Biblically Terrible

Every now an then I come across an article that is hilarious as well as informative.  Jeremy Clarkson, writing for the Sunday Times, has definitely come up with just such an article.

I am most certainly in favor of increasing fuel efficiency for automobiles, but, to put it mildly, it appears that Mr. Clarkson did not have a good experience test driving the Honda Insight.  Here is an excerpt from the article:

“Much has been written about the Insight, Honda’s new low-priced hybrid. We’ve been told how much carbon dioxide it produces, how its dashboard encourages frugal driving by glowing green when you’re easy on the throttle and how it is the dawn of all things. The beginning of days.

So far, though, you have not been told what it’s like as a car; as a tool for moving you, your friends and your things from place to place.

So here goes. It’s terrible. Biblically terrible. Possibly the worst new car money can buy. It’s the first car I’ve ever considered crashing into a tree, on purpose, so I didn’t have to drive it any more.

The biggest problem, and it’s taken me a while to work this out, because all the other problems are so vast and so cancerous, is the gearbox. For reasons known only to itself, Honda has fitted the Insight with something called constantly variable transmission (CVT).

It doesn’t work. Put your foot down in a normal car and the revs climb in tandem with the speed. In a CVT car, the revs spool up quickly and then the speed rises to match them. It feels like the clutch is slipping. It feels horrid.

And the sound is worse. The Honda’s petrol engine is a much-shaved, built-for-economy, low-friction 1.3 that, at full chat, makes a noise worse than someone else’s crying baby on an airliner. It’s worse than the sound of your parachute failing to open. Really, to get an idea of how awful it is, you’d have to sit a dog on a ham slicer.

So you’re sitting there with the engine screaming its head off, and your ears bleeding, and you’re doing only 23mph because that’s about the top speed, and you’re thinking things can’t get any worse, and then they do because you run over a small piece of grit.”

The entire article can be found here:  Sunday Times Honda Insight Review

I think Honda may need to go back to the drawing board.

Eminent Domain

Since I was a kid I have pondered the issue of eminent domain. This is when the government takes private property for the public betterment. I thought this power was reserved for building roads or schools, hospitals or some other public use. However, it appears that sometimes private property is taken away from a private individual only to be used for some other private use in the name of “the greater good”.

I just finished reading “Little Pink House” by Jeff Benedict that details the events leading up to the landmark United States Supreme Court case of Kelo v. City of New London. It is an excellent book and I really like Benedict’s writing style. I am amazed at the people who agreed to be interviewed for the book.

I must admit that I had heard of the case and didn’t want to read about it because I disagreed with the 5-4 US Supreme Court decision to allow the city of New London to take away Susette Kelo’s and others houses for an urban development project. However, the ending of the book is comfortably satisfying.

One thing that still puzzles me is the split of the supreme court. The judges that are considered liberal (Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, and Stevens) are on the wrong side of this argument as far as I am concerned. They sided with the City of New London that the homeowners should be evicted. I would think that they would be on the side of the “common person”. The judges who are considered conservative (Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas) all sided with the homeowners against giving the land to a private company for development. Normally I would think that these judges would be on the side of private industry. Go figure.