale the idea of short-term-rental motoring in the local market to a Netflix-like subscription model. Users will pay a monthly fee for access to a fleet of cars and will be able to change cars as their needs, or desires, require."Carly will provide the flexibility that many drivers and especially younger generations are now seeking by removing the long-term financial commitment required to buy or finance a vehicle eliminating the need to lock into long-term debt," the company claims Carly is set to launch next month.