Cars are tiny here...and people are fab at parallel parking. Obviously SUV-itis is a North American disease.
There's the standard VW Jetta-ish car, and then Alfa Romeos and Peugeots.
I noticed that the area where the license plate goes is long and narrow to fit the European sized license plate. I can't seem to recall if the license plate area in Canada is the same shape? I mean, I know that car companies make different North American and European models, but does the license plate area differ? Some license plates are the same size as Canadian ones however.
Most cars that I've seen are hatchback-esque with small bums.
I've also seen a lot of Smart cars which are super small. For some reason I was impressed because I thought it meant the Swiss were all up on the enviro-healthy cars, but I've been told that I'm thinking of the wrong thing. What's the one that runs on electricity or something?
Anyway, I still think Smart cars are cool. With a name like "Smart" you can't go wrong.
Last friday I saw an Amelie pedal-bike (can't wait to go to Paris in November and search out the "Cafe de deux Moulins").
The coolest thing I've seen in Neuch is the BMW C1. Canadians have to jump on that bandwagon. You'd be fab in my books if you got one.
3 comments:
you're thinking of "hybrid" cars, those are the environmental cars.
These socalled environmentally friendly or clean cars are really misleading. Take the "hybrid", most of them are actually dual-fuelled or dual-system vehicles. They run on gasoline-fuelled internal combustion engine plus some extra hardware to accept natural-gas or propane fuel, or with a separate electric drive powered by some sort of batteries. There is also the one that uses fuel cell that can convert natural gas or propane type of fuel directly into electricity to run a motor to power the car. Of course there is also the "electric car" that uses batteries to run the motor to move the car. Why do I say "environmentally friendly" is misleading? Because they are not necessarily so when you take the entire chain into account. Yes, natural gas or propane runs "cleaner" than gasoline if you measure certain types of exhaust they produce. And electric car does not produce exhaust gas. From the urban confine point of view, they are cleaner. But when you look at the batteries, where do you get the electricity to charge the batteries? The electric receptacles in your garage of course you would say. But where does that elctricity come from and how? Well, OPG or the powerplant has to produce it, with hydro, nuclear and very likely fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas in most cases). That part produces pollution too. The electric car driver might claim his/her car is clean because it does not emit any exhaust gas, but that is false because someone else emit lots of pollutants on his behalf (to get him electricity to charge his batteries to run his car) and you can say this electric car driver simply sticks his head in the sand. When I say "lots of pollutants" earlier, I mean what is generated during the combustion process but not necessarily emitted because with large powerplant they can more cost effectively put in pollution control devices to reduce emission. Another point to remember is that while using electricity is quite efficient, the conversion of energy from the fuel to electricity is still quite low (i.e. the fuel efficiency) and for a coal/oil/gas powerplant it can be in the low 30% and even the combined cycle is only in the 50% or 60%. What I am saying is that one must look at the entire chain, simply taking or looking at a block in a long chain and make a conclusion is misleading to say the least. Remember the Chinese saying about three blind men touching an elephant? The one who touches the trunk says the elephant is smooth, the one touching the leg says it is a column and the one touching the body says the elephant is a wall.
Hydrogen car is really clean because burning hydrogen produces water and no pollution. Unfortunately they have been talking about hydrogen-fuelled cars since 1960s but where are they. How do you produce or get inexpensive hydrogen is the problem. You can separate some from natural gas but not enough to run everybody's car. Yes, simple chemical lab experiment we all have tell us we can make it from water by electrolysis. Bingo, we are back to square one, how do we get the electricity to do the electrolysis.
There are those environmentalists who think solar or wind power can cure the problems. I hope the sun is out when they watch hockey night in Canada if they rely on their solar panel to run their television. It is just announced that a consortium of three companies is going to develop a wind farm in the Bruce penningsula area. They need 50 windmills just to generate 75MW. A Nanticoke unit is 500MW and a Darlington unit is over 900MW. They are going to locate the windmills 5 to 10km from the shoreline so that it would not be an eyesore for those tourists/cottagers enjoying the water. But what about those people on the land. I hope people can sleep with the sound of the windmill in their neigbourhood.
This is quite a long comment. My point is: we should not look in isolation. Y
After I posted that long comment, it seemed that I have misspelled a word. Rereading it again, I found that word in the following paragraph:
"Remember the Chinese saying about three blind men touching an elephant? The one who touches the *trunk* says the elephant is smooth, the one touching the leg says it is a column and the one touching the body says the elephant is a wall."
The misspelled word was *trunk* and it should have been "tusk" as you can see I said it was smooth. In the case of those three men, they are all right and they are also all wrong. Right, because it reflects the part they each feels but wrong, because the part they each feels does not reflect the entire elephant. Looking at thing is isolation can be quite misleading.
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