Optima owner the picture of efficiency
No stranger to green vehicles, Surrey’s Taylor knows how to save litre or two on the road
Over the course of the summer in Monday E-Driving we’re profiling our four readers who signed up for the Hyper Miler Challenge. We’re presenting them in order of fourth through first. Today, our runner-up. For Brook Taylor, taking part in the Province’s Hyper Miler Challenge was a little like comparing apples to apples.
For the past four years, Brook Taylor has owned and driven a 2012 Kia Optima Hybrid, so his seat time in the 2017 Toyota Prius Tech wasn’t a complete departure for him. That could very well explain the impressive 3.1 L/100 km fuel economy number he posted on his drive.
And the self-employed Surrey resident figures he could have maybe cracked 3.0 if he hadn’t have strayed from the 61-kilometre route.
“I’m used to using the GPS off my phone so I was a little thrown off by the Prius Nav system,” he explained.
That resulted in a wrong turn off Lougheed Highway and a subsequent 20 kilometres being added to his overall distance. He figures it might have affected his fuel economy number too.
“After I got lost I was pushing the accelerator hard at times to try and get back in time,” as he knew the final challenger was awaiting her turn behind the wheel. “So I probably could have done a little better.”
Taylor travelled 80.4 kilometres in one hour and 43 minutes and had an average speed of 47 km/h. The route began at Colossus in Langley, travelled west along Highway 1, then up and over Burnaby Mountain, onto the Barnet Highway, then east along Lougheed Highway to the Golden Ears Bridge in Maple Ridge with a return to the Colossus parking lot.
Fuel savings is what attracted Taylor to kicking hybrid vehicle tires a few years ago when it was time to replace his 2000 Mazda Protégé. And the Prius was on his radar, so much so that he visited a Toyota dealer to check one out.
Bloomberg recently had an interesting headline: Self-driving cars could have a vomit problem.
It reports that ride-share drivers — those working for companies such as Lyft and Uber — are already discovering a downside of the public that retailers, restaurateurs and hoteliers have always known: People are pigs. It makes perfect sense the same people who use white hotel towels to wipe their muddy shoes and return used appliances in sealed boxes will treat a hired ride just as poorly. Heck, some people treat their own cars in ways that would make you shudder.
My son has worked at car dealerships and brought home horror stories of trade-ins. One day he said they simply taped off the steering assembly and part of the dash and took a power washer to the interior of the car to try to blast out the unknown spills and garbage stuck to every surface.
But the tales of the doings and spewings of those under the watchful eye of an actual driver have given rise to a previously left-out factor of the brave new world of full autonomy: Who will determine if that self-driving ride you just hailed arrives in good shape?
Those developing the tech as well as the mechanics of our promised road nirvana are forgetting the single thing that has thrown the wrench into nearly every work in history: human behaviour.
Testing for autonomous cars is underway all over the globe. While engineers tackle issues making sure their software can recognize that building or this traffic signal or that hydrant, consider what testers in India are running up against: People don’t just create their own road rules, they create their own vehicles or even sort-of vehicles.
According to Tata Motors (which owns Jaguar Land Rover), current software can’t figure out what fifteen per cent of the vehicles on the road in India actually are. The learning curve is steep.
In the spirit of who needs people, turn that lens to the interior. Both car manufacturers and software companies have been so intent on being first across the autonomous finish line that they’ve neglected to factor in who will do the scut work. If my kid barfs in my car, it’s easy to know who’s cleaning it up.
But just as some people are content to leave a trashed hotel room or dinner table in their wake, it seems many are hauling slush and greasy fingers into a hired car. And worse. Ask any cabbie for his or her worst puke story and watch them try to choose one.
Uber has a puke policy, though they don’t call it that. News reports in Toronto recently were littered with Uber users finding their account hit with a $150 cleanup charge.
As expected, most were livid, saying they’d done nothing in their ride to merit the smack.
Chat rooms for Uber drivers are filled with the tips and tricks for drivers who find themselves carting home vomiting revellers or, for some reason, people who can’t hold their pee. Take photos, they’re told, and report it immediately. There is a sliding scale that Uber will recompense depending on the grossness. I’ll admit a little pee is better than a lot of pee, but still, pee.
I know people who share or pool a rented ride. If it’s on your app, you pay if someone else let’s a bodily fluid rip.
This may be an individual driver’s concern at this point. But most ride-share programs envision doing away with the driver eventually with the coming full autonomy. We’ve all seen questionable behaviour on trains or subways and I have airplane stories that would curl your hair. I just can’t imagine what would happen without witnesses. Wait. Yes, I can. A great deal of money and effort is pouring into the race to make autonomous cars reliable and safe. The emerging story of how to actually keep them clean may be a whole other industry.
I spent a weekend in New Liskeard once, a tiny town in northern Ontario. They do an annual Bikers Reunion every Canada Day. The place is inundated with visitors and drunken revellers. I took a cab back to my hotel (after a one-hour wait) and asked my driver what he did if he had a barfer.
“Two hundred bucks,” he responded. “They get charged two hundred bucks.”
Realizing that it was overwhelmingly drunks who called for cabs at events like this, I wondered if the steep surcharge was actually enforceable.
“We only have two cars,” he responded. “You can’t hide puke.”
Seems the new heroes of the autonomous ride-sharing age might just be the car detailers.