Listed works for sale from first solo show

Naturally I didn't sell everything from the first show I held, so I found a site called Bluethumb where you ca list your works for sale. I did the measurements and weight yesterday for a number of works (see below). It was a relatively painless process made a bit more difficult by the fact that my phone was on low charge so I had to sit in the lounge chair instead of on the couch.

Bridge 9340, 2023 (watercolour colalge and posca on paper)

FOCARE II, 2023 (watercolour and collage on paper)

FOCARE VI, 2023 (watercolour and collage on paper)

Social animals III, 2023 (mixed media)

Trial by media, 2023 (watercolour and collage on paper)

I have other things to list on Bluethumb and will get around to it in the future. I hope someone sees the works and likes them enough to buy. I haven't thought too much about packaging because I think it's a bridge to cross when I get to it, my first goal is to get a "view" on Bluethumb.

What do you think? Are these the sorts of things you'd like to have on your wall? Do they make any sense at all? It's Pop art I think, at least that's the way I classified them in Bluethumb. You can put in little descriptions as well where you can note your influences or write down any explanatory ttext detailing what your work is mean to be about. But these things are all relative. When I see these works I see one thing but when someone else sees them they might see something completely different.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say. For me, this journey is just beginning and I have been making lots of new work over the past few weeks. I made two paintings last night, for example, which feature cars and koalas. You can guess my meaning already?

Automobile transition series

This week I flattened out a whole slew of paintings. What happens is that if you don’t use good paper with lots of water the paintings dry curled, so I popped down to IGA on the off-chance they’d have a squirter bottle to fill with water. 

In fact this one was the last one on the shelf so for the rest of the day I sprayed the backs of paintings than weighed them down with heavy books as per the instructions I’d got from Google. 

It worked so well that I decided to revisit one series and add a closure to round out the viewing experience.

It’s a sort of comic/conceit that I’m going to call ‘Automobile transition’ in order to tap into the zeitgeist and capitalise on a popular theme. In fact the series DOES show change from one state to another and back again.

The original paintings were done in November so it goes a LONG way into the past. When I first did the paintings I started out by experimenting, just following my intuition. In the same way that in October I began in Pitt Street Mall to paint leaves, when I started to use collage it seemed natural to make leaves as well.

Abstract series

On Thursday I was due to meet friends for dinner in Darlinghurst and there was a show opening also nearby to go to. A friend had furthermore offered to give me things for the baby (my daughter is expecting) so I had three reasons to go into town, and caught a bus at around 3pm. I went to the Sheraton Hotel to pick up the bibs and cap then went to Dymocks and bought some more children’s books as well as some art books.

I started reading one on abstract painters when I was in the CBD at Westfield’s food court where you can sit freely for as long as you like, then I tried getting on the train but it didn’t come so resigned myself to resorting to a bus, which I caught on Elizabeth St.

The walk down from Oxford St to Rushcutters bay was a little stressful because I was always wondering as I went along when my heart would start thumping but it stayed calm. I took in the show by myself – you can see the review on the Esag blog – then sauntered back up the hill to Victoria St where I sat down on a bench reading.

The cars were buzzing behind me and one popped and snorted as it changed gears because it was owned by a young man and he thinks that making noise is as fun for everyone else as it is for him. For about 30 minutes I wandered mentally through different worlds, art movements, manifestos, declarations etc and I came away amused at the frailty of human endeavour, we think what we do has a certain meaning and it turns out that other people (in the future, say) don’t care a fig about what we say and only admire the pretty pictures.

Last night I talked with my friend Basia about all these earnest people and their exhortations and “position statements” etc and we laughed (I love the pretty pictures though). We also talked about the abstract works I made in response to reading the book (see below), I started with an unused base watercolour from a previous series and did four more to make five in the ‘Yellow abstract’ set, then did four ‘Orange abstract’ paintings using some of the new paint I picked up on Thursday.

At dinner a friend of a friend commented on my paintings (not from the abstract series) and later I saw an SMS she sent regarding them that noted their preliminary nature, I think she wants me to make acrylic or oil paintings and use these watercolours as studies. I took this person’s words to heart thinking about the future and its mysteries but haven't moved away from my current method yet and possibly never will. I’d shown her some of my return to the ad slogan series (see below) and I hadn’t started on the abstract ones at that point. her husband also said I should use larger paper but after talking with Basia about both of these suggestions I'm deciding to stay put for the moment. I'm enjoying myself.

CAPitalism series revisited

I just can’t get enough … of the CAPitalism series, to which I’ve added four images. 

Unlike other series I think these ones work ok with collage. I don’t know exactly what it is and someone else might be better situated to comment on these artworks, but the collage in the CAPitalism (car, ad, pop music) seems to cohere with the images. 

What do you think?

In recent weeks I’ve had cars hanging on my living room walls because I reorganised the hang, I brought down from upstairs some paintings I bought 15 years back. I also put up some photos of Aunt Madge’s which I’d had framed.

On crime dramas cars have a special significance also, on Monday night I watched a particularly bizarre episode of ‘Chief Inspector Morse’ where his red Jaguar is vandalised with Masonic symbols. Morse is the suspect in a killing and another inspector is brought in to investigate the case. The attacker has a vendetta against Morse and scratches his car leaving it badly damaged. The replacement inspector is a Mason and at the end of the ep he invited Morse to join. It’s totally mad. Morse tracks the killer down to a house in Oxford and the murderer has plastered the walls with images of Morse in order to indicate in a televisual fashion that he’s obsessed with the detective. But the thing is that in this show the red car morse drives is almost like a character, when Morse and Lewis see the killer’s car in the driveway it turns out to be a Jaguar as well BUT A MORE MODERN MODEL and Morse disparagingly makes a comment so Lewis can hear. He mocks the style of the killer’s Jaguar as if the older style is MUCH BETTER when in fact (objectively speaking) you’d have to say a more modern car would be better in an engineering sense.

