Hey guys, it looks like everyday’s got a new treat in store on Venntertainment – yesterday, you got Conor and his take on the latest celebrity gossip. As for today, well, just in case you hadn’t gotten over that, I’m pleased to announce I’m now also going to be here every Friday for as long as we can both get along together, you and I. I’m Andy Mcfarlane, from youlovethatsh.com, where I write about whatever’s bothering me, usually as and how I feel – and that’s more or less what I’ll be doing here, by giving you a weekly rant on a topic that’s driving me nuts. Hopefully you’ll enjoy, so here we go…
'Ok, I'll put a faulty accelerator pedal in here, and then you put a dodgy brake pedal in the next one'...
One of my oldest tricks for evading the timely handing-in of college or schoolwork, since I was about 10, was always to wait for someone else to go up and announce their excuse initially, then come directly next in line with my own excuse and hope that someone would also come after and thus, cover up for me – the aim of the game essentially, was to have whoever was grading the papers or whatever to clearly remember the first person’s face and the last person’s excuse, but nothing really about the person in the middle; me. And while I always presumed it was a bit of a shoddy way of doing things, my doubts over the tactic were alleviated this week when car manufacturers, at one point anyway, literally seemed to be racing to try and deliver the news that some element of their vehicles was likely to result in either a high-speed crash with a tree, end up sitting inside a potential inferno or find out too late that your brakes were not quite as effective as you may have hoped.
First, Toyota announced that they’re going to have to recall 4.5 million cars (26,000 of which are here in Ireland) due to an accelerator that may at some point become useful only if you happen to be on a never-ending runway. Then, literally the next day, Honda, obviously hoping that Toyota would still be taking most of the stick, came out and announced that some of their electric windows, devices that you might want to use to cool yourself down, can actually in some cases make you warm. Very warm in fact; fiery warm. Peugeot obviously saw what was going and decided to cut in on the action – after all, good or bad publicity, it’s still publicity – and announced that since they make some of their accelerators in the same place as Toyota, they too wanted a healthy number of their cars returned to them. To top it all off, Toyota came back at us once again, with braking problems with their hybrid, the Prius. Quite aside from the fact that the supposedly great carmakers are obviously throwing together any old rubbish, is the issue that Toyota is what’s going to stick in their mind. What are they thinking? Hadn’t someone told them the way it works? You try and come up in the middle of the bad news, or at the beginning, but not the beginning and the end.
Taxi Drivers hold up a Dublin Bus; 'It's not fair you don't have a faulty pedal'...
If you need to make an excuse for something, you do it once, quickly and quietly. I have to admit, I admire Honda in all this, because actually, their announcement was so difficult to remember that I had to go and look it up again – I remember Toyota much more clearly. Come on, these guys must be nearly the only profitable car manufacturers (the whole lot, not just Toyota) going at the moment – how can they possibly be making such large-scale mess-ups? The only thing that consoles me greatly through all this is thinking back to my days working in the airport; no, not the queues at security, I mean all the taxi’s parked outside at 6am in the morning waiting for an incoming barrage of Americans. All complaining about the weather. All putting their meters on the second they eye-spied someone coming even remotely close to their cars. All driving…Toyota Corolla’s. In fact, I’m actually quite surprised that we haven’t seen a taxi strike (like the one pictured) over this yet. Still, for a group of carmakers so wealthy, I can’t believe they made these idiotic mistakes – I knew there was always a good reason never to try and sit the practical test again – mind you, that could also have had something to do with how bad my driving was, in fact, yeah I’m quite sure that was it…
Until next week!
