Fun motoring facts from OSV

As a bit of summer fun OSV have pulled together some fun facts that might get one’s mental motor running.

For instance, while there are more cars than people in LA, most cars around the globe spend 95% of their lifetime parked up.

Interestingly, the average age of the cars filling Britain’s parking spaces is just over seven years, and a quarter of them were made in China. That sounds like an enormous amount of imports for one country, but in 1916, 55% of all cars were model T Fords which is an unbeaten record – and they were famously available in any colour, only if it was black. Now, the most popular car colour in the world is white.

Some contend that the self-drive car will put an end to speeding for good and could reduce accidents by 90% – putting them on par with roundabouts, which have been shown to reduce fatalities from accidents by around 90%.

The self-drive car builds upon the technology originally designed for cruise control – something which was invented by a blind man. Hopefully he did not live in New York as he’d never have been able to try it out, as it’s written into the city statute that blind people are not allowed to drive a car there, in light of ‘safety concerns’.

In the EU, on the other hand, it’s electric vehicles causing concern. The result of this is that all electric or hybrid cars will be required to make an artificial noise to make them safer for pedestrians. And while it might seem to have taken an age for electric cars to have become a reality, what many people don’t know, is that the very first Porsche was electric, back in 1931.