Then there’s Vera Stanhope’s Land Rover.

I did a four-panel painting in honour of ‘Vera’ where one panel features the car she drives, a boxy contraption square as the little hat she always wears around the traps. I did one panel for the hat as well. One for the hat and one for the car. The first and second panels are taken up with that aeroplane man statue they erected ‘Angel of the North’ or something I can’t remember I watched a YouTube video about it once. Engineering marvel. Pity the Japanese make better cars!

Bridge 9340

In a burst of creativity I completed these four paintings in one evening this week, the photos from my archives. In fact some of you might recognise the bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis up in the headwaters that collapsed under the weight of traffic in August 2007.

The bridge was rebuilt within a year, so it, like the paintings, was fixed in a rush.

Where there’s a will there’s a way. I’m using so many old Japanese sayings that it is suitable to use an ancient (like me) English saying as well. 

Over the next few days I’ll be alone as houseguests are out of town so will be doing more painting. ‘Bridge 9340’ says “please do not panic” and I’ve got sentences lined up for the next two series, I’ll see if I feel like posting them when they’re finished, enough to say that they’ll be colourful like ‘Bridge 9340’.

When I think of Bridge 9340 I also think of those forgotten spaces in cities that we use to move from one place to another. Near the entrance to the M5 here in Sydney there’s an intersection that is similarly unlovely, with constant traffic despite the existence on the road of houses. The traffic is made worse by trucks that use the surface roads even though there’s a tunnel under the suburbs they could use if they could see a way to paying the fare. Some times I imagine what it must be to live on a road that is so heavily used, but most of the time I ignore it. When I’m in the intersection I am too busy trying to negotiate the traffic to spare a thought for the residents who have to put up with the incessant noise.

Movie review: Schumacher, dir Hanns-Bruno Kammertöns, Vanessa Nöcker, and Michael Wech (2021)

This is a slower production than ‘Drive to Survive’ (which I reviewed recently) and its more poetic tendency goes right through to the end. Less dedicated to the speed of racing, it misses making some key points about Schumacher’s life (which I’ll get to later). 

The TV production has shorter segments and relies more on music to generate atmosphere but like the makers of that show Kammertons, Mocker and Wech also rely on friends and family to develop the plot leading up to 2000, the year Schumacher won the world title for Ferrari. While there are similarities between the two productions I felt that the TV show is more about the industry because it doesn’t take sides. 

‘Schumacher’ is firmly on the side of the protagonist, a shy and reclusive man who was dedicated to his wife, a woman who accompanied him around the world to complete races held in different countries. 

His modest background makes him stand apart from many Formula 1 drivers, though like his competitors he knew early on what he wanted to do with his life. Starting out with the Benneton team Schumacher quickly made his mark until he transferred to Ferrari which, at the time, was weak. Helping the team to rebuild its standing in the rankings, he continued to win even after he won the top prize. He left the team in 2006 but was restless and hungry for speed – sometimes parachuting in Dubai with his wife in tow. They remained inseparable – and this continues down to the present.

It’s his need for speed that brought Schumacher back to Formula 1, when he joined the Mercedes team. He met his match in France skiing – still searching for that elusive experience governed by speed – and has since been recovering. The filmmakers do not show Schumacher as he looks now, so viewers and fans have no opportunity to really reflect on mortality. This might’ve been an additional gift (to people with disabilities) he and his family could make but they declined. Corinne, his wife, saying that just as Michael protected them when he was capable, now that he’s not they are protecting him.

Ayrton Senna crashed and died when Schumacher was an up-and-coming driver. Unable to take a turn at speed Senna crashed into the barriers and didn’t make it out of the car alive – or if he was alive when the emergency crew extracted his body from the wreck, he soon succumbed to his injuries. It’s hardly surprising to learn that a similar – if less dramatic – fate awaited Schumacher, a man who in truth lived life in the fast lane.

TV review: Myth and Mogul: John DeLorean, Netflix (2021)

This show is very short but it’s nicely made with lovely retro establishing shots that use large-format numbers to indicated the year to which the narrative is about to turn. The numbers are set up on the screen and the years change with support from the soundtrack, scrolling until the correct year is selected. The numbers in these cases are red and in a large, bulky font that reminds you of the shape of the car, which came out in a production model in the early 1980s. 

The car had a stainless steel body and gullwing doors – they opened upward instead of outward – which, in the first batch delivered to the US for a waiting market, failed to open in some cases. This was potentially catastrophic for DeLorean but even more damaging was the change of government in the UK in favour of Margaret Thatcher. DeLorean had secured financial support from the previous (Labour) government to set up his factory in Northern Ireland and to fund initial production but Thatcher pulled the plug on supply. DeLorean subsequently got involved in an FBI sting but a couple of years later won a court case in California, saved from incarceration by a jury who felt the FBI had enticed him into the “crime”.

