Hello and welcome to Overdrive a program that ponders the purpose of cars and transport

In the news

1. Jaguar Land Rover: new vehicle for a new approach (1:20)

2. Can the Haval H9 SUV make it here? (2:07)

3. The standout design feature in the Citroen C5 (3:08)

4. A hydrogen-electric ute (4:04)

5. A new meaning to “Heavy Metal Fan”: (5:00)

6. We put a call in to the UK to speak to their head of Future Mobility Dr Tim Leverton about where Jaguar is going in the future (6:04)

7. And Brian Smith has some quirky news

• Electric Planes (13:56)

• Segway mobile chair (17:53)

You can find more information at Driven Media or previous programs are available as podcasts on iTunes or Spotify. OR our Facebook site OverdriveCity

So, let’s start with the news

Originally broadcast 29 February 2020

DB: Alan Finlay is a great friend of the program and is a respected traffic engineer and transport planner. His family has had twelve Holdens over the years with a predominance in the early part, I believe.

DB: Alan, I looked at your first six cars, the first five from an FJ to an EH were Specials and the next one at H.K. was a premier. Were you the rich family in the street we all envied?

AF: No, not at all, though. We were very much a middle-class family, but something I don't know what it was in 1969, probably with a bit of goading from me, convinced my father that he should go up a level and get the premier for his next car. The other thing I remember about that car is that I talked him into the more powerful 186S six-cylinder motor rather than just the one eight six.

DB: The S was it a performance car.

AF: Absolutely not. I mean, the FC Holden, I remember well, which was my mother's car, which was bought secondhand. I think when I was about 4 years old, I remember some very cold trips in that car going up to the Blue Mountains in winter with no heater and of course, no radio. And we all had to take blankets and other stuff to keep us warm.

DB: And that was the special. Now, you raced an E H. Holden was their great success with that.

AF: I wouldn't say great success. It was a bog-standard, Holden EH1 7 9 manual, so it had a large 179 cubic inch motor and manual transmission. It was not the much-coveted S4, which was a special Bathurst edition that Holden put together to try and win us, which had slightly better brakes and a few other things. But I wouldn't say it was greatly successful. But in its class, which I think was in 2000 to 3000 cc category for standard production cars on a good day, I could be up in the sort of second or third place, get a situation.

DB: Did it have a 179 badge on the back? They were special.

AF: They were. Yes. And thankfully, mine stayed on the back of the car and didn't become a belt buckle, which happened to a lot of other 179 batches.

DB: The EH that you raced went out with a bang?

AF: Yes, it did. I was competing at a hill climb at Amaroo Park in the early 70s and trying to better my times. It was towards the end of the day. And I think I'd had about six runs and I was going for a really good time on what would have been my second last run. And as I revved the car to its limit in first gear, I heard an almighty bang and I thought the worst. I thought I'd blown the motor. But as it turned out, the bang was created by one of the fan blades coming off the fan and actually almost piercing right through the bonnet. The fan blade was actually sticking out through the bonnet, and thankfully the rest of the motor in the car was alright. So the solution was to actually remove the whole fan blade assembly and then another frame friendly and helpful competitor managed to have a hacksaw in his tool kit and so we sawed off the other half of the blade that was still attached to the assembly and put it back on the car. So I limped home with a two-bladed rather than a four-bladed fan. Thankfully, didn't get stuck in heavy traffic, so didn't overheat.

DB: You did that for balance, didn't you?

AF: Yes, absolutely. Because otherwise, it had three blades on the fan and of course, one of them was completely offset by not having its mate on the other side of the hub. So it would have been a very noisy and vibrating sort of operation of the engine if we hadn't taken the other blade off.

DB: Alan lovely to talk to you. Thank you very much for your time.

AF: Thanks, David. Always, always happy to talk.

DB: That's Alan Finlay, a person who came from a family of devout Holden owners for a while until final reality settled in with times that were a-changing.

Hello and welcome to Overdrive, a program that practices what it preaches, most of the time, on the subject of cars and transport.

This week we concentrate on Holden, that famous Australia car brand that will soon cease to exist.

In the news

1. From Craft to economies of scale (1:22)

2. General Motors did the Holden name well (2:32)

3. Was the first Holden that good (3:37)

4. Button plan (4:32)

5. Did Holden build the wrong type of cars (5:39)

6. And we hear from a range of people whose families owned holdens from the first model.

• Fred Brain and 1969 350 Monaro (6:52)

• Terry Thompson owning old Holden (15:53)

• Alan Finlay – racing and EH (21:02

You can find more information at Driven Media or previous programs are available as podcasts on iTunes or Spotify. OR our Facebook site OverdriveCity

So, let’s start with the news

Originally broadcast 22 February 2020

Hello and welcome to Overdrive a program that samples and savours the world of cars and transport

1. Coronavirus leads to parts shortage (1:18)

2. Hyundai/Canoo to co-develop all-electric platform (2:05)

3. Mazda CX-30 (2:58)

4. Audi Sales – at last some good news (3:48)

5. Formula 1: 'carbon neutral' by 2030? (4:36)

6. And car ads at the Superbowl

• Audi’s weird one (5:52)

• Kia’s sentimental one (14:14)

• Genesis’ attempt at humour (18:03)

You can find more information at Driven Media or previous programs are available as podcasts on iTunes or Spotify. OR our Facebook site OverdriveCity

So, let’s start with the news

Originally broadcast 15 February 2020

Hello and welcome to Overdrive where we climb the hills, tackle the bends and endure the potholes of issues to do with motoring and transport.

