I have just heard some news which has made me wish I had a spare £120,000 – not that I don’t always wish I had a spare £120,000.

An American company in Indiana, called Fibreglass Freaks, has made 14 replicas of the Batmobile from the 1960s TV series, Batman. One has already been bought by someone in the UK and shipped across the pond to British soil.

The replica is a fully functioning vehicle and even comes with some Batmobile gadgets such as roll-top dashboard doors and the famous flame-throwing exhaust, which unsurprisingly has had to be toned down for real-life road use.

The car has been modernised a little, with a sound system and DVD player, but this impressive motor vehicle is nearly six metres in length – so good luck finding a parking space.

Still, now that I know they’re available, I can’t help but want a Batmobile of my very own.

It is sometimes difficult to distinguish sarcasm in written language, so to give you fair warning the following sentence should be read in a sarcastic tone of voice.

Councils want to raise parking penalties to £120 – Yey! (Sarcasm finished.)

As if young drivers didn’t have to fork out enough money already on car insurance, there’s a possibility that parking tickets in many areas of the UK will increase because councils are starved of money after the coalition government’s cuts.

They aren’t saying that of course. Instead they are arguing that the increase in car park prices calls for an increase in the penalties too, otherwise motorists won’t be deterred enough.

I think that if car park meters are charging more, surely having to pay any extra amount of money in the form of a penalty is enough of a deterrent for most drivers.

I personally am loath to hand over even one pound more than I need to – but maybe that’s just me.

Labels: car insurance, young drivers

Never mind the rise of the CD and the MP3, singing roads are the future and we've heard it.

In certain places, all over the planet, little bumps on top of the tarmac or grooves cut into the road play music as car tyres drive over them, but there is a problem though – some of the tunes aren’t very good.

Bump up the volume in Denmark
The Danes claim to have had the very first musical road. Created in October 1995, The Asphaltophone consists of thousands of little bumps stuck to a highway in Gylling, Østjylland, by two Danish artists Steen Krarup Jensen and Jakob Freud-Mangus.

We can’t tell you what the tune is, but the patterns are very pretty.








A little bit of Seoul music
When Korea decided that they wanted a musical road, in 2006, it was built in a Seoul suburb by the Korean Highway Corporation and they called it a Singing Road.

Located on a downhill slope, on which many accidents had occurred, it was meant to be a novel way to keep sleepy drivers awake. However, the gentle rhythms of Mary had a little lamb may not have been the best choice of song?



Karaoke cars
Japan, possibly spurred on by the success of their close neighbour Korea’s musical road, created three Melody Roads of their own in 2008.

The roads each play half a minute of different Japanese pop songs. There is one in Wakayama, one in Kyu and the last in Hokkaido and these were created by grooves in the tarmac, instead of raised bumps.

Drivers are warned that something’s afoot by large coloured musical notes which have been painted onto the road-surface.

Visitors to Mount Fuji are also in for a little bit of light entertainment. One of the roads leading up to Mount Fuji plays a song entitled Fuji no Yama – The Mountain of Fuji. Now, that’s a novel idea!.



Highway to Hell with William Tell
California used to have a musical road which played the William Tell Overture for a quarter of a mile as motorists drove along. The supposedly tuneful grooves were cut into a road in Lancaster, USA, by the car manufacturer Honda as an advertising gimmick.

However, locals living near the road got sick to the back teeth of constantly hearing the song every time someone drove past – even in the middle of the night! So, it was paved over only a few weeks after it had come into existence.

The groovy tune can now be heard on Avenue G, which is apparently in between 30th Street West, and 40th Street West. It doesn’t sound a lot like the William Tell Overture most of us would recognise, but it’s a bit of fun nonetheless. Rumour has it that the people who cut the grooves got the sizing all wrong. We think the comment made by the guy who shot this video is just right though.



Now, there's a road that needs a tune-up!

In the early hours of Halloween, I bet that some Northern Line Tube passengers were probably wishing they’d just travelled by car.

A witch’s hat had been thrown onto the rails by some drunken sorceress and it caused a power failure. What black magic is this? You may be thinking.

In fact, disappointingly as always, there was a perfectly boring explanation for the event.

The hat contained some metal, no doubt in the rim, and the belief is that when it touched the 630-volt rail at Chalk Farm station, a power failure occurred.

It stalled four trains in total, and passengers on the Northern line, many dressed up for the night of Halloween festivities, had to get out of their train, which had stopped between stations, and walk through the tunnel to get to the safety of Kentish Town station after the Tube train came to a halt.

A public relations executive from Archway, said that although Tube staff and British Transport Police were of great help to the passengers, “It didn't help that every five minutes you'd bump into a mummy, a zombie or a man with a bullet through his head.”

No, I can’t imagine that did much for the nerves.

What a way to spend the first hours of Halloween – in a dark tunnel full of monsters!

A warning to all who have recently passed their driving practical – first, congratulations – now, get cheap car insurance for new drivers before it’s too late.

In 2013, which may seem far away but will come quickly, a new super-speed camera will be introduced to Europe which can basically detect all driving offences; one of which is being an uninsured driver.

This powerful new camera, in its testing phase in Finland at the moment, is called the Multi-functional Asset Camera.

On top of many other things, it can read your licence plate, and check police data to see if you have a licence and are paying your road tax.

Pretty impressive and rather scary at the same time.

Getting really cheap car insurance for new drivers seems to be an even better idea than ever.


Image © amandabhslater via Flickr, under Creative Commons Licence

Labels: car insurance for new drivers, really cheap car insurance

Finding a parking space has long seemed like a kind of purgatory: waiting in multi-storeys, endlessly circling and re-circling towns and cities in the hope of finding somewhere to wedge my car in, only to find that some chancer has snatched the space at just the moment I’ve decided to change radio stations. However, it is only recently that the true cost of searching for a parking space has been revealed.

Parking company NCP has revealed that drivers spend as much as a year of their lives searching for that elusive parking space. This is certainly not the civic dream that was sold to our parents in the 1950s and 1960s.

NCP’s chief operating officer commented, "Parking should be simple, but in reality it is a stressful experience for most of us.

"There's often a lot of pressure on us from other passengers, people waiting behind you, and then there's the added time pressure too.

"It's bad enough we're spending so much time sitting in traffic jams, commuting on busy motorways or taking the children to school. Parking should be the easiest part."

According to the survey, the average motorist spends around 35 minutes looking for a parking space each day; more time than many of us get to spend with our friends.

I guess the inescapable reality of overcrowded cities bereft of free parking spaces just makes it all the more important that we save time in other ways, such as going straight to Hoot to find the cheapest car insurance on the market.