DeLorean’s life was epic. His wife finally left him when confronted by certain aspects of his personality that she didn’t like. From living the lifestyle of the rich and famous, DeLorean ended up selling watches online and living in an apartment in New Jersey. His legacy is cemented by a film and he was, while working for GM in the 1960s, intimately involved with the movie business. 

He had cosmetic surgery done to strengthen his jaw so that he could better fit in with the jet set, and his wife was a model. DeLorean’s poor upbringing – at least in an economic sense – probably helped to forge his narcissistic personality and his tendency to sociopathy didn’t endear him to some he had dealings with. The series might’ve been longer (it only runs to three episodes) in order to flesh out some details, including his embezzlement of funds from his motor company and in order to better explain a failed business venture involving a cooling system for cars. Overall I was happy with this show and the soundtrack is suitably vintage.

TV review: Drive to Survive, season 1, Netflix (2019)

A nice, distracting show about a complex and controversial sport, ‘Drive to Survive’ is an excellent artistic production mixing vicarious pleasure with an intense melange of visuals and sound. Beginning with some plotting around the career of Australian Daniel Ricciardo, the show delivers plenty of watchable drama. 

I never watch Formula 1 racing though when I was younger and interested in all sport I paid attention to some highlights and I vividly remember a friend of mine at secondary school (now a lawyer) who’d rattle off the names of F1 drivers with apparent gusto, forming their syllables as though repeating an incantation that could open a view to understanding the secrets of the world. I never really in my heart saw its value (though we’d stand waiting for the bus to come announcing the marques as cars passed us on the main road), but ‘Drive to Survive’ allows you to understand that the sport is full of characters and that the names of teams that have once been linked with greatness can still lure spectators. 

The backward glance, the taking in of old newsreels, the fast cars, the superyachts, the beautiful women all generate this sense of unreality, as though the problems of the world – many of which German author W.G. Sebold in his masterful ‘The Rings of Saturn’ slates down to the matter of combustion – were too boring to be of interest. 

Motorsport is an undertaking where extreme expressions tend to be used, making it particularly suited to the medium of video. This show proves that sport certainly can be made into a temptation for spare time even for someone like me. Like sailing, it is rooted in hardware and high-tech so it attracts a certain type of person for whom such concerns as literature, fine art, and the inexpressible delight of the ephemeral can only seem to lack a certain requisite form. 

The show also allows you to see how talent and money can come into conflict. The tension that the two things create can be rich with meaning, for example when the Force India driver Esteban Ocon was forced out of the team after a rich businessman whose son drives cars bought it. “In Formula 1 you do feel lonely sometimes,” said Romain Grosjean after crashing in qualifying during in the 2018 French Grand Prix. But while the competition that can arise between two drivers on the same team is compelling this cannot account for all of the show’s appeal. 

I think that the key lies in something Ocon said about driving in the rain when he was a child; his hands were freezing but “while I’m driving I wasn’t feeling anything”. Participating in this sport – even as a spectator – has this anaesthetic function, in that the stakes are so high – a driver can die at any point in any race and the rewards of success, like the penalty for failure, are extreme – that every moment seems precious. Danger focuses the mind. “It’s all these emotions and then you jump into the car and all that just goes away,” said Marcus Ericsson about the Singapore GP. “You are a bit like in a tunnel,” said Charles Leclerc about the same race. “It’s extremely intense.” 

Motorsport, though destructive, also reminds us of the sanctity of life. It’s also an international enterprise, with races held in different spots around the globe at different times of the year. A third benefit of course comes from technological advancements made as a result of finding ways to make cars go faster on the track. Though BMW, Honda and Toyota withdrew from team racing in 2008, production car makers make engines for some teams so innovations settled as a result of competition logically find their way down the chain of production to consumer products. 

RAV4 Cruiser hybrid AWD (episode four)

It’s been about three-and-a-half months since I picked up my new car so I’ve had time to get used to things. Time flies, and so do you when you’re driving one of these beauties.

Thinking back, and on viewing YouTube videos of others reviewing the same car, it strikes me how accurate were the issues, in those early days, I noticed to remark on. The noisy drivetrain under pressure, for instance, is something that others have mentioned in their reviews, as is the nice feel of the car over any surface; its hard ride – something my father used to complain about in European cars (he drove a Holden Statesman) – is dreamy and effortlessly deals with speed bumps.

One thing that comes to mind as a shortcoming is the use of CarPlay, though this is a secondary function and won’t impact your driving or safety. My phone is an old one (I bought it in 2017) and so I have to plug it into the car in order to enable CarPlay; with newer phones you just place the device in the brown holding bay under the aircon controls and it automatically charges and connects. To connect mine via CarPlay I bought a short USB cable at the Apple store. 

A related issue is also of secondary importance. This is the irritating warning message (mentioned in an earlier review) that appears for the driver’s information every time you start the car, and which, if you need to get out into the traffic quickly because of a break in the flow of cars, prevents you from moving if you need to use CarPlay for some reason, for example to enable hands-free messaging, or if you need to punch an address into the satnav. 

What I do for music is, while at home I buy albums on the iTunes store and start playing them sitting on the couch and then, when I climb into the car and start it, simply wait for it to use Bluetooth to connect to my phone and play the same album at the point where I’d left of listening earlier. By using Bluetooth instead of CarPlay I avoid having to plug the phone into the car. These are minor points but they affect your decision-making every time you choose to drive.

When CarPlay is not in use Bluetooth integration of your phone is enabled. You can toggle between commercial radio and Bluetooth using the ‘Audio’ button (a physical button handily on the right-hand side of the centre console) to bring up a menu of sources to select. 

