Transport

Volkswagen Australia has announced local pricing and specifications for its new Caddy Beach campervan, which starts from $46,990 drive-away.

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.

How long is a Renault Master?

New government legislation will give Australians direct access to new vehicles with the same state-of-the-art safety technology as the rest of the world.

How long is the Fiat Scudo?

The way we measure things, effectively, keeps us all from going bonkers.Think of money, for a start, and how annoying it is that there are so many currencies. Wouldn't it be easier if there was a single, global dollar? (mind you, that would make it easier to notice how expensive things are in Australia)Much of Europe realised this some time ago and attempted to bring in a single currency, the Euro, to make life easier. The English, of course, held on to their pound, which is the world's oldest currency that's still in use, and refers, originally, to the equivalent of one pound weight of silver.Generally, we all manage to agree on most measures, although a few standouts hang on to miles over kilometres, just to be irascible.Things like wheels, however, are measured in inches, and anyone who tries to convert a 20-inch wheel to centimetres will be deeply scorned by their car enthusiast friends for evermore.The car world needs to agree on these things to make life easier for customers, who obviously spend a lot of time researching their car-buying decisions and need to be able to make like-for-like comparisons, which is why if some car companies decided to quote fuel economy in miles per gallon rather than litres per 100km, we'd all go mad. Dogs lying down with cats, fire from the skies, proper disaster stuff. At least in the world of cars.Which is why it's so strange that the boot volume of new vehicles - a singularly important figure for anyone buying a car, and even more so if they have children/prams/bicycles/dogs, etc. - is measured in different ways.To make it more confusing, each of those different ways seems to use the actual unit of measurement - litres - and yet comes up with different figures.Some car companies - Mazda, Honda, Toyota, Kia, Hyundai, Citroen, Audi, BMW - measure boot volume using something called VDA, which is short for Verband der Automobilindustrie, which translates as the German Automobile Industry Association.Being German, it's both exact and exacting, as you'd expect, and is carried out using blocks of wood measuring 200mm x 50mm x 100mm.Grab your phone's calculator and do the math if you like, or simply believe us when we say   that this adds up to 1,000,000 cubic millimetres.A maths teacher might be able to explain to you that 1cm cubed has the same volume as 1 millilitre. So 1,000,000 cubic millimetres works out as one litre.So, if you can just stop rubbing your forehead and groaning for a minute, you can take it as read that each of these blocks of wood is the equivalent of one litre of boot space, so if you count up all the blocks that fit into a load area (and what a wonderful, giant game of Jenga that must be), you'll get the VDA number of any given car boot in litres.Fortunately, car companies will just tell you this number, so you don't have to do it yourself.Mazda Australia, which is a fan of the VDA system, tell us that, "in practice this would be simulated by computer, not with physical blocks," which is a relief."The reason for using blocks is to prevent overstating luggage capacity due to irregular shaped luggage compartments," a helpful Mazda spokesperson adds. Intrusion from boot hinges as you shut the lid are another argument in favour of VDA measurement.Now, if everyone agreed that VDA was the one and only way of measuring luggage space, then you'd have some chance of understanding how it's done, but sadly some people prefer a standard called SAE, which stands for Society of Automotive Engineers, one of those US-based organisations that considers itself "International". Their system uses smaller blocks, so you end up with a larger litre figure - or liter figure - which sounds more impressive.Or, if you check with Jeep or Dodge you'll get the SAE Cargo Volume, measured in cubic metres (a Jeep Cherokee offers 0.7, with rear seats up, good luck making sense of that).And, to make things worse, other companies, like Holden, Ford, Nissan/Infiniti, Peugeot and Renault - simply quote their boot volume in "litres". We'd like to imagine they work it out by pouring four-litre tubs of ice cream into a car boot until it's full and then counting the empty containers, but this seems unlikely (at least outside of the US).In short, outside of those companies that helpfully agree on using the VDA method - and surprisingly even the Japanese seem to believe that, in this case, the German way is the best - it can be extremely confusing to compare one car's luggage-carrying space with another's.One man's litres, it seems, are not always the same as another's, and working it out yourself - unless you're Stephen Hawking - might well do your head in.So here's our advice. If you want to compare a car that doesn't specify whether its boot volume is measured in VDA, call the local dealer and tell them to do the conversion for you.Or, if you're more practically inclined, knock yourself up a few timber blocks of 200x50x100mm dimensions and pop down to the dealership to do it yourself.

The New South Wales Government has passed a new law that requires drivers to leave cyclists a one metre gap while passing under 60km/h, or risk a $330 fine and loss of two demerit points.

Australia is a country that embraces car ownership. It's a rite of passage, and the notion of getting from A to B is often not the primary reason for the purchase of a motor vehicle.

As the rest of Australia recovers from Christmas celebrations, police are bracing themselves for silly season.

We’ve all felt it: the boiling, impotent and yet unstoppable rage of being stuck in traffic, particularly the kind of congestion and jams that seem to make no sense.