1. Volkswagen leads in global sales (1:25)

2. Jaguar Land Rover’s better seat (2:22)

3. DeLorean comeback (3:26)

4. Honk more, wait more (4:26)

5. Sustainable transport - Carrots and sticks (5:10)

6. We hear from BMW about their latest update you can get over the internet (6:52)

7. We have an interview with Damien Meredith from Kia on what is different in buyers minds now from the past and (11:52)

8. We have a chat with Brian smith on making people movers look less ugly (17:14)

You can find more information at Driven Media or previous programs are available as podcasts on iTunes or Spotify. OR our Facebook site OverdriveCity

So, let’s start with the news

Originally broadcast 8 February 2020

Damien Meredith is the Chief Operating Officer for Kia Australia.

He is a down to earth bloke that knows that his first task is to sell cars now, which will then provide the foundation for future developments.

In the full year of 2019 when the market declined by 7.8%, Kia did what no other top ten manufacturer did, it increased its sales over 2018 volumes.

It is not all wonder and light. The increase was due to a 16.5% increase in Kia’s Cerato. All their other models decreased, although the reduction was mostly better than average. Part of the decline may have been some cannibalising of existing model sales by their new Seltos small SUV that they bought onto the market in mid-October and by the end of the year it had sold over 2,000 vehicles.

Towards the end of 2020, they will bring in an even smaller SUV, the Stonic.

We caught up with Damien, in a bit of a noisy area at the Australian Open Tennis tournament for which Kia is the major sponsoring partner.

Hello and welcome to Overdrive, a program that ponders the philosophical and the practical aspects of motoring and transport.

• Car sales for 2019 (1:33)

• Another airbag recall (2:33)

• Rolls Royce Car Sales are booming (3:35)

• Making ‘Ice Missiles’ illegal (4:54)

• Motoring Minute – Lotus Electric (6:13)

• What to do in a car in a bush fire (7:38)

• Motoring Minute – Maserati Levante SUV (2:17)

• Kia’s quest for greater sales (13:24)

• Car value if previously owned by a celebrity? (14:25)

• Motoring Minute – Maserati Levante SUV (16:38)

• Banjo Paterson and transport data (17:49)

• Quirky news – Road testing a Kombi (20:33)

You can find more information at Driven Media or previous programs are available as podcasts on iTunes or Spotify. OR our Facebook site OverdriveCity

So, let’s start with the news

Originally broadcast 1 February 2020

Hello this is Overdrive a program about the facts, the fun and the fiction of motoring and transport

1. ACCC issues new Takata airbag warning for thousands of cars (1:35)

2. The $73b company with no name: Fiat Chrysler, Peugeot (2:45)

3. Holden announces exclusive SUV and Ute line-up (3:35)

4. NSW’s smartphone-detecting traffic cams go live this weekend (5:31)

5. Stink bugs delay Hyundai & Kia Shipments (6:22)

6. New Kia logo (7:53)

7. ‘Smart’ headphones to warn pedestrians of road dangers being developed (8:19)

8. Last week we spoke of the top of the range Nissan Navarra N trek Warrior dual cab ute. We covered the specifications now this week Rob Fraser takes it down the Blue Rag track in Victoria (9:45)

9. And I play part of an interview I did for a radio documentary on disability and transport (16:10)

10. And in Quirky news – Brian Smith and I discuss how car companies help the Apollo Space mission (31:20)

You can find more information at Driven Media or previous programs are available as podcasts on iTunes or Spotify. OR our Facebook site OverdriveCity

So, let’s start with the news

At the premiere of the movie Machine, which is a documentary film about artificial intelligence, one of the featured experts was Professor Toby Walsh. Professor Walsh is a leading researcher in artificial intelligence who has held research positions all over Europe and also in Australia, including the University of New South Wales. He was named by a newspaper as a rock star of Australian Digital Revolution (but that was The Australian).

The movie touches on autonomous driving and there is an item from an interview with Audi’s Head of Predevelopment specifically about autonomous driving later in this newsletter.

But I also interviewed Prof Walsh. Too often we approach a subject from our special interest area and fail to look at the broader context that will be driven by politics, business and even crime. Transport implications could be outweighed but many other factors.

The key approach that Prof Walsh says we need to take is how we give time and effort to what we feed into these artificial machines and time and effort to analyse the nature of the outcomes.

Dyan Currie is the Chief Planner for Brisbane City Council and she was also the president of the Planning Institute of Australia (PIA) at the time Kirsty Kelly was the CEO. It was a significant time and one that is worth reflecting on.

We had a chat with Dyan soon after Kirsty Kelly (who Dyan worked with at the PIA) joined the AITPM.

• Place Making

• Applying a sense of place to work and institute Environments

• The Value of Organisations supporting participation in Institutes

• Working with Kirsty at PIA means understanding the nature of members and their interaction with the Institute

• Transport very much involves an eclectic range of Professions

• Social Media

• Dealing with Change

• Working with the political process