Bluetooth is a dreamy feature and can also work with podcasts and audiobooks, as you can listen at home and then, a few minutes later, resume listening at the same spot when inside the car, but while you can shift between tracks on an album easily to change albums you have to go back up a navigational level (by tapping the soft ‘Browse’ button) and then painstakingly select the phone again, and then ‘Albums’, before you get a list of the relevant titles to choose. This navigational quirk of the system takes some getting used to, and might’ve been avoided by better design of the interface. 

If you want to avoid this problem you can plug in your phone and use the CarPlay function. This allows you to navigate between albums, a task that is far simpler as CarPlay has a soft ‘Back’ button that, from the play screen of an album track, you can touch to go to a full menu of albums that are on your phone. It’s is very convenient.

Some items by design won’t work with CarPlay, including TV and YouTube. A safety function thus shelters drivers from distractions while in traffic and busy manoeuvring among fast-moving cars. 

A hands-free approach to using the popular messaging application WhatsApp was useful one day. On that day I knew I had to contact someone while on the road and decided to use WhatsApp to do so. The interface that allows access to this application is however slightly counterintuitive. You tap on the WhatsApp icon on the top level menu in CarPlay, then a Siri-like interface prompts you to say a name. When I said the name of the person I wanted to contact, the AI understood me and displayed his name on the centre console. Then I dictated my message, the AI captured it and asked me if I wanted to send it, reading out my message back to me. I sent it when I tapped a soft button on the screen but you can also reply to a prompt that lets you send your message without using your hands. 

The feature worked pretty smoothly but not all of the RAV4’s electronic and software features do. You get the promise of endless features but in the upshot your ability to use them can be limited by various constraints. This is obviously suboptimal and reflects an annoying problem that Toyota has with interface design. They do a terrific job with hardware and have perfected the art of manufacturing, but US companies do the soft part of IT better. Problems with the RAV4 driver interface system also reflect the hazards inherent in a car that almost has more functions than can be feasibly handled by a driver who must obey road rules all the time.

As one reviewer mentioned – and as I also found after some weeks of driving – you get about 1100 kilometres out of one tank of petrol. It comes out at around 47 miles per gallon, or five litres per 100km, which is pretty tops compared to all-petrol units (which is most of the cars on the market). 

I’ve been noticing more RAV4s as I drive around the city, but most don’t have the “EV” badge the state government issues. I got my badge in the mail and affixed the little triangles – made with blue reflective paint and the letters “EV” printed in white – to my number plates on 8 September. The badges are designed to alert emergency personnel and first-responders to the presence of a battery in case of an accident, so that they know immediately in case of fire which cars to attend to first. The front plate had less room for the badge than the rear plate, and you have to put them on without obscuring the registration details. It’s a bit fiddly; if you take care you’ll have no problem but if NSW drivers don’t have them on their hybrid or hydrogen or electric vehicles after 1 January 2021 they could cop a fine.

New car redux: RAV4 Cruiser hybrid AWD

This post has over 3400 words so, if pressed for time, bookmark and read later.

The old Titan silver Aurion AT-X weighs 1525kg (3362 pounds, or one ton, 97.3 stone) and the new, Saturn blue RAV4 weighs 1620kg (3571.5 pounds, or one ton, 112.1 stone), so my guess about the new car – how heavy it is – was correct just based on driving experience.

But it’s also more tightly sprung, riding without drama over speed bumps and road surface irregularities. It feels neat and comfy – one person who sat in the passenger seat said it’s “huggy” – but it also feels wider than the Aurion. In fact the latter is 1.82m (five foot 11-and-two-thirds inches) wide, and the RAV4 is 1.85m (six foot and four-fifths of an inch), so the difference isn’t really significant. Once I got used to the car – after a week or ten days’ driving – I was able to park the beast (which I nicknamed “Ensign”) in a restricted space.

To compensate for a slightly larger size, a RAV4 has more sensors around the exterior of the chassis. If you come too close to an object in front, the car will make a beep sound and will display video on what’s on the street. For reversing there’s automatic video on the central screen mounted on the dashboard (what I call in my report the centre console) that shows you – from a height, looking down – how much space you have behind you as you move. In addition, like an Aurion, a 2020 RAV4 makes beeps while reversing that, as you come closer to the object behind you, get more rapid until, if you are too close to go any further without touching or bumping, form an uninterrupted tone.

The height of my RAV4 Cruiser is 1.75m (five foot nine inches) with roof racks on and an Aurion (with no roof racks) is typically 1.47m (four foot ten inches) high. That sounds too like a difference too large to be possible and without the roof racks the RAV4 is 10cm (four inches) lower than this figure implies – around 1.65m tall – making it, however, still (in stockinged feet), significantly taller (about 20cm or eight inches) than the Aurion (a standard Australian six-cylinder sedan that was based on the Camry).

And for the first few days you feel higher up: separate from the traffic around you. On the one hand this is comforting; that extra distance between you and the action on the ground makes you naturally to feel safer. On the other hand you worry that the gap will make you complacent or reckless. These feelings soon go away.

In the showroom I got the salesman to bring the driver’s seat back as far as it could go, but once I started driving I brought the seat forward a bit toward the steering wheel and lowered it slightly. I also made the seat back sit at a slightly more relaxed angle compared to the vertical. It only took a few trips to get the settings right for my body and driving style. If there’s one problem with the car it’s the placement of the interior door handle, which is situated a bit too far forward, making you have to reach for it. It’s significantly different from in the Aurion, and the placement of the arm rests is also different.

