G’Day and welcome to Overdrive, where we experiment with ideas and activities to do with cars and transport and their impact on our culture.
I’m David Brown
In the program we are joined by motoring journalist Paul Murrell to ruminate on
- The gentleman who renovated his house so that he can keep his HQ Holden Monaro in the lounge room
- The Mazda CX-3 and the image of Mazda that has made it successful but will it continue.
- Look at executive vehicles and compare the Audi e-tron with the Kia EV9.
- Discuss the carbon footprint of classic cars.
A more detail rundown of the program
Making an HQ Holden Monaro a lounge room feature
00:01:47
A Queensland man renovates his home and who’s put this HQ Holden in his lounge room.
We tend to sort of put cars on a pedestal, both literally and figuratively. If you’re in that much in love with a car, you wanna be looking at it more often. And if it’s all locked away in the garage, then you probably don’t see it as often as you would like.
There’s a story many years ago with the chap who was a bit of a Mustang nut.
And he was having his house built and the builder came to him and said I think your architects made a mistake here, Sir. And the chap said, “Why, what’s what’s the mistake”? And he said, well, it seems to me that you’ve got the garage and the lounge room sort of reversed. And what he had done was he actually had the garage in such a position that there was a big glass window between the lounge room and the garage, and he can sit there and look at his Mustang.
Gary MacDonald, an Australian Comic Actor, di a skit parodying a television car show by Peter Wherrett where he was road testing a Morris minor.
He was driving the Morris Minor up and multi Lane Rd talking about its power and performance and another car in the background zooms past.
MacDonald eventually goes to bed with a Goggomobil
Mazda CX-3 How does it fit the Mazda Image
00:09:48
Mazda sales o far this year are done a bit, but it has been #2 for a while.
But they have been the quiet achiever in many ways.
They tend to be well put together. Interiors in particular are nice, so people judge them almost on a on an out of date image if you like. They haven’t really changed a great deal. They’ve had their odd issues here and there, but they present as cars slightly better than their price would suggest.
They have the CX3, they have the CX 30 and then they have the MX30 and you and I of course deal with these things all the time and even we get confused about which is which.
Mazda owns the elegant small SUV image if you like.
Kia EV9 versus an Audi e-tron – Which is the best executive car
00:19:54
Driving the Kia EV9. It is a large, some say ugly SUV. All electric with good electric performance and a lot of features to it. Then I hopped into an Audi sedan, a big sedan, the E Tron GT, and it made me think if I was an executive of a large company and wanted to both be pampered and appear to be pampered, I wonder which one I’d take.
You would never normally put those two cars in the same in the same ballpark, in the same sentence. I mean, the Audi E, Tron GT and the Kia EV9 are, on almost any level, very different vehicles.
But, they both appeal in many ways to a cashed up executive who’s probably doing it on a on a salary sacrifice and whatever.
But the back seat of large sedans are only comfortable when you push the front passenger seat as far forward as possible.
Whereas if you sit in the back of the EV9, there’s a lot of room and the top of the range EV9 has heated and cooled seats in the front AND second row of seats.
The EV9 is well suited for the executive trip to the airport. Situations where the look of the vehicle is not important but would not suit as a wedding car.
In the upper large sedans and it’s over $100,000 category, the Porsche Panamera is #1, but don’t get too excited about it so far this year (the first quarter of 2024) they’ve sold 12.
Paul, yes, indeed, David. You should know that by now. I am a great fan of classic cars and.
How much do Classic cars contribute to pollution
00:36:33
You also know that I’ve objected fairly strenuously to the barrage of PR we’re getting about electric vehicles are going to save the world. Well, not perhaps as much as we would have thought. A recent study by Footman James, who is a UK classic car insurer, has claimed that classic cars are in fact greener than E vehicles.
Its all to do with the amount of energy to produce a new car.
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Originally broadcast 13 April 2024