The aircon system turns on easily with a big button under the centre console, but you need to select a separate, smaller front demist button if you want to get air onto the inside of the windscreen. I tried to do this soon after buying the car while driving on a road outside Sydney, but initially failed – with my knowledge of the Aurion operating like a preset – to get the hang of the controls; while driving that first time on an open road I didn’t have attention bandwidth available to work the system out. I really wanted a blast of air to demist the windscreen so in the absence of knowledge just alternated between periods of blasting air and periods where the aircon was off. On another day on the same road I managed to understand the fact that you just hit the “windscreen air” button, and use the “Off” button to stop the blast.

These are minor details compared to the improvements the RAV4 combines, including touch-locking, the fact that you don’t need a remote control to unlock the car, pushbutton starting, and the ease of driving. The automatic shift is incredibly intuitive and easy to use, and you glide off from a start when leaving your parking spot.

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The driver-assist technology that comes with the RAV4 is so striking it's like I went to sleep in one century and woke up in another. For example, the car talks to you all the time – providing voice notifications for school zones, red-light and speed cameras – and displays the current street's signed speed limit on the instrument panel. The speed display is white with red writing to indicate the speed limit but it turns red with white writing when you are over the limit. If the car doesn’t know what the speed limit is, it displays a circle with two horizontal bars, indicating empty values.

This feature works ok most of the time but when there are two speeds (depending on what kind of vehicle you’re in; it can be 40km per hour for trucks at the same time as it’s 70km per hour for cars and motorcycles) it doesn’t work. This feature is not a replacement for alertness, but it’s very useful if you’re busy with something else – for example finding your way with the satnav, or tuning the radio – and so is an effective adjunct that’s very useful in areas you don’t know well.

It’s interesting that the carmakers didn’t attach a voice notification feature to it; doing so would have added another layer of information to an already crowded field – you get notice of school zones and speed cameras at least every two minutes, when driving in the city suburbs – and would have made it too hard for the driver to concentrate on the important things already being beamed to him or her. Making visual-only the concurrence of signs – on the instrument panel and on the roadside – allowed the carmakers to reduce the importance of this information to a layer below that reserved for school zones.

In New South Wales school zones operate to slow down traffic to 40km per hour at specific times (a morning slot and an afternoon slot, when kids are going to school or going home) so a school zone will, depending on the time of day, sometimes form an alert for the driver of a 2020 RAV4 in two, distinct ways. Regardless of the time of day the instrument panel shows the limit 40km/hr school zones and there’s also the voice alert that is audible (even if the radio is on).

I’ll talk about maps later on, but the car’s warning system for critical traffic details like school zones is indicative of something that will also determine how useful the satnav system is. This is that you cannot 100 percent rely on the car to tell you about the reality that surrounds you. Just as you might feel that a street sign is more accurate than what the onboard computer is telling you about which road to take, the warning system is only useful if you are also watching carefully what is going on around you. Notification of the fact that you are driving into a school zone is also useful and can, under certain circumstances – for example when driving on unfamiliar streets – help you to be safe and legal. But you cannot replace awareness of your surroundings with information received from the car’s computer.

The car tells you when someone comes too close to the front or the rear. When this happens you automatically see on the centre console a camera view of in front or behind. This vision replaces whatever had previously been displayed on the screen. The display also launches a notice to be aware of your surroundings, and this feature can be especially useful for people with small children who might be in the habit of playing in the driveway at home.

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The mechanics of a 2020 RAV4 are elegant, and though they take a bit of getting used to – about a week – once you know what you’re doing you’ll wonder what all the fiddling around with keys and remote controls was about.

To start the car, get in and sit down in the driver’s seat. Then put your foot on the brake pedal, and resolutely press and briefly hold the “start” button to the left near the steering column. This button is tucked away down in an inaccessible region of the dashboard where you won’t accidentally bump it, and the car won’t start without your foot on the brake. On starting there’s no sound but, to acknowledge your action, the instrument panel (which is entirely digital) lights up and the centre console shows the maker’s logo followed by a cautionary message you can dismiss after a few seconds. The home screen thereupon displays, by default, a map.

The instrument panel is a busy zone with a series of digital displays (including menus for safety features) you can toggle through with a button on the steering wheel but that, at most times, are invisible. The salesman set up the features in the showroom and I’ve not used any of these menus since. This area also displays navigation detail on occasion.

From the standpoint of performance, a RAV4 Cruiser is responsive enough for city traffic. I don’t feel underpowered, even though the engine is smaller than what I had before. The engine of the Aurion AT-X is is 3.5 litres (213.6 cubic inches) and the RAV4 Cruiser’s is 2.5 litres (152.5 cubic inches), but for a driver the two cars don’t feel all that different. The RAV4 is as smooth and effective as the old car was, even uphill on busy roads, but on the motorway uphill it strains a bit harder than the Aurion did, though possibly you notice such engine noise more because, at other times, the car is totally silent.

If, while driving, you’re curious about the powertrain there’s an information screen you can easily pull up on the centre console – press three buttons, one physical and two virtual – that shows you, in real time, how energy flows, red being used to illustrate power transmitted by the petrol engine when it’s running, with two shades of green for electricity. A blue green shows the feed of electricity due to running the engine, which starts up automatically when needed. Electricity also feeds the battery due to the braking effect or from braking using the brake pedal. On the display the battery is light blue in colour, with separate sections filled to show how much charge the battery currently holds. Then there’s a light yellow-green that shows the charge flowing from the battery to the motors on the wheels. The diagram is elegant and easy to understand, having channels like corridors in a building that are drawn with lines that light up – like the old-fashioned displays governments made to show how energy in an industrial process flowed – to serve as indicators of power usage.

The first photo below shows the petrol engine charging the battery and powering the front wheels. You can see the two motors in the car, illustrated by cylinders; one on the front wheels and one on the back wheels. In this image you can also see the engine charging the battery. You get this image when you are accelerating and when electric power alone is not enough for that purpose.

The second photo (below) shows the battery powering the motor on the front wheels. At other times it powers both motors. At low speeds, only the battery is needed, but if you want to accelerate, the petrol engine usually kicks in.

For example, as shown in the third photo (below). This photo shows the engine feeding the battery and powering the front wheels. (This gets confusing, I know …)

The fourth photo (below) shows the effect of braking, where the four wheels charge the battery. The same effect occurs when you coast to a stop, which is when the natural breaking ability of the engine kicks in to slow the car down gradually.

I can’t really comment with any authority on fuel efficiency because I’m terrible at maths, but on Sunday when the odometer was at 356km (it had read 6km when I picked it up from the dealers’) I put in petrol for the first time. It was unleaded priced at just over $25 (at $1.25 per litre). By my reckoning it comes out at 17.45km per litre, which is pretty good compared to the Aurion.

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The satnav is easier to use. Upon starting the car, if you tap on the map that comes up on the centre console by default, you touch the little “pinpoint” icon then use the screens that appear to punch in a suburb, street, and street number. Alternatively, you can use a different button to select a suburb (in case you don’t have a specific street address to set as a destination). Once you have punched in your destination, the computer usually asks you to confirm it and then, as you drive off, a map with a thick blue line – to indicate your route – appears on the centre console. The computer’s voice starts narrating your route.

To test the system, on one day, while house hunting, I punched in an address about 20km (12.4 miles) from my home in an area I don’t know well and then, when halfway there, deliberately took a wrong turn. The car’s computer knew where I was and quickly recalibrated itself to accommodate the new state of affairs. It then offered me a new route, but I guessed that, if I took it, I’d have to stand waiting to turn right (in Australia we drive on the left) across traffic flowing on a busy street, so kept ignoring the satnav until I came to a place I thought there would be traffic lights. Then I followed the satnav, turned left, and then right. 

The satnav was by turns efficient and accurate, and inaccurate and (on one occasion) plain wrong. Most often it accurately tells you what’s coming up about half a kilometre ahead (for US readers, that’s about 500 yards) so you can prepare yourself for what’s coming, but I did have trouble with the route when coming to an area I don’t know at all. The satnav told me to turn right when it should have told me to turn left, and I had to drive down a busy street, turn right into a side street, do a three-point turn, and come back and approach the target street again afresh. In fact, for this trip (from Rockdale to Gordon) the device should have told me to go over the Harbour Bridge rather than up Roberts Road. The following photo shows the car on a Rockdale street.

Possibly, for this trip, it decided to allow me to avoid tolls. More dramas ensued while returning to my place in Pyrmont because the system wouldn’t accept that I wanted to go in the Lane Cove Tunnel and then over the Harbour Bridge, and kept asking me to turn, first left and then right. On the expressway it even asked me to attempt a U-turn! 

The way the satnav deals with roundabouts (which are uncommon in the US but commonplace in Australia) is sometimes different from Google’s satnav program (and sometimes the same), but it’s not hard to understand. In fact, the RAV4’s satnav is, in this respect, an improvement.

The computer on occasion tells you about traffic, but the warnings I got on two different days were not founded in reality; there were, in fact, no traffic jams to deal with. On one occasion, furthermore, it told me there’d be a traffic jam 300m ahead at the precise moment actually I met traffic and got caught up in it.

Like the speed limit indicator, the satnav can best be used as an adjunct to other information, not as a replacement for knowledge or research. I’ll probably, in many cases, do what I have always done before a trip: capture screenshots from Google Maps and print them out on paper to carry with me in the car as reference. In other cases I’ll rely on the satnav. I’ll just have to learn what works and what doesn’t. So far I’ve had mixed results with the system but it’s a comfort just to have it available to use if necessary and you can see its utility. 

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Getting other people’s message notifications while driving is something I’m not so sure I understand the utility of, however. On seeing a message you risk making a call to that number – I did this a couple of times not understanding that I’d received a message rather than a phone call – and hence taking your eyes off the road. If, while driving, you decide to hear a message you risk taking your attention off the road. On one occasion when I got a message while driving, the centre console told me that it wouldn’t display it because I was moving, but then I touched a few other buttons and the car read the message out to me as I moved through traffic. 

All of this activity takes your eyes off the road which, even if it’s just for a couple of seconds, can be disastrous safety-wise. The audio system is, also, a bit too detailed to be used while driving at speed in traffic, but it’s easy for a passenger to use.

To make phone calls you can use a finger to operate the controls on the centre console, or you can (to be more conservative) use the smartphone call button on the steering wheel. Press it and say “Call Joe Blogs” and the car will make a call to your friend. 

To link the car with your iPhone you have to turn on Bluetooth in the phone, then select the phone from the list displayed on the centre console. The car sends a code to your phone – it displays there straight away – and asks you if what you see in your hand matches what is displayed on the car’s screen. If so, you tap “Pair” on your phone and the two devices connect. The pairing applies regardless of how many times you leave the car and reenter it, but you can only pair with one phone at a time. 

If you want to display on the centre console messages that people send to your phone you must turn on notifications in your iPhone at “Settings > Bluetooth”. Just tap on the “i” in the little circle and turn on “Show Notifications”.

Wi-Fi setup is a little different and, for my phone, requires a cable; there’s a USB socket in the car’s phone charging bay under the aircon controls. On your iPhone go to “Settings > General > CarPlay” and find your car in the list. If you want to be able to control your phone through the car by voice you must have Siri running. 

I had to set up Siri, as I’d never used it before. To do this, go to “Settings > Siri & Search” and use the controls there. If this is the first time you’ve used Siri, you’ll have to train your phone to recognise your voice, a process that takes about a minute even if (like me) you’ve no idea what you’re doing.

You probably want to use the shortest USB cable available, as a long cable might get in the way of the gear stick. This device has a button on the far side that you press to shift the stick. When you want to drive off, press the button with your fingers and drag the stick back to “D”. When you want to park, press the button and shift the stick forward to “P”. Once this is done, the car will automatically engage the handbrake. If it goes on, a red light appears on the handbrake button and a beep sounds in the cabin to notify you of the new state.

New car report: RAV4 Cruiser hybrid AWD

Having had second thoughts about the Camry on which, the previous year, I had paid a $1000 deposit, I drove down to the Toyota dealership and had a look at an SUV called a “RAV4”, which can come with a hybrid petrol-electric powertrain.

I told the young salesman I wanted a car that would let me carry large things as my daughter and her boyfriend would be coming to Sydney in the middle of the year (though plans changed due to rona); for them I’d need to transport furniture and other things. A “steel blonde” Camry had already been allocated a slot in the Nagoya factory and was due to be manufactured in mid-February, so Ryan drifted off and phoned his manager to tell him about my idea, coming back to me a few minutes later to say there would be no problem making the switch to a different model. Using his computer Ryan changed my order details on the company’s database and I left after choosing a colour.

Navy blue, to match the restored, mounted and framed ensign that’s hanging on one of my living room’s walls. The thing had been among dad’s personal effects – actually in a sail bag – along with other things from our old life. A bunch of such stuff made its way to me after, 20 years ago, I returned from Japan, and I had preservation work done on the flag when I lived in Queensland.

On 6 January – the day I changed my choice of car from a sedan to an SUV – when I got back to my apartment I looked at reviews for the RAV4 Cruiser hybrid AWD, the model I was going to get, and then went to the maker’s website. All of this activity made me decide in favour of roof racks, so I called Ryan and added this option to the list, which included weather shields for the windows, as well as floor mats.

When I asked Ryan on 20 March about delivery I was told the car would be made in May with delivery in June, but on 18 May I was told manufacture might happen in June. On 18 June someone at the dealership phoned to say that the car would arrive in Sydney probably in the first week of July. She also wanted to confirm the options included in the order, and we straightened that out. I phoned back a bit later and left a message, intending to talk with someone about the payment method, and later spoke on the phone with Ryan about this important issue. Then on 20 June I sent $10 online to ascertain the accuracy of the account details I‘d been handed back in December. On the Monday morning I phoned Toyota and they confirmed the money went through.

So I started sending the remainder of the amount due. It would take several days to complete, but bit by bit I finished the task before the end of the month. Meanwhile, I phoned my insurance company to notify them of the pending purchase. I’d been told the car would probably be available to pick up on the 9th of July but, on the last Saturday in June, Ryan phoned me and told me it’d be ready to pick up on the 5th, the Sunday of the following week.

In Japanese “five” is “go”, a lucky number, so the date would be auspicious. I was surprised when Ryan SMS’d me the registration number on the 4th (I immediately SMS’d it to my insurer) because it also seemed lucky, having in it the number “5”. Using SMS, I made a date with Ryan to pick the car up at 10am, when the dealership opens, and in the evening I ordered a new tag for road tolls I would incur while driving it.

Yesterday morning I had breakfast and walked to Glebe through Wentworth Park, arriving at the dealership at two minutes past the hour. Ryan was busy in a meeting so I sat down in the reception area. When he joined me he was surprised by the coincidence regarding the number plate and expressed himself in a positive manner while he showed me all the car’s (seemingly innumerable) features, including the ability to answer and make calls on the iPhone without touching the device. Controls for phone calls are on the centre display and also on the steering wheel, a part of the car that is so loaded with functions that it felt, as Ryan walked me through them, as though I had suddenly been transported – via a TV screen with Netflix connected – to a parallel universe. “I feel like I have just swallowed a whale,” I quipped to Ryan as we were finalising the paperwork at his desk next to the showroom. Again, he laughed obligingly at my meagre humour.

It looks as though I’ll now have to upgrade my phone, as the RAV4’s automatic charging station – where you put your phone down in a bay under the A/C controls – only works on newer phones and mine was bought a few years ago.

Ryan showed me how to link it to the car using Bluetooth. Wi-Fi connection is also possible if you want to watch movies on the centre console; I told him I’d think about it for possible use at a later date. He also showed me how to set up the Toyota app on my phone. This lets you generate QR codes to use at service stations when buying petrol; discounts apply for select retailers and you can accrue points on your account. So far, he told, me, only Caltex has signed up.

As often happens, I silently thanked Steve Jobs. An appropriate reaction, as driving home I sort of felt like I was in a helicopter. The thing sits up off the road relative to the height of the Aurion, but I had no problem manoeuvring it into the parking garage under my building even with roof racks on (I’d checked the height earlier via SMS) and driving was intuitive. This was reassuring at first blush, although the overall feel is plush. Having, since September 2007, driven an Aurion AT-X (see photo below for the two cars lined up in my car spaces), there’s a bit to get used to now.

As Ryan explained on the day I picked up this Saturn blue RAV4, regeneration of the traction battery happens when the petrol engine starts up, and also when the driver brakes. By pressing a physical button on the console there’s a dedicated display showing the car’s drive mechanism which, in the model I bought (an all-wheel drive), includes representations in graphic form of the two electric engines (one on the front wheels and one on the rear wheels) as well as the battery. This display lets you see at a glance how much charge the battery has at any given time. The car has a special energy efficient setting you reach by pressing a button on the console that sits between the front seats, and three other power settings as well, including a “sport” setting which is less fuel efficient. 

Ryan told me you can easily get over 900km out of one tank of fuel, and his employer filled the tank for me. The car had six kilometres on the odometer when I picked it up. As he was showing me the ropes in the showroom Ryan told me, when I asked about the hum that could suddenly be heard, that the engine had started. 

You don’t press a button on a remote control to open the door – the correct remote’s proximity to the car, and a hand on the door handle (which contains two sensors), are enough to give you access to the cabin – but the last thing Ryan told me before I drove off in the traffic was not to leave the remote in the car. He also mentioned that to replace the device is very expensive but I got a spare with my purchase. 

A quick spin in the traffic through Leichhardt in the late afternoon revealed that the car is tightly sprung and heavier than the Aurion, but rides surprisingly smoothly. On the road you feel secure but I had, on getting back home, a dose of the heebie-jeebies, so watched Landline, then the news. It’d been a busy couple of weeks.

Conversations with taxi drivers: Sixteen

This is the sixteenth in a series of posts relaying conversations I have had with taxi drivers. The first of these posts appeared on 6 June 2018. 

7 February

Caught a cab from home to Newtown and the driver was named Shahadat. He wore a white taqiyah on his head and we talked about how drivers have no patience in Sydney. (In Melbourne, he mused, drivers are not so impatient.) He told me about an accident he was in one day when a bus drove into the back of his car. It happened near where we were heading, off Broadway, and the bus belonged to a private college. It was a big bus and he showed me a photo of a similar vehicle on his phone, which sat mounted near the dashboard.

The accident had happened during the day and he had asked to see the driver’s license. The driver said he had left his license back at the school. Later, my driver had gone to that place and the people there showed him the license of a different driver. The driver who had hit him, he surmised, hadn’t been licensed. We talked about how it’s illegal in New South Wales to drive without carrying a valid license.

He mentioned a family that had been in the news recently, with three children who were killed in Parramatta by a drunk driver. A cousin of the children had also been killed. I remembered the case and told him so. I said my uncle had been killed, as a boy, by a drunk driver. It was something that had, I went on, destroyed his family. Shahadat dropped me off on King Street when I paid using EFTPOS.

After I watched a movie I came out with my friend and left him, getting into a cab, one I hailed from the kerb. The driver was also born outside Australia and we went down Missenden Road at my suggestion, heading to my home. I told him how one night I had been unable to get a cab on Missenden Road at 1.30am and he displayed surprise, saying that he personally won’t refuse fares unless they’re young men and look like they might not pay.

Then we talked about hybrid electric vehicles. I asked him how much the rent for his car was and he said $1100 a week. Plus $400 a week for petrol, he added. The battery in his Camry is not new, he said, so it cuts out every ten minutes and power is then drawn from the car’s internal combustion engine instead. He told me – when I mentioned I was buying a hybrid Toyota – that their traction batteries last 100,000 kilometres and then need to be replaced although, he added, rather than the replacement of the whole unit with newer models individual battery cells can be changed out. A new traction battery costs around $6000.

He asked me what kind of car I drive now and I said an Aurion. He said that because it had been made in Australia, it would last forever. I took this piece of hyperbole with a grain of salt but mentioned that I get the car serviced every year. He asked me how much fuel I buy for it and I said about $50 every two weeks. He said with that kind of usage a hybrid RAV4 battery should last ten years.

I told him that demand for hybrid Toyotas was so high the new car wouldn’t be delivered until April. He asked about Camry hybrids and I told him that initially, in December, I had ordered a Camry and the dealer had told me that it could be delivered by March. Then I had changed my plans and had ordered an SUV instead because my daughter was coming to live in Sydney and, I told the driver, I would need a vehicle to move large things around in. He asked me where she was coming from and I told him it was from Japan.

RAV4s, he said, were used for cabs sometimes and he asked me how much mine would cost. I told him it would be about $50,000 and he said the ones used for cabs cost around $35,000. He asked me which model I was getting but he didn’t seem to know much about the range available from Toyota dealerships.

When, in March, I contacted the Toyota salesman I found that delivery would be delayed, possibly until June. It seemed that the novel coronavirus had stuffed up the supply chain for new cars coming from Japan.

Visual disturbances: Eight

Sample is 32 of 204 images taken between 3.28pm and 4.10pm on 27 June 2008.